HP Exits Media Center Business 99
MCE writes "The first big adapter of Microsoft's Media Center Edition is quietly dropping MCE. HP is ceasing production of its Digital Entertainment Center, the only real success story for Media Center PCs in a living-room form factor. As the first company to embrace Microsoft's MCE, at a time when the platform was still half-baked, HP was simply spent by the time Vista rolled around. Now the company will put its resources into MediaSmart, a new line of TVs with a digital media adapter (not an MCE) built in. HP insists that its departure is not a statement about the viability of the Media Center platform."
not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
You're completely missing the point that MCE was a dry-run to get the xbox done right. The path of the XBOX + xbox marketplace is the real fruit of Microsoft's MCE endeavor.
I Have an XP MCE PC (Score:5, Interesting)
I can not imagine any of my family, friends, or acquaintances buying one. They're expensive when done right, and they're really only useful for a very small portion of the population. In essence, MCE PCs have two big draws: a nice interface for music/movie/picture viewing and DVR functions. For a smaller group, upconversion and scaling is a selling point, but I doubt they register in the grand scheme of MCE owners.
If people want DVR, they get it from their cable company (just ask TiVO). If they want HD DVR, they get it from their cable company. It is only a very small subset who genuinely benefit from the HD DVR features in XP MCE. It works very well with over-the-air recording, and can be hacked to enable QAM recording with certain hardware. My cable company happens to send some cable channels plus all local channels via unencrypted QAM along with my cable internet service, so I end up getting "free" HDTV service.
I have a 1080p HDTV. Most people don't have an HDTV, and thus, don't care about HD DVR features. See above about what they do when they want to record TV.
I have a nice home theater system set up; it is nice for me to be able to listen to my audio via that system. For many people that isn't particularly necessary. I also value the fact that what would be a digital cable box, a CD changer, and a DVD player are all bundled into one 3U-sized box, but for many people, the space occupied by a couple of additional boxes isn't a big deal. Even with that, I still hate the music playback interface for MCE, and usually exit out to iTunes for my audio.
In essence: the current version of XP MCE (I can't speak to Vista) is well-done, well-featured, and user-friendly enough for my wife to sit down, watch and record HDTV and listen to music. If you have an HDTV and an extra $1,500 for a nicely-done MCE computer, XP MCE is a good solution. But it's really expensive to have a dedicated PC in a living room, and it's only relevant for a small section of the population. When the MCE PCs started shipping, most of the HP models were just higher-end desktops anyway - they were merely the next model up in the line. I highly doubt that many people were actually using them as a dedicated media center. For the gadgety few who truly care about having the proper, dedicated MCE box, I'd guess they're just as likely to order from one of the many niche white-box builders (or roll their own).
IF (Huge IF) AppleTV gets some sort of official TV recording device, especially one with cable-card functionality, I could see it succeeding in this market. As it is, though, I imagine that there just aren't enough takers to justify the market for anyone other than niche builders and the occasional MCE laptop.
Some information on WHY they're doing this (Score:2, Interesting)
* Be your set top box (read: DCAS) - this is the most critical piece because it's from this that all of the media sharing frameworks like DLNA and SVP take place.
* Be your Slingbox - using DLNA- and SVP- compatible mobile devices, PCs and secondary TVs within the home plus standard Ethernet/WiFi and transcoding everything into H.264 profiles suitable for those devices
* Be your PVR - and I'm talking multiple simultaneous MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 streams with no recompression that can also be securely distributed around the home using the network
* Be your media access box - playing back all of your MP3/AAC/OGG and XviD/DivX/VC-1/WMV files, whether or not they have a DRM wrapper
Now, the trick here is that all of this can happen in the context of a single chip or platform, albeit with enormous bandwidth requirements (DDR3 dual-channel would be necessary although DDR2 can be doable with some functional tradeoffs). But the point is that they don't have to pay a Microsoft tax. Microsoft pitches CE-type OSes to the major DTV chip manufacturers (i.e. Broadcom, ST, AMD, Zoran, Mediatek, Genesis) but they usually run either Linux, some flavor of RTOS or an in-house OS. It's a lot of money to license a lot of the different standards and to put that lovely alphabet soup on the front of your new LCD TV. For example, those virtual surround technologies cost $0.50 per TV! And the end TV manufacturers like Samsung or Philips constantly bitch about these costs. When you also get to the point where issues like startup time and channel change time start impacting the end user experience, the constant battle over the control of the on-screen display, and the lack of hardware-secured conditional access solutions for cable for open PC hardware, it's a no-brainer to cut MCE out of the picture.
But really, HP has tried to take a very unique approach to DTV. They had the first DivX Connected DTV where you could take any PC and put DivX's software on it, and it would do all of the transcoding on the PC and you could view your media library on the DTV itself using your remote, both DRM-wrapped and otherwise. It's not necessarily the best solution, but it is a solution that exists today and eliminates the need for everything except an optical disc player and an A/V receiver with speakers for surround sound. This move is not only not a surprise, but the general trend that will continue until the DTV becomes the center of the digital home. At least in their eyes.
MCE won't die. There are lots of legacy TVs out there with lots of opportunities to build them in. But there are a lot of alternatives out there to MCE like GBPVR and MythTV, and you can be sure that the constant downward pressure on bill of materials costs will push the DTV guys to these types of scenarios. Couple that with the limited options for the Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management aspects on open-platform PCs (irrespective of free content), and this is exactly what you'll get.