MS Launches Video Download Service

renderhead writes "According to ZDNet and many other sources, Microsoft has launched a new video download service for playing back television content on Windows Mobile devices. Partners include CinemaNow, MSNBC.com, and TiVo. According to another article from ployer.com, the service will require Windows XP, Internet Explorer 5 or higher, and Windows Media Player 10 or higher."

Comments

The Mask Comes Off

[Doc Ruby]

Now we see the truth behind all the corporate assurances that MS ownerships in MSNBC, ComCast cable and other media holdings is "just financial investment", or "just funding innovators". This is the beginning of MS leveraging a truly mass market monopoly. Combined with their DRM ubiquity in new DVD players, the MS octopus can now begin to squeeze the entire broadcast industry, and the world that depends on it for information, from its Internet lair.

Philosophical question

[Darth Hubris]

Technical issues aside, if you could install this on your OS of choice legally, would you?

I use MythTV

[drewzhrodague]

MythTV is great -- plays shows I record, DVDs, and even plays TV shows downloaded from the Internet (via mPlayer, which still blows my mind). KnoppMyth is easy to setup and install, and works with even old misengineered equipment.

I say this becasue I don't do Windows anymore, and my life is easier for it!

A call to MythTV/gstreamer/apache/whoever hackers:

[Trelane]

heh.

While true, it's a very good option for those in geeks' families, and hopefully the Free (not free) bug will spread, especially as all of the steps listed above get easier with time.

Indeed, there's nothing prohibiting someone from taking mythtv code, shining it up, and selling it as a set-top-box + personal distribution server. In fact, I suspect people would pay TiVo for precisely that, provided they don't get sued out of the water. Or someone could set it up as a LiveCD, like they currently do, for free.... The main catch is the hardware,really, and that's getting better as more and more people adopt Linux. Given that lack of hardware/software support is entirely an intertia problem, and the intertia's changing, there's reason yet to hope for some real service.

Indeed, if anyone from TiVo or others are listening, I bet people would be quite willing to pay to have remote TiVo interfaces so that they can monitor their TiVo and play shows back and watch them live, via TiVo's servers (for a nominal monthly fee, of course). This sounds kind of like what Microsoft may be doing, but with TiVo being merely a very minor cog in the Great Microsoft Video Wheel.

Hopefully, we can convince MythTV and others to build separate frontends (not just the full-screen one) so that we can do things like I describe for free (playback, live TV watching, episode download, and remote control of the backends) as I describe. Given MythTV's backend/frontend separation, it seems like a very logical next step. I know I've wanted to watch some TV on my laptop in my office while working on some stuff. It'd be very convenient for, say, gstreamer to incorporate such a mythtv frontend functionality. Maybe someone from Apache could hack together a mod_mythtv....