VoIP Toolkit

Media Center will more than entertain us

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 09 Oct 2003 11:45 BST

As I wrote on Friday, Microsoft's Media Center operating system is certainly changing the way vendors sell PCs. Media Center is also more gradually changing the way people use computers at home. And it will probably, eventually, slowly do the same in offices as well.

People think of Media Center as merely a home entertainment phenomenon, but that's shortsighted. Many, if not all, of Media Center's features -- the "10-foot" remote controllable user interface, big screens, and, eventually, wireless streaming video -- all have business applications.

This isn't to say that businesses are going to snap up Media Centers for their employees' desktops (though such systems could make great machines for conference rooms as well as for those workers who actually need to monitor television as a business function).

I'm thinking about this after speaking to Rick Thompson at last week's Media Center 2004 launch event in San Francisco. He's the Microsoft corporate vice president who runs the Media Center, Tablet PC, "Spot" information device, and Smart Display businesses in Redmond (and previously ran the Xbox group).

Much of our discussion was about how the Media Center platform will evolve. We started with a feature that will become increasingly central to Media Center in the long term: wireless streaming media.

Rick predicts customers will be able to start sending video from their Media Center to other devices by next summer. This will be done wirelessly, probably using 802.11g or 802.11a. But next summer's version of wireless streaming video won't be for the masses as much as for early adopters: it will probably be expensive, hard to set up, and available from only a handful of vendors.

In the course of that particular discussion, Rick said something that, while it didn't surprise me, did make my ears perk up: it's conceivable that the Media Centers of the future will use both 802.11g and 802.11a wireless networking. The 802.11g part, which is fully compatible with the 802.11b that most people still use, would be for data networking, while 802.11a would be dedicated to transmitting video or other content.