Internet TV for Windows Media Center

The number of content providers delivering video over the Internet continues to grow, and Microsoft is supporting this by adding a new Internet TV feature to Windows Media Center. Microsoft said its Internet TV service will be available for all Windows Vista Home Premium-and Windows Vista Ultimate-based PCs in the U.S. This new capability will allow a range of video content to be streamed to any Windows Media Center or Extender in the connected home. Further details will be announced at the DigitalLife event in New York on Sept. 27, 2007.

Nice!

Although, realistically, I think one of two things will happen:
1) It will be a very limited offering -or-
2) cable companies won't sit still while a direct competitor uses their pipeline, so cable internet users like me will probably have to look elsewhere or go without.

I am interested to see what they have in mind.  If nothing else, the announcement later this month will provide some timing information about the next major MC update.

Nice to see some new capabilities in MCE!   They have some significant competition.  This one is new on the scene and was started by the guys who founded Skype.

http://www.joost.com/

Problem is that site requires an invite.

Actually, the problem is that it's only available in the US - and only under Vista.

Plus ça change, c'est le même chose,

Andy

Yep, rest of the world loses out again!

Great!

As I understand it, Microsoft's internet tv does not use your existing internet connection to deliver the content, but rather is a service just like cable or dsl that you purchase for a monthly fee that provides your internet connection and the internet tv.

I don't think this will be going over your existing cable line... but details were scant last time I looked around for them.

Good to hear they are going to make sure this works with Media Center, though, as last I heard this was not neccessarily true (was going to require an XBox360 or Internet TV box in each room, as opposed to just a Media Center extender).

So is this their IPTV solution, just worded/delivered differently?

I am running it on Windows 95 and I read about it in a magazine and just signed up - no invite.

Sigh, when will Americans realise the world does not end at the borders of the US ?
So many European features in Mediacenter could be supported, but they are not, or they are supported very poorly.
DVB-C/T/S/S2, H264, etc.
Many countries all over the world still don't have an EPG, etc.

Because Mediacenter is now an integral part of Windows, MS have made sure they can even look away from this problem, as people will have Mediacenter integrated, and noone will know how many actually use it.

I'm not anti-MCE, far from it, I use it on a daily basis as my sole PVR solution, but I really feel the limitations of the product.
The moment I switch to HD, I am afraid MCE will no longer be used, and I will have to switch to any of the alternatives that support European standards, such as Mediaportal, GBPVR, Mythtv, ...
At this point in time TV Vlaanderen SD works via a lot of workarounds (some hardware providers released a DVB-S solution that presents itself as a DVB-T solution, connected through firewire) with Mediacenter, but HD cannot work, simply because H264 is not supported under MCE.
I am pretty sure some clever programmers could write an H264 encoder that would present itself as an MPEG2 encoder to work around those limitiations, but I believe the DVR-MS fileformat simply does not support that format, so even if you had an MPEG2 wrapper for your H264 encoder, you could still not easily work around that limitation, as MCE has no options to save files into a different format.

Wake up, Microsoft !

inmodify:

So is this their IPTV solution, just worded/delivered differently?

No, it's not IPTV.  It's Internet TV.  The main difference being you would subscribe to an IPTV from your teleco.  Internet TV is generally free (but can be paid) from an third party provider and is not ISP dependent.

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/09/07/new-extenders-and-iptv-unveiled-for-windows-media-center.aspx

 

Looks like this guy misspoke - not Internet TV at all... Bummer :-(

i think you mis-read. His correction on his blog states that It IS internet TV, it's NOT IPTV

What I think when I talk Internet TV is the ability to get regular TV over broadband thus eliminating the need for CableCARD or other Cable/Satellite services.  What this sounds like to me is just broadband video via the Media Center interface like MSN Video... so it's not really Internet TV... more like Internet Video

i hear what you're saying dstrack. but in regards to (i think) terminology, IPTV is exactly what you're referring to, which you'd get through your cable company & thus need their box. whereas Internet TV gets you internet shows ala Diggnation, or other Vidcasts/shows/broadcasts