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Category: Digital media
October 28th, 2009
Internet TV goes live on Windows 7 Media Center
One fascinating detail almost got lost in the shuffle of last week’s Windows 7 launch. Microsoft flipped the switch on some partner deals that turned its ho-hum Internet TV feature into something worth watching – in every sense of the word. (Full disclosure: One of Microsoft’s primary TV network partners is CBS, which also happens to own ZDNet’s parent, CBS Interactive.) [Update: As several readers have noted in both comments and private e-mails, this feature is currently available only in the United States. I will confirm with Microsoft whether they have plans to make similar features available in other markets.]
The Internet TV icon was present in pre-release versions of Windows 7, but mostly it delivered short clips and promos. With the final release, the Internet TV icon includes full episodes of a surprising number of classic and current series from CBS, PBS, and other partners.
How does it work? See my screenshot gallery for a visual walk-through
On the CBS page, for example, you’ll find full episodes of the current series CSI:Miami, NUMB3RS, Accidentally On Purpose, and How I Met Your Mother. I also found all three seasons of Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone, in glorious black and white. I think I saw MacGyver there, too, but didn’t have the strength to click that link. If you’re a PBS fan, you can gorge yourself on Nova episodes.
Setting up Internet TV was a very quick two-step process. The first step install the Media Center application that downloads and displays listings. The second component is a Flash viewer (not Silverlight?) that gets installed when you first try to view a program from the Internet TV pane.
In my limited testing, the streaming quality was pretty good, but not great. On a laptop screen, the picture was easy to watch, with no noticeable glitches. On a 24-inch 1080p screen, the degradation in quality was noticeable. I suspect only a diehard fan who missed an episode of their favorite series would bother trying to watch these low-res signals on a 50-inch-plus HDTV screen. There’s no charge for any of the content. Each full episode includes a handful of short ads - far fewer than those found in a network broadcast. I couldn’t find any obvious fast-forward capability to zap through those ads.
I was able to set up Internet TV on PCs running Windows 7 with and without regular TV tunes. The Internet TV feature was not available on a Media Center extender, however, which isn’t surprising given the Flash-based player that powers the feature. I also couldn’t save the episodes for offline watching, although I’m sure there are workarounds for that.
The gold rush is on for Internet-based TV, with Hulu and Tivo and Apple all experimenting with different ways of signing partnership deals, delivering content, and charging viewers for the privilege. If Microsoft is smart, it will iterate the Internet TV feature quickly, adding content partners, improving picture and audio quality, and figuring out how to make the content portable.
September 10th, 2009
Media Center gives digital cable tuners a new lease on life
Last week, I was prepared to write off CableCARD support in Windows Media Center. When I went shopping on the web for new Dell and HP systems last week, I couldn’t find a single one that offered a CableCARD option. Instead, the technology appeared to be relegated exclusively to niche PC makers selling high-end systems. By all objective measures, the technology was on life support, about to be declared dead.
And then, last night at the annual CEDIA show in Atlanta, Microsoft made a handful of Media Center announcements. Several were expected, but this one was a complete surprise:
Microsoft and CableLabs announced that customers will now be able to add digital cable tuners with CableCARD to a Windows 7-based PC with Windows Media Center. A new tool will be provided by Microsoft that assesses the PC’s ability to support the solution. This tool will analyze the customer’s PC and enable digital cable support if the PC meets requirements, opening digital cable options to Windows Media Center customers across the country.
In addition, a firmware update for existing digital tuners will relax the restrictions that prevent copying some programs. Currently, every program recorded using a CableCARD-equipped tuner is saddled with the most restrictive form of DRM available, even high-definition over-the-air broadcasts that can be freely shared if tuned via an antenna. After the firmware update, any program with the Copy Freely tag can be transcoded, synced with a portable device, or shared with another PC. In theory, that means you won’t see this message nearly as often:
September 4th, 2009
Friday follow-up: six online music services revisited
Last spring, I took a closer look at six online music services, comparing them to iTunes on the basis of price and selection. (If you missed that post, you can read it here: 6 music services compared: who can bust the iTunes monopoly?)
Since then, I’ve been keeping close track of all those services. Although it’s only been a few months, I thought it might be worth recapping what’s changed since then (a lot, it turns out) and whether these iTunes alternatives can really make an impact on music purchases.
eMusic goes mainstream. The biggest change in recent months involves eMusic. Last month, the service announced a new partnership with all of the Sony labels (Arista, Columbia, Epic, among others). Where previously eMusic was strictly an indie alternative, now it offers access to recordings from major artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and The Clash. The change comes at a price, though: The monthly cost of an eMusic subscription is up substantially, to an average cost of 42-50 cents per track. At an average cost of about $5 per album, that’s still a bargain compared to other services, but longtime customers like me saw our monthly charge nearly triple.
My initial reaction to the eMusic changes was disappointment and the fleeting thought of canceling. After using the new service for the last month, though, I’ve changed my mind. Given the expanded catalog, I’ve found that I can fill a lot of holes in my collection at a very reasonable price, and it’s still a great deal for indie artists that are hard to find elsewhere. Ironically, the higher-priced eMusic might be a better overall deal for music fans willing to dip into older catalogs for overlooked gems.
iTunes is expensive. I’ve been faithfully checking the prices of every new album I’ve purchased since the beginning of the year at iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Lala.com. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve purchased roughly 30 albums at those sites, and in every case, without exception, the price difference over iTunes was substantial. Without exception, I was able to purchase albums for at least $2 less than iTunes every time, and I was able to locate the exact title I was looking for every time.
Even more significant in terms of monetary savings are the specials that Amazon and Lala.com offer. Both services regularly discount new releases substantially in the first week they’re available, which is why I was able to get new albums from Steve Earle, U2, and Green Day for $2,99, $3.99, and $4.99, respectively. They also discount selected older albums to $2.99 or less as part of daily specials. By contrast, I have never seen iTunes Music Store offer a one-time sale price on any title, old or new. I’d estimate that for those 30 albums alone, I paid about $120 less than if I had purchased them at the iTunes store. If I added in the savings from 70 or so albums I picked up at eMusic, my total bill would easily be $300 less than the equivalent tab at iTunes.
Subscription services are frustrating. I pay Microsoft $15 a month for an all-you-can-listen to Zune subscription. My Rhapsody subscription, which is paid annually, works out to about $12 a month. Both services give me the ability to synchronize subscription tracks with a portable player. When I’m traveling, I like to fill the player up with a few dozen albums from artists that I want to hear more from. The ability to listen to an unlimited number of tracks and albums has kept me from wasting money on albums that looked good on paper but disappointed in hearing. I’ve also found several albums that are keepers that I gladly paid for after a few listens.
The Zune monthly fee includes the right to download 10 tracks a month, which is useful but adds some hassle to the process. Ideally, to get the bast bang for the buck, you’ll want to find an album that’s exactly 10 tracks that you would have paid $9.99 for (or $7.49 at Lala); for an album consisting of more than 10 tracks, you either have to cherry-pick which 10 tracks you want to download or pay extra to fill in the missing numbers. Those “free” tracks expire monthly as well, so you have to be vigilant to avoid losing them. (That’s happened once already to me. Ouch!)
All three of the services I continue to use regularly for music purchases—Amazon, eMusic, and Lala—include their own downloader utilities, which copy purchased tunes in the background and move them into either the iTunes or Windows Media library. It’s arguably easier to do it all from the iTunes window, but my experience suggests that a collection drawn from different sources requires no extra management tricks beyond installing those mini-downloaders.
When I wrote my original post, several commenters chided me for being fixated on saving pennies. As it turns out, those pennies add up: if you’re a music fan, the actual savings can be hundreds of dollars.
Your turn: Are you willing to pay extra for iTunes? Have you switched to any alternative services? Leave your comments in the Talkback section.
June 15th, 2009
Microsoft fumbles the digital TV transition
Microsoft’s Media Center program is nearly seven years old, and the version included with Windows 7 will be its fifth major revision. It’s one of the most polished features in the entire Windows family, especially in its support for multiple TV tuners: analog, basic cable, over-the-air digital (ATSC), satellite (in Europe and Japan), and CableCARD (in the United States).
With all that experience, you’d think that Microsoft would have sailed through the long-awaited transition to all-digital over-the-air TV broadcasts in the United States this past Friday. Instead, the company failed, in dramatic fashion.
It’s not like it caught the company by surprise. A Service Alert has been visible on the home menu page for Windows Vista Media Center users for the past two weeks or so:
Clicking through the multiple explanation screens produced a series of clear-sounding messages about what to expect in Media Center, depending on the type of tuners you were using. According to this screen, for anyone using an ATSC tuner there was “no additional action needed.”
That advice was wrong. Microsoft apparently forgot to plan for one of the side effects of the transition, in which some broadcasters changed broadcast channel numbers along with the switch.
I first noticed that something had gone wrong on Sunday, when I saw that a couple of shows on CBS and ABC had failed to record on Friday and Saturday, complaining that no signal was available. When I tried to tune in the channels manually, I got an error message instead of the programming I expected.
In postings over the weekend at The Green Button, the Microsoft-owned (but independently operated) community forums, I found other users complaining of the same issues. Media Center MVP Chris Lanier also noted the problem this morning.
There are workarounds for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that involve editing an XML file (in Windows Vista) and adding DTV channels manually (in Windows 7). Neither of the workarounds have worked for me.
If you’re a Media Center user, has this issue affected you? Leave a comment in the Talkback section below. I’ll be following up with Microsoft to see if I can understand what happened and when to expect a fix. If I hear from enough users, I’ll put together a more detailed follow-up post.
Update: A vigorous discussion at The Green Button here along with some possible workarounds.
A pair (so far) of cryptic updates from Microsoft here. The most recent was posted by chrisboedy around 21 hours ago [typos and punctuation errors in original]:
All, our services are all running as expected, however there was an issue which is causing the new data feed with some of the updated frequencies not to process through. We are currently working to resolve this and I’ll provide additional updates as I have them. I don’t expect this will be difficult for us to resolve, however the at that point, it’s just time waiting for the data to propagate to the front end servers for you all.
Expectation should be however that this will take ~24 hours to complete processing.
Additional input from GeekTonic and Ben Drawbaugh at EngadgetHD.
April 23rd, 2009
6 music services compared: Who can bust the iTunes monopoly?
Update: At least one of the services I discuss here has significantly changed its policies since this post was published. For a look at what’s changed with eMusic and a tally of how much I saved by forgoing iTunes, see Friday follow-up: six online music services revisited.]
What does a monopoly look like? In 2009, you can get a pretty good idea by looking at Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS). It has overwhelming market share with a hockey-stick growth trajectory, is designed to work exclusively with the enormously profitable iPod/iPhone family of hardware devices (another near-monopoly), and appears to be immune from pricing pressure. Having a monopoly isn’t illegal, unless a court or governmental agency rules that you’re trying to abuse the monopoly position (just ask Microsoft). In fact, if you can stay on the right side of the antitrust regulators, having a monopoly is like a license to print profits.
Apple’s success in digital music is not for lack of competition, however. Over the past few months, I’ve been sampling all of the major U.S.-based competitors to the iTunes Music Store, as well as a few fascinating minor-league competitors. In this post, I’ll show you how each one stacks up against iTMS in terms of pricing and available features. After my testing was complete, I had a new favorite music service, and after you read my report you might decide it’s right for you too.
In all, I compared iTunes to six competitors, all of which sell music downloads sanctioned by the labels that own the digital rights to those tunes: Amazon MP3, Zune Marketplace (Microsoft), and Rhapsody (RealNetworks) are all divisions of much larger companies; eMusic, Lala, and Amie Street are smaller independent services trying to carve out niches.
Here are the criteria I used:
December 9th, 2008
DirecTV kills its Media Center tuner project
If you’re a DirecTV subscriber and a Media Center fan, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: DirecTV has pulled the plug on development of its long-rumored HDPC-20 tuner.
The device was first announced at CES in January 2006, and I noticed that a driver for the device was included with build 6801 of Windows 7, which was handed out at PDC. The folks at Engadget HD even spotted some of the hardware in action at Microsoft’s labs. But alas, it is not to be. Via e-mail, I just received this official statement from DirecTV Chief Technology Officer Romulo Pontual :
DIRECTV has suspended the development of the HDPC-20 tuner project that was designed to integrate DIRECTV service into Windows Media Center after assessing the impact of missing the August 2008 release of Windows Media Center update and considering timing of the next release.
Both DIRECTV and Microsoft understand the desirability of offering consumers an all encompassing DIRECTV programming solution via Windows-based PCs. We are continuing to explore ways to integrate DIRECTV service with Windows-based PCs in the future.
The HDPC-20 tuner that appears on the driver list of a pre-Beta build of Windows 7 is an artifact that was listed prior to the decision to suspend the tuner project. As our plans progress toward a Windows Media Center-compatible product, we will make an announcement at the appropriate time.
Windows 7 incorporates all the infrastructure needed to bring satellite signals from DirecTV and its competitors into Media Center. But without the necessary hardware, the two won’t be meeting anytime soon.
November 21st, 2008
Why the new Zune Pass should be irresistible
The music industry has been stumbling and bumbling with subscription-based music services for years, and I’ve been experimenting with them since the very beginning.
This week, Microsoft announced a sweeping change to its Zune Pass music service (press release is here). The $15 monthly price tag is unchanged, as is the basic outline of the service, which gives you the right to download any album from the Zune Marketplace (an impressive collection, to be sure) and play it on any of three PCs or three Zune devices. What’s new is 10 free song credits per month, which allow you to turn a subscription-only track into a purchase. At the going rate of 99 cents per track, those 10 credits effectively lower the subscription portion of the service to 5 bucks a month. A 14-day free trial is available.
I’ve been using the Zune Pass service for the past five months and absolutely love it. The Zune software is superb, and the end-to-experience is better than anything Apple has to offer. In my opinion, the new terms should be irresistible to any serious music fan. I’ve put together an image gallery that gives a better idea of how the service works, so you can see for yourself.
November 8th, 2008
DirecTV's HD tuner set to debut with Windows 7?
Way back at CES 2006, DirecTV announced that it was working with Microsoft to produce a tuner that would connect directly to a Media Center PC. The result would be the ability, in theory, to capture all of DirecTV’s satellite programming, including HD, and then view and manage it with the Media Center interface.
In nearly three full years since then, the DirecTV tuner has achieved the same notoriety as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness monster. The occasional sighting is always enshrouded in fog and mystery. In January 2008, a product brochure appeared, and some people got invitations to test the new HDPC-20. But no one ever reported spotting one of these mythical creatures in the wild. In fact, as recently as September I had pretty much written the whole project off:
DirecTV “announced” its plans to support Media Center at CES in January 2006. It was pure vaporware. And DirecTV never announced the HDPC-20. A third party leaked scans of a product brochure, and some folks on the Fiji beta got paperwork that mentioned that name.
All on paper, no actual tests.
So imagine my surprise when I found a signed driver for this device in the pre-beta build of Windows 7 distributed at PDC. Here, see for yourself:
April 4th, 2008
Windows Media Center meets cable TV in HD
Six months ago, after years of waiting, I finally had a chance to switch my Media Center setup over to a fully digital, cable-compatible, high-definition configuration. How has it worked out? Let’s just say you’d have to pry the Media Center remote from my cold dead fingers.
My previous Media Center system was a small form factor Dell C521 that I profiled last summer. It served its purpose well, but it suffered from one crucial weakness: it couldn’t record high-definition programming over premium channels like HBO and ESPN. As a result, I had to keep the DVR I leased from DirecTV and switch between the two systems depending on what I wanted to watch or listen to. Not elegant.
So last fall, I talked to a contact at Dell and arranged to purchase a custom-built system that would work with CableCARD technology and permit me to consolidate everything in one box. In this post and the accompanying image gallery, I’ll show you this system has evolved over the past six months.
January 9th, 2008
Microsoft extends the reach of Media Center
It’s no secret that part of Microsoft’s marketing plan for Windows Vista was to push sales of its Home Premium edition, and every bit of market data I’ve seen says they’ve been extremely successful in this effort. As of mid-2007, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, more than 70% of Windows Vista sales through OEMs and at retail were premium editions, “driven by the demand for Windows Vista Home Premium.”
That’s good news for Microsoft, which puts extra dollars in its corporate coffers with every premium edition it sells. But it’s also good news for consumers, who might not even realize that Vista Home Premium gives them a direct pipeline to stream digital music, photos, and videos into other rooms with a Media Center Extender. The small extender devices are designed to plug into an HDTV (and, optionally, a surround sound system) with only minimal setup required. All of the devices I’ve looked at have Wireless N and wired Fast Ethernet support, making them more than capable of handling even demanding HD streams.
At CES, a handful of Microsoft partners have launched so-called v2 extenders, which work with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions. I’ve looked at all of the current and soon-to-be-released offerings. Here’s a quick overview:
- Linksys has two models on display. The DMA2100 is the simplest device of all (and also the least expensive). I have two of these running at home, one connected to a surround sound system and 1080i display in the living room, the other connected to a 1080p display in the bedroom. Both are playing back full HD content from a Dell XPS 410 PC in my office with two CableCARD tuners. The combo has been working flawlessly for two weeks now. The DMA2200 is a similar unit that adds a DVD (not HD) drive.
- D-Link is showing off its DSM-750 MediaLounge device. Paired with a Vista PC, it runs the full Media Center experience at a maximum resolution of 1080i. It also works in conjunction with XP machines to stream digital media via its own MediaLounge interface.
- HP has the best-looking hardware of the bunch in its MediaSmart Receiver (PDF release), which won’t be available until this spring. The shiny black box includes a bay that can hold a Pocket Media drive in 160GB or 250GB sizes. HP’s device works as a straight extender but can also connect to XP machines to stream media using a very slick interface that is friendlier and more usable than any media player I’ve seen before. The same extender technology is incorporated directly into HP’s line of MediaSmart TVs as well, including 2007 models that will get an automatic firmware upgrade when the final code is released.
I’ll have a direct comparison after I get my hands on review units.
Update 10-Jan: The ZDNet news team helped me put together a video clip showing the HP MediaSmart Receiver in action. You can also see Samsung’s entry in the field, which works only with its HD displays and is designed to attach to the back of the set. The unit in this clip is a non-working sample.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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