Windows Media Center at CES

Today I chatted to a number of people from Microsoft,OEMs and enthusiasts about Windows Media Center announcements at CES and I was disappointed that Media Center wasn’t shown in the keynote but Microsoft’s Ben Reed point out to me that in the keynote Windows Media Center on screen as one of the 3 ways of accessing Windows implying it’s significance, but it would have been nice to show off the improvements in Windows 7 Media Center

I have been impressed with how well Media Center works with touch and I think it’s the best way of using touch on Windows 7. With Media Center being designed for simple control with a mouse it translates to touch very well, Vista touch and Media Center worked well but with Windows 7 the way you can scroll makes it very look very cool. I saw lots of people playing with it on the Microsoft booth running Windows 7 on a HP TouchSmart and they were very impressed with it.

Judging from the comments on the video of Play To I posted yesterday there is going to be a lot of interest in this feature, I love how well this works and I think this in combination with Home Group means that content sharing will work out of the box without the need for drive mapping and registry changes. I saw Play To working with a 4 year old Ruku Soundbridge (the same model as the one I have), so it doesn’t need new hardware to get it working.

The UI changes in Media Center are a nice improvement, it looks cleaner and some of the wording have been changed to make it more intuitive e.g. instead of saying Internet Video Beta it now says Viral Videos. The integration of Internet content into the guide makes finding content much better and the guide also gets colour coding and favourites ,ok they are not major changes but the changes add up to a nicer application

The story on Extenders is not to bright, despite the Toshiba announcing a prototype Extender I think most of the OEMS have given up on Extenders. There were no Extenders at the show at all except for the Xbox 360, even on Microsoft’s booth there was only the Xbox 360. I think the market for Extenders must be so small that the manufactures have given up and they can’t compete with the Xbox 360, its a shame as it reduces choice but I am happy using my 360 as an Extender.

One worrying trend seems to be the amount of devices that are capable of getting internet content direct from the web bypassing the PC, Microsoft need to get more web content in to Media Center and not just from MSN video and not just for the US.

So over all there does seem to be a buzz around Windows 7 and the new version of Windows Media Center. I can’t wait to get back home and install Windows 7, I am so tempted to install it on my main system…