My wife and I like to watch old movies, murder mysteries, and reruns of 80’s sitcoms. Our content of choice pretty much mandates that we watch streaming video; NetFlix is our provider of choice today. We watch on a regular basis between 9 and 10 at night because our kids won’t let us near the TV at any other time. And that’s okay. The point is, by the time we get around to settling down to a good movie, the kids are in bed and we can’t really use the home theater. We have to watch in our bedroom to keep the noise level down.
To facilitate this habit, I’ve strung a VGA cable and a ministereo-to-RCA cable from the back of the flat panel TV in our bedroom to a shelf a few feet away where I set the laptop when streaming NetFlix content. This works well, but short of paying for various accessories like an air mouse, I’ve had to jump up and hit the pause button occasionally, whenever we’ve wanted to discuss a point in the movie – usually a mystery.
Yesterday I upgraded my HTPC (64-bit 2.84 GHz quad processor AMD) from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 and found the new features of 7MC to be nothing less than wonderful. The user interface enhancments are exactly what you’d expect, given the UI enhancments between Vista and Windows 7. The new TV card management software in 7MC is much better than the Vista version. The new Guide actually represents all of the available channels now (plus a few I didn’t even know about!), as opposed to the previous 30 percent coverage provided by the Vista MC Guide. The Internet TV feature is now out of beta, and seems pretty nice. And lastly, and most importantly, the integrated NetFlix interface is just nothing short of cool.
Or so I thought. But Microsoft seems to think that I’ll only ever want to watch streaming content on my PC. I just don’t get that mindset. Who do you know that sits at their desk and watches TV?! I’ll answer for you: no one. Neither NetFlix nor the new Internet TV features are supported on the extender interface. Thus, my only options for watching NetFlix on my TV remain as follows:
- Connect my HTPC directly to my TV.
- Continue to use my laptop as above.
As far as connecting my HTPC to my home theatre system, well, that was always the ultimate goal, but I’ve grown accustom to having the unit in the play room, where I could mess with new features in comfort with convenient access to its insides if necessary. I’ve sort of allowed myself to dream of the possibility that the XBox extender would just become better through the years until it finally did everything I wanted it to.
Recently, I read a comment on a blog somewhere that indicated that Microsoft was motivated (monitarily, of course) to NOT allow streaming content on the XBox extender. The rationale was that the XBox console was using NetFlix streaming content as a hook to get people to buy XBox Live Gold memberships. Well, I’ll be hanged if I’ll pay a subscription fee just to get extender support for a service I already pay NetFlix for.
Wake up Microsoft! These are two different market segments. Will gamers mind paying for an XBox Live Gold subscription? No, they’re already paying for a subscription anyway. Will they go out and buy an HTPC so they don’t have to have that subscription to stream NetFlix? No, they bought that subscription for other reasons (games).
On the other hand, will home theatre enthusiasts pay for XBox Live just so they can stream NetFlix content to their big screen or bedroom? Possibly a few, but most (like myself) will be too angry with the marketing tactics to play along. Will they buy a Gold subscription because they might want to play games too? Possibly a few will, but mostly, gamers are gamers, and home theatre enthusiasts are into movies.
So why emmasculate Media Center and alienate your hardware partners by disallowing some of the most enticing reasons to get an extender? Again I say, wake up…please. I might buy an XBox for my bed room just to use as an extender – if I had a good enough reason.
Open Sourcery 