It sort of surprised me as much as anybody that I liked Cher. It’s appropriate, I think to ask for a car driver to change the radio station when they’re driving you around, but I’m still sort of new to this whole New York car thing. It still seems pretentious. I feel better about it now, though, because as far as I can tell nobody that likes Cher can really be too big of a prick.
I am starting to get worried, though, because I was supposed to be in Manhattan for a meeting with Microsoft – where they’re going to show me their upcoming new version of MSNtv (formerly WebTV) – seven minutes ago.
We’re just now crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, though, for a meeting that is supposedly somewhere in Midtown. That means my driver went halfway down Brooklyn to cross the Bridge, only to have to drive back up Manhattan to get into the Fifties. Whatever. It gives me a chance to sit in the back of this car, working, taking calls, and ignoring the scenery.
I think I could get used to pretentiousness.
I don’t have high hopes for MSNtv, really. It’s not like I have a long history with WebTV. I recall using it once a few years ago, on the way to my first Burning Man. My travelling partner Laura and I got stuck in Utah at a bed and breakfast – our only bit of good luck in what was otherwise one giant crash to the burn – and needed to reach some friends, who because we were firmly in the Cyber Age yet not the Practical Age were only accessible by IRC via a crappy, dial-up WebTV terminal. I recall being surprised I could get it to connect to a non-WebTV IRC server at the time, and from that short 15 or 20 minute experience I’ve formed most of my opinions about the platform. “Crappy, but with the occasional surprise.”
But now it seems Microsoft is ready to give it another go, and in a way it makes sense. TiVo and Home Theater PCs have sort of snuck up on everyone to provide internet-enabled set-top boxes – you know, the very kind of thing that was going to revolutionize everything back when WebTV first came out.
But now our TVs have gotten more like PCs and our PCs have started looking more like content delivery devices, so perhaps a broadband-ready set-top web surfing machine isn’t all bad. If I don’t see some tie-in to Microsoft’s other home media stuff, though – especially MSN Music – I’m going to be very surprised.
——
So I finally made it, only about 45 minutes late, to be ushered into a room with three guys from Microsoft. From the MSN group, specifically, which I am starting to think maybe doesn’t ever really talk to the Media Center group. More on that in a second.
The MSNtv box is pretty much what you’d expect from a $200 device, though. It’s small – maybe I’ll take a picture of it here in a bit, as I’m still out in the lobby of the PR place, and they had some cookies in the conference room) – and a little bit junky looking, but not really awful. In some ways I almost wish it were bigger, so that other bits of home A/V hardware could fit on it, because it’s clearly not going to replace your DVD player, your DVR, or your Media Center PC… yet. (DUM DUM DUM!)
That’s not to say it doesn’t have some cool tricks up its sleeve.
As part of the subscription price – $10 a month for broadband service and $22 or so for dial-up – you can log into MSN’s “Video” service, where by selecting clips from a variety of MSN-partnered television networks you can create a playlist of streaming video direct from Microsoft’s servers. The box even works out what sort of bandwidth you can handle and sends out a Windows Media Video stream at rates up to 700kps.
Rather than making it seem like a goofy tech demo, the shortness of the clips actually work in its favor. By selecting 20 to 30 second clips you can sort of program your little variety show, with a little MSNBC here, a little Discovery Channel there, maybe a dash of Food Network. There are plans – and don’t expect this at launch – to let individual users set up a sort of aggregation service, so that you could wake up in the morning and have a sort of RSS-like video feed ready and waiting. I don’t think the MSN guys realize how hot this could be – or I don’t realize how few of their potential customers will care about it.
There’s more than just streaming video off the web, however. If you put the MSNtv box on your home network with other PCs, you can pull data off of any other PC running Windows 98 or later, either by UNCing right to it (typing in //192.168.x.1 or whatever) and getting a regular file list, or using XP Service Pack 2’s new Windows Media Connect, a Rendezvous-like service that sends out a background network heartbeat to alert different devices on the network that they’re around and what sort of content they host.
Which would be awesome, if the video content didn’t have to be in WMV. The MSNtv box streams directly from the network devices and codecs can’t be added by an end user, so if your video isn’t in WMV format you’re pretty much SOL. That includes MPEG2, so ripped DVDs or shows you copied off your TiVo (or that live on your TiVo, potentially) won’t play. Since very few media fiends I know dump video out to WMV, that potentially very cool feature ends up being very crippled.
But it works a lot better for music, because here MSN chose to support both WMA and MP3. And maybe OGG Vorbis and AAC… just kidding. The guys giving the presentation said they’d check up on the formats, but come on. If this thing streams AAC – even unprotected, regular MPEG AAC – I’ll stop doing lines and anonymously trolling Slashdot. And if it plays OGG Vorbis, too, I’ll stop doing it logged in.
Of course, you can stream music from MSN as part of your monthly subscription fee, too, and that works well enough. They specifically mentioned that they were trying to emulate the service that cable providers, um, provide, and with music that’s pretty easy to do. You can even listen to music while doing all the traditional WebTV functions like email and instant messaging and browsing the web.
Did I mention the web? Because that part still sucks. It’s not their fault exactly, though, because they are still using the same crappy output device – a plain ol’ NTSC TV – as their monitor, and at that sort of resolution you’re just not going to have an optimal experience, even if you use the best option of S-Video. They mention plans to perhaps one day support higher-quality displays – and they’ve got a Celeron 733MHz in there, they could definitely do it – but for now it’s GrandmaVision. They do a good job working around it, though, with on-the-fly resizing and the like. And of course with the broadband option, it’s just as snappy as any other broadband internet experience.
Of course, it doesn’t have a hard drive – that would allow for too much abuse – but there are plans to allow external storage devices to be accessed via the USB 2.0 ports on the back. It’s possible an enterprising hacker could get in there, reflash the box and install a hacked OS, and turn the MSNtv box into a streaming media server. But seriously, don’t. While I think being able to hook up printers and flash memory card readers (and USB flash key drives! I asked!) is a really nice trick, the limited output on the box – just S-Video, remember? Oh, and RCA stereo sound – sort of defeats the purpose. I mean, go for it, I know one of you will, but you’d be better off building a MythTV box or something. Or hey, hack an Xbox – then at least you’re still punching Microsoft. I am told the standard anti-hacking tricks are in place on the MSNtv box as most other hardware.
But for MSNtv’s target audience, which is basically grandmas who need to get on the internet and kids who want to buy one to give to their grandmas (so she can get on that internet), the ability to add in a little extra functionality through an external hard drive or something is pretty cool. Or will be once they get that cooked up – don’t expect that at launch, either.
Sooo, it doesn’t suck. It’s almost exactly what an updated WebTV should be, I guess. Still simple enough that anybody can use it, but with extended features that take advantage of a faster processor and more ample bandwidth. The price of entry is sort of high, though, and that might be their downfall.
Right now the plan is to sell the box itself through regular retail channels for $200, in addition to a monthly fee for the service. The service itself will be cheaper if you already have broadband, but you still will have the monthly charge from your broadband provider. So assuming that’s maybe $40 a month, you’re looking at a… wait, I guess that would stay the same. But for the hardware + MSNtv service, it’s about $300 (including a year of service). It’s very reasonable these days to be able to find a PC from Wal-Mart or something for $300, and you won’t have to subscribe to a monthly service for it to work (beyond the broadband).
Then again, the target audience may not want a computer, because Computers Are Hard, and TV Is Easy. One thing is for sure: the MSNtv is definitely a logical, well thought out upgrade to the existing options.
Now I’m going to go crash whatever meeting they are in now and take a picture, then get the hell out of here, assuming I can find a guy who knows which way Brooklyn is.
Oh, MSN Music – not around. This probably has something to do with the fact that there is no bundled hard drive. It’s too bad, too. It would be kind of cool for people to be able to download music for listening to later, or even stream their purchased music from Microsoft’s servers. But unlike the Home Theater PCs, MSNtv offers a very limited, fenced-in experience, which maybe is best considering their market (average age of an existing WebTV user? 57).
Actually, I just broke The Blogger’s Creed and went in and asked a follow-up question. They want to add MSN Music, as well as the ability to stream full-length movies from services to the box, but they are waiting for a proper DRM implementation – something that won’t be present in the launch box. But conceivably, if you want to buy into the whole Microsoft platform, you (or Grandma) will be able to purchase and download music from MSN Music through the MSNtv device.
Oh, and here are my notes:
Notes: In stores by Holiday
building clip playlists
On top of windows CE
64 flash, celeron 733
selling it as hackproof, no flash updates approved (obvs)
Oct 1st in stores
no plans to bundle with high speed providers
playlists of video clips from disvoery, msnbc, food network, atom films
aggregration channels in the future
sending channels at the moment
sending everything streaming WMV content up to 700k/ps, based on the rate of the broadband connection
premium streaming content with DRM
streaming from other PCs, whether media center or not //unc pathing
uPnP Windows Media Connect, rendevous-like
only windows video
passive cooling
Streaming music, either from a service
stream from home PCs, WMV, MP3
3rd party perihperal media readers
Mass storage, USB flash drives will work may not make launch
ugly keyboard
HDTV? support
print photos to epson and HP printers
hotmail backend POP/IMAP
NTSC only, S-Video is the highest output quality
the browsing still sort of sucks, but at least it doesn’t scrunch everything together
MSN seems to really view themselves as a seperate entity from the Home Theater bit
on the fly page resiszing, text size, etc
$200 retail
monthly sub – dial up – UNKNOWN $22
$10, $100/year –
Stereo sound, modem built-in
typical age of 57, some of the older users graduated
RM4100
