Microsoft at CES

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Microsoft at CES

There wasn't a ton of news coming from Microsoft this week at CES (at least, related to PVR stuff). For the most part, they were there to court the zillions of small electronics manufacturers into using their OS, DRM, or both. Microsoft seemed to cover half of an entire building, with different sections devoted to showing off specific technologies. Front and center from the entrance, they were pushing their Spot watches and giving a bunch away throughout the center if you wore a MS sticker on your shirt. I ran into more than one person trying on their free new Spot watch in other sections of CES but I couldn't stop thinking "gee, what a nice thing MS did, giving away a watch that costs $10 per month to keep."

Comcast cable box running a MS-powered UI that looked almost like Windows Media Center XP's

Aside from Spot watches, they pimped their set-top box offerings and most interesting to me was their demo of the Comcast DVR UI (sorry for the crappy cellphone pic). It was a great looking UI, especially considering the typical interface cable company DVRs have. That's something TiVo and MS should go after -- figure out a way to decouple the UI and sell/license it as a product on top of cheap hardware. At least it'd mean folks would have easier to use devices.

Msextenders
Windows Media Center extender and xbox extender in the box below

They devoted another section to Windows Media Center and all the parts, including extenders and xbox extenders, and showed of HDTV playback and HDTV in windows media player, which looked great.

Microsoft's Digital Restrictions Management: you will be assimilated

There was a massive temple of DRM under a Playsforsure banner. They featured every handheld device that was MS DRM certified, which included probably fifty different types of tiny mp3 and video players. MS is really doing all they can to get protected-file playback on devices.

Creative's portable media center player

On the outskirts of the massive Microsoft area were booths featuring companies and products that had some sort of licensing deal with MS. My favorite one to play with was the Creative booth, where they let me play with one of their new portable media center players. They claimed the 20Gb drive could hold 80 hours of video and go 8 hrs on a charge, though the screen was pretty small. Probably a fun thing to have on the subway, if you had an hour to kill each day.

by Matt Haughey January 9, 2005 in News

Comments

I was pretty impressed with the Microsoft IPTV product that they were showing at CES. I thought it was a big step up from the Foundation Edition that Comcast is using.

I wrote up some of my thoughts here:
http://tomconrad.blogspot.com/2005/01/microsoft-tv-iptv-edition.html

Posted by: Tom Conrad at Jan 9, 2005 9:21:20 PM

I have a Motorola 6412 with the Microsoft DVR software and I posted some more images of the user interface on my blog. Right now units with the MSTV software are being rolled out in the Seattle area only but will eventually be pushed to all of Comcast's digital boxes.

Check the images out here:
http://andy.assareh.com/links/2005/01/microsofttv-on-motorola-6412.html

Posted by: Andy Assareh at Jan 16, 2005 10:12:41 AM

Microsoft at CES

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