I like writing about digital home media because I invested in it significantly when I renovated my home.  My family lives in a brownstone in New York City that was built in 1846; nonetheless, we have CAT6 cabling behind the walls and, among other things on our Gigabit Ethernet network, we have connected a Vista Media Center, two XBox 360s (used exclusively for media; we’re not  gamers), Windows Home Server and several Sonos devices.

But I also write about digital home media because Microsoft is making bigger and bigger bets on it and living room PC/AV convergence is one area where they are beating their consumer entertainment competitors, including Apple and Sony.  That doesn’t mean Microsoft is doing everything right though. For example, they backed HD DVD and lost.  And they haven’t exactly embraced Blu Ray.

Today though, Microsoft and Nextflix announced that with a software update this fall, XBox 360 will gain a client for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” content.  This means that Netflix subscribers who take advantage of this service won’t be forced to use a browser plug-in or a dedicated set top box to get the content.  That’s a good development and a good partnership for Microsoft.  But I wonder how many analysts and reporters who are covering this and praising the deal actually use these services.  Because if they did, I think they’d realize Internet-delivery of video is so limited as to be nearly unusable.  Blu Ray (and Playstation 3), on the other hand, offer great entertainment with uncompromising video and sound quality.

Here’s why, at least for the time being, (non-pirated) streaming and downloadable TV and movie content is mostly fantasy:

• Studio opposition and paucity of downloadable content: only a very small percentage of new home video releases are available in Internet-delivery format.  Netflix Watch Instantly has over 10,000 movies and TV episodes, but that’s but that’s compared to over 100,000 titles in their DVD library.  For all intents and purposes, blockbuster titles are not available over this network delivery medium.  Cable on-demand can do it, but Internet-based services do not.  That’s not a technology problem at all; it’s a legal one.  But it’s going to be difficult to overcome, and Microsoft is learning (again) that DRM isn’t a good compromise to break the logjam.
• Lack of HD content: most downloadable programming is Standard Definition (SD) video, with two channel audio.  Blu Ray offers HD video, and a multitude of 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 encoded and un-encoded audio formats.  Even standard DVDs on an upconverting player offer very nice picture (though certainly not as nice as HD) and almost always offer 5.1 audio as well.
• Low bandwidth: The download times for feature-length HD films over the typical U.S. broadband connection are unacceptably high.  Streaming delivery mitigates this to some extent but then hampers your ability to select random chapters in a film, or even to perform simple rewinding and fast-forwarding.  Beyond the raw bandwidth provided, many broadband carriers are working actively to limit the amount of rich media traffic that consumers can generate.  This policy is undoubtedly futile in the long-term, and certainly misguided.  But it’s here today, and further reduces the short-term viability of Internet-delivered film and TV content.
• Lack of portability: streamed content isn’t portable beyond the console it’s being viewed on and even non-DRM downloaded content is, at best, portable to a laptop, with an inconvenient amount of effort.  DVDs, on the other hand, play on inexpensive, rentable, portable players and in-car seat-back systems.  Anyone with children can attest to the fact that losing that capability makes the technology much less attractive.  Arguably, Blu Ray faces the same challenge since its players are far from ubiquitous.  But the assumption is that Blu Ray will replace DVD in much the same way that DVD replaced VHS (for movie playback).  That may or may not come to pass.  But a specific encoded, downloaded content format doesn’t even have a chance.

I’ll agree that physical media is old-fashioned, and that network delivery is, in the abstract, more sensible.  But physical media is a standard, and standards are powerful.   Manufacturers, studios and consumers adopt standards rather universally.  That makes for ubiquity, interoperability and usually ease of use as well.  CinemaNow, Movielink and Akimbo don’t offer that.  Neither do Apple TV and iTunes.  Nor does Netflix Watch Instantly. 

Make a standard that supports consistent HD video and 5.1 audio, convince the studios (including, yes, producers of adult programming) to distribute all their home video content over it, make truly high-bandwidth connections ubiquitous and get the telcos to end their prohibition on unfettered consumer use of the bandwidth they’ve paid for.  Then you might have something.  But that’s a lot of work to do and a lot of negotiation to conduct and conclude.  And until and unless it happens, the only real competition to physical media for major motion pictures is cable pay-per-view and on-demand service.  Microsoft can break this regime, but only if it’s committed to the heavy-lifting required to do it.

This is a big deal folks.  Look what I just read in my inbox (it actually arrived yesterday):

Tomorrow the New York City Franchise and Review Commission (FCRC) will hold a public hearing regarding Verizon’s entrance into the New York City Cable Television market. On April 29, 2008 Deputy Mayor Lieber and Commissioner Cosgrave of the Department of Information and Technologies (DoITT) announced an agreement with Verizon to offer cable service throughout the City of New York. Currently, an overwhelming majority of New York City residents have only a single choice in cable television providers. If approved, the agreement would require Verizon to offer cable service to all residences in New York City, potentially establishing a competitive marketplace in an industry that has been dominated by single providers and a lack of competition since its creation. We encourage you to attend tomorrow’s public hearing taking place at NYC College of Technology, 285 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY. The hearing begins at 3:00pm and is anticipated to run until at least 6:00pm. As with all public hearings, feel free to attend and testify regarding your concerns.

I’m no fan of Verizon the company, but I think the FiOS product is a good one, and the rigor of a full cable franchise agreement would hold Verizon to the same standard as today’s cable providers in NYC (Time Warner, RCN and Cablevision).  This would force Verizon to serve all NYC neighborhoods, not just the more lucrative ones, and would ostensibly also compel them to provide public access programming carriage.

I’d love to have the better HD picture and faster broadband speeds that FiOS provides.  Perhaps more importantly, I’d love to see Time Warner Cable match those offerings, thus allowing me to stay with them.

I imagine a full city-wide franchise will anger Time Warner and Cablevision, who now serve mutually exclusive territory (Cablevision in the Bronx and Southern/Eastern Brooklyn; Time Warner everywhere else) because the previous franchise areas and awards prevented them from wiring the whole city.  And they’d have a valid point.  Let’s see what happens.  Maybe they’ll each get the opportunity to serve a city-wide area as well.  More competition.  Something the cable industry needs.

Got my invite yesterday and got it all working today.  From the user’s perspective (which is the only on available at this point in time), Mesh offers three things (1) FolderShare-style file synchronization between PCs, including the ability to share your folders with invited members/users (2) SkyDrive-style cloud storage, file access and sync participation and (3) Remote desktop access to connected devices that is VPN/NAT friendly (i.e. it works over port 80, in a peer-to-peer fashion).  That’s it.  For now.  Kind of makes me wonder why even the BBC reported on this thing.

Also, if you remember when Ray Ozzie first got to Microsoft and first got his blog set up, he posted on something called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).  These extensions are to RSS (and ATOM, as it turns out) and allow simple feeds to function as the transport for synchronization.  SSE was later renamed FeedSync, and is the basis for Mesh.  And, in fact, you’ll see “news” feeds all over Live Mesh.  These are really easy to produce, given the FeedSync foundation to Mesh.

And that means that this whole thing is going to be programmable.  Mary Jo Foley’s got a slide on her blog that even shows that there will be Visual Studio integration for all this.  But there will also be JavaScript interfaces, and interfaces for other languages, and a whole URI-based convention for getting to everything.  Nice.  That makes it seem like it will be easy for me to sync the data my apps use, over the Mesh infrastructure (including the cloud storage bit) without writing a lot of code.  In fact, with a little LINQ magic, I should be able to query and iterate through files within my mesh-enabled folders and items within my Mesh-enabled applications.

Goody gumdrops?  Not yet.  Because until Microsoft cleans up the mess of things it’s created that cry out for synchronization, no amount of DIY programmability is going to make me happy.  I’ve been thinking about this today.  Here are some things I’d like to be able to sync.  Easily:

• Photos (to my PCs, Media Center/Windows Home Server, and mobile phone).  And I want the option to downscale the resolution on the copies pushed to my phone.  And I want the ability to push/pull content to flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc
• Music (to my PCs, Media Center/Windows Home Server, mobile phone, and MP3 player).  And I want the option to downscale the bit rate on the copies pushed to my MP3 player and phone. 
• Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks (between two separate Outlook instances on my home and office PCs).  And somehow this should work along with (and not against) Exchange Sync and ActiveSync/Windows Mobile Device Center.  And I want the ability to sync certain of my contacts with Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, and other online services and social networks.  No more double entry, and no more forcing me into an all-or-nothing situation in terms of what gets synced.
• OneNote notebooks, or sections or section groups between PCs and onto OneNote mobile (over the Internet, not only through USB and Bluetooth)
• SharePoint libraries and lists should also be an endpoint, and a source, of data
• Favorites, between my Favorites folder, and Live Favorites, and del.icio.us and others.  Make it work with Digg too.  And with Windows Help favorites.  And push mobile favorites to mobile devices as an easily selected option.
• Internet radio stations.  Push their URLs properly into Windows Media Player, Media Center, my Sonos setup, and the Resco Radio app on my phone.  Not to mention any internet-enabled MP3 player.
• RSS feeds, of course.
• Backup volumes, from my local or NAS drive to my Amazon Simple Storage Service account or my records retention vendor’s server.
• Ability to sync specific douments automatically to FedEx Kinko’s, Mimeo, and other printing services.
• A configuration of all of the above assets (perhaps in the form of an OPML file), so that when I get a new PC, I can instantly get it syncing all the right stuff

Right now, here are all the different Microsoft Sync technologies I can think of.  Let’s get them all to use Mesh under the covers, and get them to work in a federated, cooperative fashion:

• Exchange Sync
• ActiveSync (Windows Mobile Device Center)
• Offline files
• Vista Sync Center
• Windows Media Player sync
• SQL Server Merge Replication (Is this too big a stretch?  I don’t think so.)
• SQL Server Compact Edition Sync Services

It’s getting close to 1am now, so I’ll stop.  But I bet the above lists are nowhere near comprehensive.  The point is that a transport isn’t enough.  We need something that understands devices contextually and has a good idea of what to sync where, and at what quality. 

My home entertainment infrastructure, being assembled as part of my home renovation, is slowly coming along.  We have set up a 32” Sharp LCD set in the bedroom with an HD set top box from Time Warner Cable.

More to the point, however, is that we setup an XBox 360 Elite along with it.  This XBox has three important features: (1) it acts as a Media Center extender, for both Windows XP and Vista, (2) you can buy an HD DVD drive for it for $199 and (3) it has an HDMI output, making it the perfect delivery mechanism for even 1080p content from the HD DVD.

Oh, and last week, Circuit City had a promotion whereby you could get two HD DVDs (up to $60 in value) for free with purchase the player.  Since the player itself comes with a free disk (the 2006 version of King Kong), that means you get a 1080p HD DVD player and about $100 worth of discs for $199.  Yowza!

The verdict? Picture: 1080p-tastic.  Installation: dunce-cap simple.  And the Xbox is an amazing Media Center extender…even on XP, it offers the full client UI experience of the Media Center PC itself.  And given that I haven’t (yet) upgraded the Media Center to hi def, the XBox Media Center extender client actually looks better.

Sonos, whose multi-room digital audio system I am about ito install in my home, is now compatible with Pandora.  Pandora, the Music Genome Project’s trainable Internet radio service, which until now worked only from a browser-based Flash application and the Slim Device/Logitech Squeezebox and Transporter devices, can now be dialed up sans PC, in any room in your home.  And unlike the Slim Device implementation, Sonos’ interface to the service allows you to rate songs and create new “stations.”

I had picked Sonos before it had this capability (but after it added support for WMA-protected tracks and for the entire Rhapsody service, including streaming content).  So this will just be a wonderful bonus.

In the latest issue of SmartMoney magazine, Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg explores the relative merits of iTunes and its competitors, including Napster and Yahoo Music, in an article titled “Rent vs. Own.”  Essentially the article compares the Apple AA3 format with Windows Media, with a heavy focus on Windows Media’s Plays for Sure subscription support.

The article has so faulty a premise (starting with its title) and so many misleading statements, that I felt compelled to challenge many of his points.  The full text of the original article is here and my rebuttal to it follows:

>> In the download model championed by Apple, the music service functions like a physical record store. You choose a track, pay 99 cents, and you own it. <<

This is precisely that model that most of Apple’s competitors follow as well.  The fact that many of them also offer subscription services does not diminish this.  Only one or two of the online music stores available through Windows Media Player require a subscription before you can buy tracks.

>> As long as you abide by the restrictions, which are designed to thwart mass copying by pirates, the song will play anywhere you want to hear it forever, with no further payments required. <<

Again, all purchased tracks from Apple’s competitors are provided on this basis as well.

>> This rental model has attracted a solid audience, but it is nowhere near as popular as iTunes — not even close. That may be because the rental model is far more complicated and restrictive than iTunes, and has several big downsides. <<

This premise of “iTunes or rental” presents a false dichotomy.  If people find the “rental” model too “complicated,” they can choose to ignore it and consider only the purchased track model.  Where is the downside in this?

>> Also, the rules for rental songs are more restrictive than for owned downloads such as Apple offers. At Yahoo, for example, you can store each song on only three computers, versus Apple's five. And you can install each song on only two portable devices, versus an unlimited number at Apple. <<

The number of PCs you can store your purchased tracks on varies by service.  MusicMatch (now owned by Yahoo) and Napster allow you to store tracks on up to 3 PCs; MSN Music allows up to 5.  Purchased tracks from any service can be copied an unlimited number of times to compatible portable devices.

>> At the Apple service, every song is a 99-cent download you can own, but at rental services, there are different kinds of songs. Some can be both rented and purchased (for that extra 79 cents each); others can be either rented or bought outright, but not both. Some songs can only be "streamed" — that is, they can be played directly from the Internet, but not downloaded, even on a rental basis. And some can be rented, but not streamed. You get the picture. <<

Actually, on Napster, most “rental” tracks can be downloaded, streamed, or purchased.  I have come across only a few that can be “rented” and not purchased.  It is true that some tracks are available for purchase only, and cannot be downloaded or streamed for free.  But on iTunes, all tracks have this limitation!  Does Mossberg really think that the additive option to subscribe to Napster or other services somehow diminishes their tracks-for-purchase offerings?

>> Another huge downside of the rental services is that the songs they rent — and even the ones they sell outright for the extra 79 cents — cannot be played on the world's best and most popular portable player: Apple's iPod…the rental-service songs are encoded in a format owned by Microsoft, Apple's rival, and Microsoft software is required to play them on a portable player. <<

With Apple’s scheme, iTunes locks you into iPod, and vice versa.  With Windows Media, an array of online stores provide tracks compatible with a wide array of players from a host of different manufacturers including Creative, iRiver, and Dell.  Most Windows Media players are offered at lower costs than iPod, based on hard disk or flash memory size.  The players and many of the services offer their own software, but you also give you the choice of using Windows Media Player as the single software tool for purchasing or subscription downloading or streaming of tracks, for playing them on your PC and for copying them to your portable player.  The Windows Media format has created a market, while Apple has created a monopoly.  Need I expand on the irony here?

>> Apple won't build the necessary Microsoft compatibility into the iPod. <<

Bingo!  I wholeheartedly agree with that observation.  The question is whether or not this is a defensible decision.

>> …the rental model is better for people interested in sampling a wide range of music without a large out-of-pocket expense. That might make it attractive to curious but cash-poor students, for example. The rental services also have many more "community" features than iTunes does, features that allow friends and families to share music recommendations, see what others are listening to and discuss music. So they may be better for people who view music as a social activity. <<

I’m not a cash poor student, and I’m not a teenager yearning to use my online music service as a chat or sharing tool (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  There’s no question in my mind that music is a social activity, but my guess is that Mossberg is using the word “social” in a condescending teenage-gabbing sense of the word and does not mean to invoke the spiritual, uplifting power of music.

>> But for most people, it's no contest: Right now iTunes and the iPod are the better choice in digital music. <<

I beg to differ.  Subscription services offer a great way to expand your horizons and listen to music you don’t own.  As you listen to the tracks you have purchased, you can click on links to artists that your service has determined have an affinity to what you’re listening to.  From there, you can check out the artists’ discographies, pick an album, and start listening to it without plunking down more money and without having to wait for it to download.  If you like what you hear, then you can buy it.  I have done so many times, and have been very happy with my purchases because I knew what I was buying.

And here’s a whole dimension that Apple doesn’t even care to cover: owners of Windows Media Center PCs who are Napster subscribers can do all of this from their remote control, on their television (with a specially designed user interface that is living room-friendly) and listen to the music on their audio/home theater equipment.  Portable players and earbuds are great (I have a Creative Zen 6GB player and I like it a lot), and music on PC speakers can be remarkably good, but getting the music on my own amplifier and speakers makes the other options sound just plain tinny.  I suppose you could hook your Apple notebook up to your stereo, but it’s just not going to be integrated nearly as well as a Media Center PC.

There’s no question that the iPod is hugely popular and incredibly well designed, both from a technology and an industrial design perspective.  Apple is heavily dominant in the portable music player market and probably will be for some time.  About 25 years ago, there was another dominant player: the Sony Walkman.  “Walkman” was then, as “iPod” is now, the generic noun for all products in the category.  Sony had a great cash cow product that eventually became commoditized and irrelevant.  Sony of course has survived, but they also had numerous other market-leading products like Betamax VCRs, Trinitron TVs, and mass market and high-end audio equipment.  The Betamax died, but the PlayStation has arguably become even more important, especially as games for the console now command budgets and revenue comparable to major motion pictures.

Apple doesn’t have this kind of diversified product line.  In fact, iPods are starting to represent the lion’s share of the company’s revenue.  Will the iPod eventually be “Betamaxed” or “Walkman-ed?”  Will Apple become a one-trick-pony like Palm?  Will it suffer a similar fate?  Walter Mossberg owes his readers the courtesy of exploring these issues fairly, honestly and more thoroughly.

He’s tied together my Sunday morning and late night television viewing habits and now he’s invading my digital media world.  Fareed Zakaria, who is the Editor of the International Edition of Newsweek magazine (and who is a columnist in the US Edition) now has his own show.  I started watching and listening to Mr. Zakaria during his frequent appearances on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and enjoy him even more during his guest appearances on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  He’s incredibly bright and articulate, and as an Indian Muslim, his take on everything from Al Qaeda and the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to globalization and the Indian off-shore revolution have a lot of credibility.

Now, instead of being merely a guest and consultant, Mr. Zakaria has his own show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.  The show airs on PBS, but at least in New York, the show airs only on a digital channel that is available to owners of digital televisions or subscribers to digital cable.  In New York, WNET’s digital companion service Thirteen World, which is carried on Time Warner Cable’s DTV digital service on channel 715, airs the show a few different times per week.  But the digital distribution of the show goes one step further, in that the most current episode and past broadcasts are available as streaming video, in either Windows Media or Real Video formats on the show’s Web site.

While the show is still finding its rhythm and voice, as is Fareed Zakaria as a host, I highly recommend the show.  Virtually all the guests so far have been extremely intelligent and well-spoken.  Given the virtual collapse of critical, vigilant insight in mainstream American news media, this show is a beacon of hope for fans of unfettered analysis and real debate.  Interestingly, the show is produced under something called the Creative Commons License, which apparently (forgive my ignorance) allows the show to be freely copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided proper attribution is made and the content is unaltered.  I find this concept intriguing, as I do its ironic parallels with Open Source software, of which I am not a terribly avid proponent.

This may sound too good to be true, or at least too good to work well, but it's for real.  If you have a media PC, go to http://www.orb.com, create an account, then download the client (really server) software onto your Media Center PC.  It downloads and installs pretty quickly, asks you a few config questions and then starts up.  You'll see a small, green Orb icon in your tray, and your media machine will feel a bit sluggish, but after a few minutes that will dissipate.  At this point, go to your router and open up outbound TCP ports 82, 85, and 86 (in your router's port triggering menu) for your media PC's IP address.  (You did give it a static IP, didn't you?)

Next, go to any PC with Windows Media Player and IE or FireFox (preferably outside your home network for a decent test), point your browser to http://my.orb.com, and login.  You now have access to all your media: music, home videos, photos and, yes, recorded TV (not just the ability to schedule recordings)!  You even have the ability to watch live TV from your media machine's tuner (though I found this to be glitchy), delete recorded shows and program new ones. 

Oh, and for music, Orb recognizes your already-created playlists.  And my understanding is that Orb works with any PC, not just Media Center gear. 

I used my Verizon EVDO cell modem to test an "oustside" connection that varies between 600Kbps and 1Mbps. The music came in at a crisp 128Kbps stream and sounded great; the video definitely had digital artifacting, but it was very watchable and the sound was great, as was my ability to seek to different parts of the recording without totally messing up the buffer.  Orb's software streams your content in Windows Media format, and does so at a bitrate that is optimized for what it has determined your host and client connection speeds to be.

Did I mention this ain't from Microsoft, and the site appears to use Java Server Pages?  Hey, I'm not implying anything, I'm just reporting the facts.

One more test you might want to try: try logging in to your Orb account from your SmartPhone!  The UI is nicely optimized for SmartPhone screens; I tried it on my Samsung i600 which runs the mobile edition of WMP 9 and recorded TV shows worked quite well the first time I tried it.  They also worked very badly when I was trying to demo it to my friend the next day.  Mind you, I don't pay for any kind of fast Internet access on my phone...I just get Verizon Wireless's Quick2Net "1G" service that, if I'm lucky, gets a 56K connection.  The speed tests that Orb performed during my failed demo told me I have a 14K connection...so I can't blame the unimpressive results on Orb.  The fact that it worked well the first time is impressive in and of itself.

And again, all this is for free.  Apparently, some syndicated content from Sony Pictures and others, which you will see injected in the UI's menus is what pays for all this.  We'll have to see if it lasts.  And if the live TV feature ends up creating legal hassles.  If not, I hope and expect to see something similar and "official" from Microsoft on MSN or WindowsMedia.com soon.  With broadband connections available in many hotels, this may really catch on with road warriors who have media PCs.

It also may end up causing some bandwidth problems for those hotels, but fiber optic to the curb connections should take care of that!

Musicmatch, first known for its jukebox player software packaged with many PCs and sound cards, was one of the first online digital download music stores for the Windows Media platform...I'm reasonably certain their online store beat Napster to the punch.  The two services have been largely similar: both offer Windows Media protected format music downloads, at 99c per track or (usually) $9.99 per album.  MSN music joined the fray recently with a similar service, but their store is so terrible and difficult to use that I have to assume they've "thrown the game" on purpose, to let the third party ecosystem of music stores (and broad support for WMA protected format) flourish.

Both Musicmatch and Napster also offer subscriptions that give you unlimited access to a majority of their libraries, with the ability to stream or download the files, but not to burn them or copy them to other PCs or portable devices.  The subscriptions are a terrific way to explore new music.  The Napster subscription is especially good, because they've built a Windows Media Center front-end to the service, so you have access to a huge library of music from your home entertainment center (i.e. your "stereo").  The software is buggy, but it's worth putting up with the bugs because there's so much good music, all available from your remote control.

Recently, Napster upped the ante by offering a $15/month subscription that works just like the aforementioned one (which is only about $10/month) but also allows you unlimited copies of the downloaded files to portable music players.  Not bad.  But the plot thickens.  Yahoo bought Musicmatch a while back, and through that acquisition is now offering Yahoo! Music Unlimited, its own subscription service with unlimited copying to portable players.  Better yet, it's only $4.99/month if you pay for a year's worth of service ($6.99 on a month-to-month basis).

This means Yahoo, arguably the most recognized brand on the Internet (OK, maybe 2nd or 3rd at this point), has standardized on Windows Media and "Plays for Sure" as its platform.  There are now a lot of music services on Microsoft’s platform, and one of them is HUGE.  How many sites use the AAC format in a form compatible with Apple's iPod?  Just one that I know of: iTunes.

Furthermore, Philips and Microsoft have jointly announced the release of a new chip set for portable players that has Windows Media baked right in the silicon.  Strike two for Apple.

Apple's iPod has a huge market share (something like 70%, I believe).  Their hardware looks great, and people love their iPods.  Most Windows Media-based portables look like cheap knock-offs by comparison.  As a fashion item, iPods rule, and until Microsoft understands the fashion component of this market, their success will impeded.

But eventually Microsoft will get this part right, and even if they don't, it may eventually matter less and less.  Sony's Betamax once had a fiercely loyal customer base and had the VCR market to itself.  Then scrappy ol' JVC came out with an inferior format called VHS.  They licensed it to every OEM under the (rising) sun and "VHS" eventually became synonymous with "VCR." The same ubiquity-to-also-ran-status transformation will happen to the iPod.  And for the same reasons.  Call me crazy.  Just remember that you said that when the Windows Media Audio format is so universally adopted that no one will even notice anymore.

Today, over email, I found myself advising my wife’s friend on a potential Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) PC purchase.  In the course of all this, he asked what seemed like a simple technical question, but I realized later than it has wider ramifications.

His question was whether an MCE PC could replace his stereo receiver.

People familiar with this product line understand that MCE machines can integrate digital music and photos into their living room/home theater setups, and that they have DVR/PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities as well.  People more familiar with the products know that MCE machines can also replace their CD and DVD players, and even their FM tuners, and they can act as CD and DVD recorders.

But depending on the model you buy, you can also run stereo speakers, or even surround sound speakers (my HP z545 actually has 7.1 speaker outputs!) directly from the MCE machine.

So as long as you’re comfortable dispensing with AM radio, audio cassettes, and VHS (and assuming you’re satisfied with your MCE PC’s digital-analog converter), MCE machines can act as thoroughly integrated AV/digital media devices in a single box.  This makes these devices much more cost-effective than they might at first seem and I think it’s worth considering the fact home entertainment could evolve in this direction. 

And that could be a huge opportunity for Microsoft.  It could take them beyond the early adopter gadget freak market into the mainstream of consumer electronics.  And rather than just being an also-ran, Microsoft could have a killer product and a big, new revenue stream.

If Microsoft is serious about this market, they need to do a number of things to make the MCE devices have broader appeal.  Here’s a top ten list off the top off my head.  I may post more as I think of them:

• 10. Add Dolby Pro Logic for enhanced sound on 2-channel audio sources.
• 9. Add support for DVD Audio and/or SA-CD.  The latter would require MS and Sony to make nice…no easy task, but I think BillG wants it to happen.
• 8. Add DTS decoding capabilities for a better DVD experience (my MCE box has Dolby Digital built in, but I have to use the digital audio output into my AV receiver to get DTS decoding).
• 7. Add aux A/V inputs so old fogies like me can hook up their VHS decks, tape decks and turntables.
• 6. Add top-notch digital-analog conversion.
• 5. Strike OEM deals with audiophile manufacturers.
• 4. Consider a retail partner program akin to the authorized dealership programs many home entertainment brands have (imagine a Microsoft-certified installer coming to your home to set up your gear).
• 3. Add true HDTV support, not just through antenna signals, but by offering component video and DVI inputs (I know, I’m pushing it here).
• 2. Consider, as with the Xbox, building a dedicated software environment for Media Center devices that is not based on Windows XP.  To work in most peoples living rooms, these boxes shouldn’t require the kind of maintenance and patching Windows does.
• 1. (drum roll…) Realize that the living room is a major front in the battle against Linux.  TiVos are Linux-based (and they work very, very well) and HP has announced that they will introduce new media computers that are Linux-based.  If Microsoft wants to beat Linux, they need to look beyond the data center!

When I have more time, I'll discuss Windows Media Center (I own the HP z545 Digital Entertainment Center and x5400 Media Center Extender), with which I have a love-hate relationship.  But no matter what type of home entertainment center you have, you should strongly consider buying a Harmony Universal Remote from Logitech (I have the 680).  If you don't know about these things, they are learning remotes, but the way you set them up is to connect them to your PC via a USB cable, and then connect to a mother ship Web site which has IR codes for virtually all VCRs, TVs, DVD players, PVRs, media PCs, cable/satellite set tops, tape decks, receivers, CD players, tuners, etc. ever made.  You just tell a browser-based Wizard what makes and models you own and how you have them connected and it will set up just about everything for you, including programming and labeling of configurable "soft buttons" at the top of the unit.  Yes, you will want to tweak the default set up a little and yes, you can teach it IR codes the old-fashioned way if you have to.

But when you're done with set up, ONE button for TV, Music, or DVD/VCR operations will turn EVERYTHING on and switch the inputs on everything and ONE button will turn everything off.  And guess what the latter button is labeled?  Yup...it just says "Off."  This remote is 100% spouse-proof and 100% baby-sitter friendly.  It's tactile (no screen based pronto-type stuff here) and it's back-lit and it's WAY smaller (and shaped like the TiVo "peanut" remote) than my two-handed Marantz RC 2000 Mk II was.  Get one!