Microsoft's latest ploy to rule the living room

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 September 2007 13:27

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft has unveiled its latest ploy to extend its dominance of the home PC market into the traditional TV-based home entertainment market, with a range of products that it claims "shatters the PC-to-television barrier."

So keen is Microsoft to stake its claim to this territory that it is pre-announcing the products, saying they will be "unveiled later this month," and even being vague about what they will actually do, saying the new devices "may incorporate new features, including live high-definition (HD) video, wireless networking and expanded support for audio and video formats such as DivX and Xvid."

All the products are designed to enable video content either stored on a Windows Media Center PC, or fed through it in real time via the Internet to be viewed on an TV or on multiple TVs anywhere in the home. You can buy plenty of products today that will do this kind of thing and while few details of the Microsoft offerings are available, key features seem to be tight integration with the PC: for example their ability to handle content with digital rights management that might otherwise be impossible to transmit, and to extend parental controls applied to the content at the Media Centre PC.

Microsoft also emphasises that the products will be "quiet" which suggests that some of the current offerings have intrusively noisy fans. Microsoft has teamed up with Cisco's Linksys division, with D-Link and with Niveus Media for the first tranche of what is likely to be an ever expanding range of such devices.