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Pc To Tv Via Microsoft ; Software Broadens Media Content For Living Room

Posted on: Friday, 9 January 2004, 06:00 CST

Microsoft Corp., the world power in computer software on the desktop, yesterday introduced a new effort to extend that dominance to the entertainment center.

Chairman Bill Gates, opening the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last night, showed new software designed to let people use a television to view media content stored on a personal computer, even if it's in a different part of the house.

The initiative is the company's latest effort to cement its presence in the living room, while still positioning the PC - where Microsoft makes most of its money - as the hub of home entertainment and technology.

Microsoft's past attempts to push into home entertainment have yielded mixed results. The company makes software that runs digital- cable boxes, but it has had a tough time persuading U.S. cable operators to use it on a wide scale. Microsoft's Xbox has become a strong contender among video-game consoles since its debut.

The company's Windows Media Center Edition software, released in October 2002, lets people watch and record live television and access movies, photos and music through a special on-screen interface. But as long as that content has been confined to the computer, analysts have viewed the market for Media Center PCs as limited.

"People don't want to watch movies on their PC," except in certain settings, such as a dorm room, said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

The technology shown by Gates last night, dubbed the Windows Media Center Extender, seeks to address that limitation. It will come in small set-top boxes, letting televisions communicate remotely - either wirelessly or through a wire - with PCs running the Windows XP Media Center software. People will use a dedicated remote control to hear audio, watch video or view pictures that have been piped into the television from the computer.

"It's the same experience that you have on the (Media Center) PC, the same user interface," said John O'Rourke, senior director of Microsoft's consumer strategy. "But what it's essentially doing is, through your television, enabling you to bring that experience from your (home) office and view it through the TV that's sitting in your family room."

As an alternative to the set-top boxes, the company said, consumers will also be able to buy televisions with the technology built in. In addition, Microsoft plans to sell a DVD containing a program that will let people use an Xbox to access Media Center PC content on a television in the same way.

Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung Electronics and other manufacturers have signed up to make the Media Center Extender hardware. Microsoft said the first of the Media Center Extender devices will come to market by the next holiday season.

By removing one of the major downsides of the Media Center PCs - the fact that many people don't like to watch television or movies on a computer - the new technology could also boost sales of the media-center computers, said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research.

Microsoft declined to say what the devices will cost, but to be competitive, the Media Center Extender technology will need to be priced less than comparable personal video recorders on the market, Gartenberg said. Otherwise, people might opt for a specialized device such as the TiVo personal video recorder, which sells for as low as $200.

The TiVo and other stand-alone devices run counter to Microsoft's push to make the PC the hub of the home network, with other devices tapping it for content. Some experts believe Microsoft may be swimming against the tide in that regard.

"What we'll see increasingly is various devices which have their own direct connection to the Internet, instead of connecting through a central unit," said Mark Anderson, publisher of the Friday Harbor- based Strategic News Service, a newsletter about computing and communications.

"We're starting to see that now. It's pretty interesting, and it makes sense in terms of Moore's Law - as the price of chips and the price of storage come down, it becomes less and less critical to conserve that investment in one machine." (Moore's Law is the principle that computing power will rise exponentially over time.)

At the same time, a Media Center PC environment mirrored on a television could still suffer from some of the quirks of the computing experience. As an example, the existing Windows Media Center operating system can sometimes experience problems, such as unexpectedly exiting the Media Center interface, IDC analyst Roger Kay said.

"There's a tendency for it to be a little bit brittle because of the complexity of the operating environment," Kay said.

The existing Media Center PCs let people easily record and play back television, but analysts say the demand for the computers, and for the Media Center Extender, might become stronger if the process of downloading movies onto a hard drive becomes less cumbersome.

There are sites, such as the studio-backed Movielink, that let people download Hollywood movies, but they generally use a rental model, placing limits on viewing. And a full movie download can take anywhere from 50 minutes to 90 minutes.

The concept behind the Media Center Extender isn't entirely new. Microsoft showed a prototype of the technology, which it was then calling the "Media Center TV client," at the company's annual hardware engineering conference last year. In addition, it is already possible to connect a TV monitor to a Media Center PC, but in that case the controls still go directly through the computer, generally requiring it to remain in the same room.

There are existing products on the market from other companies that let people stream media from their computers to their televisions. In general, however, the other products are not yet simple enough to catch on with a large number of consumers, analysts said.

"There's no one device that elegantly and simply lets you access all the content on your PC and get that around the home," Jupiter Research's Gartenberg said. "That's the breakthrough here. They're enabling this process for mere mortals, for consumers that are interested in functionality but not necessarily technology."

Other announcements made by Microsoft in conjunction with the consumer electronics show:

MSN Premium, the latest version of the company's Internet service, will be released today. The updated service comes with enhancements designed for broadband users. Microsoft announced a series of video content providers for the service. "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno joined Gates on stage at the show for the official announcement.

Content providers EMI Music, CinemaNow and Napster will work in conjunction with Portable Media Centers, hand-held audio and video devices that will run special Microsoft software. Microsoft expects the first of the devices to debut in the second half of this year. They also will work in conjunction with Media Center PCs.

Smart Personal Objects Technology, or SPOT, watches running Microsoft software and will be available publicly for the first time this week.

P-I reporter Todd Bishop

can be reached at 206-448-8221

or toddbishop@seattlepi.com

CES 2004

Follow the news from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on the P-I's Microsoft weblog, http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/.

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