Microsoft Ready To "Take On'' Google and Apple TV

Antisyzygy writes "Microsoft is getting ready to offer an internet television solution of its own, and will demo a TV box this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas." The rumor is under $200 putting it more on price point with GoogleTV at the moment.

Comments

Re:Dear Microsoft,

[BitZtream]

I'm guessing you've never used Windows Media Center with XBox (old or 360) as an extender.

It is simply put the best DVR system on the planet for the home.

You get complete control over your TV, you get the ability to burn to DVD as DVD movies anything you record so you can use it elsewhere. You can archive your videos if you want.

I have the ability to record or watch live 8 HD or SD streams at a time while watching them on the local display, another Windows PC or any of my XBox 360s. Or I can watch any combination of live and recorded across my systems. Or listen to my music, watch my home videos.

The interface is fast and looks good. It supports plugins so you can do stuff like commercial removal if you want, but its almost pointless to bother with since the 'skip forward' feature is exactly 30 seconds and makes commercial skipping almost instinctual with the remote in hand.

The only thing that prevents WMC from being perfect is the fact that cable companies encrypt their content rather than filter it from entering the home so for premium channels you need STBs from your provider. My solution is to simply ignore those channels, and the cable co can ignore the money they could have had in the process.

In short, I'm sure MS is perfectly capable of pulling this off, they already have, you just haven't heard about it before now.

Take a look at WMC, it makes others DVRs look like a joke.

And before anyone tries to mention MythTV ... don't. Seriously, its only useful if you would rather spend your time screwing with it to get it to work at all rather than watching recorded shows. Forget about using it like a normal TV, its architecture makes the lag in user input to system response completely unbearable. Its a joke all on its own.

XBox 360? MCE?

[SpryGuy]

They already have Media Center for Windows, the XBox 360, and Media Center Exteders... they're going to add something ELSE to the mix? Never mind Zune.

What is it with Microsoft always just throwing layers and crap out there, making things confusing and complicated. Can they ever stop and think something through, and put out something that is cohesive, simple to use and understand, and useful?