A few weeks ago there was a bit of outcry by some bloggers that Microsoft had enabled DRM in Media Center when users were blocked from recording “American Gladiator” (see this story) and that “once again Microsoft kills its products with DRM”. Chris Lanier followed up with a good article on the broadcast flag and why Microsoft are not deliberately blocking recordings. Over on Microsoft’s Consumer Electronics blog they try and explain how the issue happened and what the Broadcast Flag is and what it is not. It’s interesting to see they feel the need to explain the issue to customer installers.
2 thoughts on “Consumer Electronics Installer Blog : CGMS-A, Broadcast flag and Windows Media Center”
My advice to Microsoft is not to explain this but make certain it never happens again. Customers want what they want, not an explanation.
Whether or not this is explainable this is a damning event for Microsoft Media Center PCs with CableCARDs. These boxes are far more complicated to set up and administer than a TiVo or cable company DVR. This is one more reason to avoid OCURs and Media Center.
Microsoft is setting themselves up to be overtaken and replaced in the computer-as-media-server/player by Apple, TiVo and others because they do not fully appreciate that their product’s consumer experience is not good enough for the average user. It is very costly, buggy and extremely complicated.
I’m disappointed that Microsoft didn’t push a VMC update out that removed broadcast flag recognition. Microsoft (and HP for that matter) are touting updatability as a huge asset to VMC, yet they aren’t really doing it outside of major updates.
The reason I mentioned HP is that on your show the HP rep said that as technology moves, their mediasmart TVs can “get smarter”. They abandoned all of my printers as the world moved to XP and then to Vista. Why should I trust them to not make my TV obsolete? I’ve had to throw away perfectly good printers because of software issues.
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My advice to Microsoft is not to explain this but make certain it never happens again. Customers want what they want, not an explanation.
Whether or not this is explainable this is a damning event for Microsoft Media Center PCs with CableCARDs. These boxes are far more complicated to set up and administer than a TiVo or cable company DVR. This is one more reason to avoid OCURs and Media Center.
Microsoft is setting themselves up to be overtaken and replaced in the computer-as-media-server/player by Apple, TiVo and others because they do not fully appreciate that their product’s consumer experience is not good enough for the average user. It is very costly, buggy and extremely complicated.
I’m disappointed that Microsoft didn’t push a VMC update out that removed broadcast flag recognition. Microsoft (and HP for that matter) are touting updatability as a huge asset to VMC, yet they aren’t really doing it outside of major updates.
The reason I mentioned HP is that on your show the HP rep said that as technology moves, their mediasmart TVs can “get smarter”. They abandoned all of my printers as the world moved to XP and then to Vista. Why should I trust them to not make my TV obsolete? I’ve had to throw away perfectly good printers because of software issues.