Thought about the future of Media Center & WHS
In response to an article by Chris Lanier:
Stuff to think about. I’m a Media Center veteran, ran a PC with MCE in my living room for years, Xbox 360 in the bedroom, then added WHS for backups when it came out. Last year I moved away from MCE to Sage TV due to better codec support, DVB-S satellite capabilities, proper WHS integration, crossplatform clients with place shifting and awesome extender. In the mean time, some of that has been fixed in Media Center, but far from all, and I’m happy to have made the move.
But, as you rightfully say, it’s not about you, me or other enthusiasts. It’s about the bigger currents sweeping IT and home electronics. Even with all my experience, I still spend a lot of time in making sure everything works, is optimized, controllable, with a decent WAF. I wouldn’t recommend a multiple zone media center network of any kind yet to friends that aren’t at least a medium computer savvy. And the confusion on how to consume entertainment is getting only worse: do I DVR locally or catch it from the cloud? Do I buy a disc or stream from the cloud? Do I placeshift from my home or find it in the cloud? (see the trend here?)
There will continue to be a market for local storage and home networks for a long time, but increasingly it will be for private content only (photo, home video etc). All the generic stuff (music, movies, TV, even games) will eventually all move to the cloud. All the stuff all the time, wherever you want but you don’t need local tuners or disks any more to receive and store it. So WHS can still serve a decent market for set-and-forget backups, streaming/place shifting of personal content, but I agree in that it won’t be the end-all, be-all hub for all media.
All other media will be stored and served-to-order online so what will stay individual is a profile, buddy list and a (Live?) subscription, plus commodity hardware from various vendors (console, set-top box, phone, Win 7 software) to interact with the service and render it in glorious Full HD.
Ironically, Xbox Live already offers all the ingredients. Right now though, it’s a service optimized for gamers, linked to specific hardware and it still depends on physical discs and traditional retail for its blockbusters. But imagine the next generation of Live to include a full-blown media service, taking the best stuff from Xbox Live, broaden its appeal to non-gamers, stop worrying about the need to support physical media or relying on large local disks, and you’re there. Phone (ANY type, not just Win Mobile please!), music player (ANY type, not just Zune please), PC (ANY type, not just Windows 7 please), TV/Set-top-box, in-car-entertainment. Microsoft can make money on the service, and although they won’t benefit from OS sales on every piece of hardware sold, a substantial part will still be because people will again trust Microsoft to deliver a open, unified way to deliver content they care about.
