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November 21, 2005
Microsoft's Latest Cable Play
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
IPMediaMonitor is trumpeting Microsoft's latest agreement with CableLabs as the Next Big Thing. (Bigger than the Sony Rootkit fiasco? Yep.)
The story, by Cynthia Brumfield, is that next year's version of the Media Center PC spec from Microsoft will support a digital set-top card from CableLabs, meaning the PC can double as a cable television.
A few simple questions are all that's needed to knock this one down like a last-second Hail Mary:
- The Media Center PC spec has been a market failure.
- Nothing here about who's going to make these boxes. Notice?
- TV displays, in the age of HDTV, have moved miles from the standard PC aspect ratio.
The fact is the actions of watching TV and using a PC are different. With a TV, you're mostly passive, except for that remote in your hand (and we know who you are). With a PC you're constantly active.
I got another reminder of this a few weeks ago, when my broadband was out and I was reduced to getting my news from TV. Not only don't your fingers move with a PC, but your eyes don't move, either.
Let's call this Dana's Law of Attention:
Video takes your attention without taking your mind. A PC takes your mind without, at times, taking all your attention.
In other words, this is not a technical fix requiring a technical solution. This is a usability issue we can safely ignore. What this really means is that the Media Center PC is dead.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business Models | Consumer Electronics | Futurism | computer interfaces | marketing
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Brad Hutchings on November 21, 2005 05:53 PM writes...
I think you could have said the same about music in 2000. The computer players were computery. In 2005, every serious audiophile and most people who really like music have gone digital with the computer at the center of their music libraries.
A few trends that suggest the same will happen with video over the next few years... Cheaper and smaller hard disks with more capacity, higher capacity and faster writable optical disks, cheap flat panel LCD televisions with S-video, VGA, and component input, higher bandwidth home wireless networks, multi-core CPUs, higher bandwidth broadband. We're still tied to the DVD for video delivery from an efficiency point of view. For example, I love iTMS and purchase the Nightstalker episodes as they come out. But on 768K DSL, it's painfully slow to download a relatively low quality 320x240 version. As technology takes care of that, the software people will start getting these home media centers right, just as they did with music.
Permalink to Comment2. Mike Weston on November 21, 2005 08:13 PM writes...
I usually agree with you, but I think you're wrong this time. See The Long Tail blog for reasons why Media Center PCs are cool, especially with every XBox 360 as an extender.
As a big anti-fan of Microsoft, I wish it weren't true, but that's the way it goes sometimes.
Permalink to Comment3. Ed Dodds on December 1, 2005 06:34 PM writes...
I anticipate the digitization of legacy medical data for emrs as well as a time when this data is expressed via cell phones, VOIP, web tablets, and set top boxes (read repurposed Media Centers). Remote disease management and medical device monitoring over IP rather than dial up modems (via interactive home health servers) seems likely to me.
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