Short Bits: Distributors, BSkyB, Vista SP1, Sony XL3/TP1
CE Pro says that "distributors
believe Media Center Edition whole-house controls will be the most important
trend" in 2007. This is a very
important step in the wide-spread adoption of Media Center and PCs in general
for living room use. People often forget
that while you might not be personally interested in purchasing from a custom
installer, when the CI market picks up on a platform it can mean very good
things. The hardware and third party
software markets will benefit from the wide-spread adoption such as this.
Ian points to BSkyB
officially pointing to the fact that they are working with Microsoft to
provide access to services on the PC.
Only problem? Only terrestrial
television is pointed to, nothing about satellite support. Over here in the US, DIRECTV
support is moving along (with Dish
possibility following) and it’s my guess we will see
support in Fiji.
Speaking of Fiji, looks like Vista Service Pack 1 is
about to see the light of day in beta form with the final release expected
around the end of this year. We should
soon know for sure if I’m right about Fiji not
coming until 2008.
I’m gone for almost three weeks and you still didn’t add your
system to the Media Center Components
Database? I’ve been trying to
highlight this as much as I can, because it’s very important that we finally
have a resource that is getting large enough to actually judge and compare
components and such. Please take a few
minutes to add your system. The database
is about to break 400 systems!
Back to Ian, he had Xavier
Lauwaert from Sony on The Media Center Show to talk about the Sony XL3 Media
Center Server and the TP1 Living Room PC this past week.
Part two is on the way....