| Microsoft invests long
term in TV/PC marriage
7 May, 2006
By Paul Weinberg
Recently, Microsoft announced that its upcoming operating
system Vista will include audio and video creation capabilities
that represent an upgrade on the current Windows XP Media
Centre.
At the April 24, 2006 meeting of the National Association
of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, company representatives discussed
how Vista with applications wrapped around it will serve as
a tool for television and music production.
"The target markets are the content creation community
who need a stable, scaleable and flexible platform to produce
premium content, and consumers themselves who want a platform
that will playback this high quality media while doing a variety
of other tasks on the PC," stated Marcus Matthias, product
manager of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft.
"For example, we're introducing glitch resilience that
raises the priority of audio and video processes [and] offers
a seamless playback experience, even with the most demanding
high-definition content or when you're taxing the processor
with other applications."
As some of the technical issues acting as barriers to the
PC/TV marriage start to slip away the issue of insufficient
content still festers, stated Eddie Chan, research analyst,
mobile and personal computing and technology at IDC Canada.
Also, the television and film industries are grappling with
the concept of open platforms that the PC industry takes for
granted, he continued. "The content has been a question
mark in the whole scheme of things, and obviously, Hollywood
and TV networks want to insure that their [productions are]
protected."
On the PC side, Chan sees the need for additional horsepower
and larger hard drives for the future home entertainment console.
He sees one display or screen but multiple connected devices
as the television and computer experience blur over the next
two years.
The challenge for Microsoft, which has invested billions
in cable and broadcasting in its pursuit of digital home,
is that it will have to wait until both the TV industry and
the consumers are ready for digitally based high definition
television, the other crucial piece in the PC/TV integration.
2009 is the year that broadcasters in the U.S. are expected
to make the switch from analog technology to HDTV and that
is also the time when Microsoft will probably be introducing
the successor to Vista, suggested Charles King, the principal
analyst for Pund-IT.
But King expects that the Federal Communications Commission,
the regulator of the broadcasting industry in the U.S, will
probably delay the changeover. "They have pushed the
date out because broadcasters haven't been ready and HDTV
technology is still quite expensive."
Also, he expects a lengthy early adopter phase before the
home entertainment console is able to achieve mass consumer
acceptance.
"The point when you tell people that they have to either
junk their old sets or buy specialized tuners, that [new]
technology had better be pretty cheap and pretty flawless,
in the way that it works if you are going to start forcing
consumers [to switch to HDTV]."
"It may be a generational thing, appealing to younger
consumers. People that I know in my generation -- some of
them will think the idea is real cool and some of them are
perfectly happy to simply keep the media in separate containers,
more or less."
One looming issue is that television is a more stable technology
than computing.
"What happens when your home entertainment console is
affected by a virus or a hard disk crash? Does that mean your
entire access to television, and radio and satellite radio,
whatever you are listening, does it go bye-bye at the same
time."
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