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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.
Once again MS arrives late to the party with an offering that likely won't offer enough to be competitive. Good ol' MS: Reactive rather than proactive.
Are any TV solutions relevant now that Netflix is streaming? Granted, they don't stream everything, but that library seems to be growing.
Many new TVs have Netflix interfaces built right in. What's the point of these other solutions?
(And doesn't Microsoft make a set top box... Um, the Xbox??)
If MS has something like all-you-can-watch video similar to the all-you-can-download subscription system for the Zune, it might be something worth considering.
However, why does MS need a TV set top box? They already have one... the XBox 360.
I have my own "internet" box that also run cable. The total cost of the entire system to build? About $200 or $300. It is a pc with Windows 7 on it and it uses Windows Media Center. Why would they try to push out more hardware when the software company already has a solution? I guess it seems like a waste or resources to me. They could be working on security for Windows 7 or getting more people working on stuff for IE9 or something. There is absolutely no need for a Microsoft set top box when for the same price any reasonably intelligent person can build a small pc with W7 on it and just use WMC instead
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Wouldn't that violate your sig's Microsoft-free lifestyle?
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Here's my bet: A box with a fairly conservative design, maybe available with different fronts to blend more neatly into your living room interior. Of course, those would cost extra, it comes with a simple, flat brown front.
It will take about 3-5 minutes for the box to finish booting and will require some kind of rather complicated authorization and verification process before you can use it the first time to make sure it's a genuine product. Now, one might wonder, why this is necessary, but since it's running a Media Center Edition of Win7, that pesky registration process could not be patched out easily without pretty much giving away how to do it in Win7 as well, it was left in and is redubbed "personalization" of the box. The goodie you get for it is that your settings will be stored online, just in case you have to replace your box one day and want to use your settings. This will be considered a neat feature until people notice that by the time they could replace that box, a new version will be out that is incompatible with their settings and no converter exists.
It will have a network jack and it will require an internet connection to operate (obviously). You will have to open about half the ports on your router and forward it to the box, or it simply will not work. MS will recommend connecting the box directly to the internet with a dedicated IP address. Yes, even for functions that have nothing to do with the internet.
Of course you cannot access "the internet" directly, because that would, of course, be far too dangerous. To keep you safe from trouble and malware, MS will provide a "Microsoft TV network", at a fairly affordable fee per year. You can spend more for more advanced membership options that also allow you additional features, like doing something but watching TV with your MSTV.
And so on, simply take what MS has done so far and extrapolate, I'm sure you can do it just as well as me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Zune gave no competition to the iPod. The Kin gave no competition to any phone. The Windows phone isn't giving any real competition. Hell, why are we talking about MS and competition? They didn't even compete with Windows and DOS! They stifled competition rather than compete with it.
Microsoft's corporate culture doesn't know how to compete. In fact it's funny you mention the xbox 360, because Microsoft is so bad with competition that they just created something that will compete with their own product!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
From a Microsoft stock holder : NO. NO, NO, NO.
Microsoft does ONE thing well : it hires thousands of competent programmers and it makes usable software. There are many critics but the stuff isn't all bad and they do try to improve it. It SELLS the software to users, and because it has so many customers, the revenue vastly exceeds the cost of paying thousands of programmers. They have a swanky corporate headquarters with all the free soda you can chug, and many many 6-figure jobs.
It's failed miserably at EVERYTHING ELSE IT HAS TRIED. As far as I know, it has not made ONE DOLLAR OF NET PROFIT ON ANYTHING ELSE.
It's wasted billions of dollars trying to compete as an online portal and as a search engine. A company crammed to the brim with top CS grads and extremely good custom software SPECIALIZES in search and basically nothing else. Expecting to ever beat them and make more money is a fool's errand.
It's wasted more billions, with little or NO net profits on gaming consoles. (MAYBE it's finally breaking even on that, but I doubt it)
And 50 other assorted ventures that never made a dime that we don't hear about.
Software is STILL a good idea. How about the executives pay dividends and focus on doing their core business WELL.
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?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
From a Microsoft stock holder : NO. NO, NO, NO.
Microsoft does ONE thing well : it hires thousands of competent programmers and it makes usable software. There are many critics but the stuff isn't all bad and they do try to improve it. It SELLS the software to users, and because it has so many customers, the revenue vastly exceeds the cost of paying thousands of programmers. They have a swanky corporate headquarters with all the free soda you can chug, and many many 6-figure jobs.
It's failed miserably at EVERYTHING ELSE IT HAS TRIED. As far as I know, it has not made ONE DOLLAR OF NET PROFIT ON ANYTHING ELSE.
It's wasted billions of dollars trying to compete as an online portal and as a search engine. A company crammed to the brim with top CS grads and extremely good custom software SPECIALIZES in search and basically nothing else. Expecting to ever beat them and make more money is a fool's errand.
It's wasted more billions, with little or NO net profits on gaming consoles. (MAYBE it's finally breaking even on that, but I doubt it)
And 50 other assorted ventures that never made a dime that we don't hear about.
Software is STILL a good idea. How about the executives pay dividends and focus on doing their core business WELL.
Yeah, no. They're making hand over fist licensing the Xbox platform to game publishers. They make money by selling virtually nothing. Who cares if they give the razor away?
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Don't forget CableCARD and the new Ceton tuner. 4 digital cable channels from one card, no additional fees from your cable company.
That is the real advantage of WMC: provider support.
No one else can do CableCARD. Not yet anyway. There is no reason MythTV couldn't record from a CableCARD tuner, at least for unprotected programs. As a matter of fact, it works almost exactly like the HDHomeRun tuner...
And before anyone spews Cheetos all over their keyboard and rants about how everything recorded from CableCARD is evil DRM-this-and-that.. CableCARD tuners only apply DRM if the content is flagged as protected. The only channels I see any copy-control bits applied to are the premium networks like HBO... which I don't care about. Most non-clear-QAM channels such as Discovery HD, SciFi HD, TNTHD are recorded with no protection at all.
Or they could just give in to reality. No one is going to rip the streams you send to the tv or the phone, they rip blu-rays you nitwits. If they did want to rip these streams they could just capture it off the HDMI anyway since HDCP is a freaking joke.
What has been lacking has been clear leadership and direction, not marketshare, technical know-how or PR. And it doesn't help that they keep making new projects without thinking them through, then killing them before they have any reasonable expectation of success. Sounds more like a company self-destructing from internal politics instead.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Yeah, no. They're making hand over fist licensing the Xbox platform to game publishers. They make money by selling virtually nothing. Who cares if they give the razor away?
They sank >$5B over the whole life of XBOX, and only recently started reporting >$100mil profit per quarter. Heh, Kinect alone cost them $600mil in failed experimentation (in the end they licensed third party technology, there is ZERO M$ technology in Kinect) plus another $500mil for advertising.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Or if it is considered one, it's horrible. It plays a very limited amount of media.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The XBox didn't turn a profit in 2008. The XBox 360 did, but only against the costs expended that year. That profit will never ever come close to obliterating the total losses on the Xbox and early years of the Xbox 360. (as stated by the OP the total losses exceed 5 Billion) Considering that the life of the Xbox 360 is nearly over with a new console cycle due within the next couple years it's astounding that anyone would assert that they made a profit.
They are claiming a profit against only the expenditures of that year, not the total expenditures over the life of the program. They aren't even close against the total net loses.They would need to sell the Xbox 360 with the same 165 million profit per year for about 5 decades to recoup the total expenditure or raise profit to exceed a billion a year. The Xbox has been a collasal money sink for MS, as the OP stated they would have been far better to simply give the money to shareholders rather than waste billions on a product that was 3 years into it's life with nearly zero expenditure on development before they could turn a yearly profit. Think about how scary that is, it took them 3 years after the product was produced and sold and near zero development was ongoing before they could reduce costs to the point that they actually made money.
Silly Lemming.
I've been recording HD cable for about 2 years now. All of the recordings I make come with
absolutely no BS attached as they are completely DRM free. I can do anything I want with
them include watch them in another room or put them on an iPhone or Archos.
Cable Card tuners for PCs are mostly vaporware.
The solution I use with MythTV to record HD satellite cable is available at the local Frys. ...as far as rips go. That's pretty automated. Most of it is the computer processing data.
OTOH, there is no suitable automated solution for DVD collections in Windows or MacOS either.
So a script centric environment comes in very handy. Automation is king, not shiny buttons.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No. They need to create a serious home server that's basically a Tivo knockoff on steroids that would have the option of using any available PC tuner, gobs of hot swappable storage, and host local content to "extenders" running stripped down Revo style PCs that can play everything and the kitchen sink, organize local content like XBMC and preset the web as needed for stuff that's still "desktop browser centric".
The Xbox is a frontend, not a backend. They need to make a proper backend box and make it whole house and network transparent in ways that other vendors haven't delivered yet.
This is the big thing that MCE or MythTV or SageTV has going for it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's more to it that technical capability. Usability is important and MS don't have the best track record in that area. If they require the use of a remote like the one Sony made for Google TV, I can't see it making that much headway.
Can't Microsoft ever make something original. Why do they have to stop or feel threatened by any product out on the digital market? Look, Zune and WindowsCE lost. They just wont give up.
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