Can’t Put a Satellite Dish on the Roof? No Problem.
Windows 7 and the Internet Deliver!
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner
October 22, 2009
Are you living in an apartment that doesn’t allow a satellite dish? Is a tree or building blocking line of sight to the satellite? If the answer to either of these questions is yes and you live in the UK you have just got another option. All you need is a Windows 7 Media Center PC and the Internet!
Along with all the hullaballoo surrounding the release of Windows 7 today, Sky and Microsoft announced the availability of the Sky Player on Windows 7 Media Center. Although these types of TV Everywhere announcements are pretty common in the Industry, Sky’s announcement is quite unique. For one thing, not only are they providing on-demand content online, but they are also delivering their broadcast channels. That’s right. No Dish required. You don’t even need a Sling Box. If you are an existing subscriber to Sky, you can access your content through Sky Player on any Media Center machine where ever you are. This is TV Everywhere the way Comcast and Verizon wish it could be.
But, in another first, you don’t even need to be a satellite subscriber to enjoy Sky content on the PC. You can subscribe to Sky and get all the content a satellite subscriber gets but do it all over the Internet. And if you want to watch that content on the TV, all you need to do is let Media Center guide you through the process to set it up. This broadband only subscription TV service is something PayTV operators in the US aren’t even talking about yet. But it is exactly what we recommended they do in our report “PayTV Service Providers and Online Video Delivery: How Soon is Now?” from earlier this year.
For those of us in the US, there’s still a lot of Internet delivered content in the revamped Media Center to enjoy. The CBS Audience Network is contributing primetime CBS shows as well as daytime, TV classic and even some web originals. MSN and msnbc.com provide shows like Arrested Development (I know, everyone has it) as well news, weather, music videos and more.
You will also be able to select from the full Zune video podcast library. This includes TV episodes, webisodes and the like from ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, CNET TV, Comedy Central, Current TV, The Discovery Channel, Fox, G4 TV, HBO, MSNBC, NBC, Showtime, and Revision 3. Some of the content will also be available in HD.
As well, Netflix has updated the Media Center client to allow you to do everything except change your account details. That means you can browse the full movie catalog, queue things to your instant play and DVD queues and watch any of the 17,000 instant play movies and shows.
Media Center brings Internet content together with broadcast content in a new feature called Virtual Channels. These channels allow you to enjoy related content in a single place regardless of where that content came from. And when you’re watching TV do you really care where the content came from? Bringing Internet, broadcast and recorded content together just makes sense for viewers. It’s a lesson most PayTV operators would do well to learn. Their guides present subscribers with byzantine menu structures and a complete separation of TV, on-demand and PVR content. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Sky’s book and partner with Microsoft!
With all of these new shows and features will Media Center in Windows 7 win a place in our TV rooms? For the UK Sky Internet subscriber the benefits are obvious. For the rest of us, it’s not quite so clear-cut. However, it is a subject we will discuss in detail in our upcoming report Broadband-Enabled TV: Evolution of OTT Platforms. In the meantime, check back with us often. I’ll be hooking up a media center machine to my TV and keeping you posted about my experiences.
For more pictures of the Sky Player interface in Media Center , click here.
ShareThis