Submitted by Microsoft Wednesday edged one step closer to its vision of offering a complete home digital entertainment system through PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition OS. The company revealed a deal with a cable television consortium that will allow PC vendors to offer digital-cable-ready Windows Media Center PCs by next December.
MS dream is to DRM everything so you have to pay the piper to watch or listen to anything.
Of course this nightmare scenario will give them a vice lock grip on all cable based media and monopolise them. Only a fool would acquiesce to that…
“MS dream is to DRM everything so you have to pay the piper to watch or listen to anything.
Of course this nightmare scenario will give them a vice lock grip on all cable based media and monopolise them. Only a fool would acquiesce to that…”
At first I thought, “what a good idea!” Then, I remembered it was Microsoft. You’re right. For at least the past couple of years, I heard about Microsoft wanting to get cozy with the music & motion picture industries through DRM (though, I don’t remembered how they originally phrased the term). However, I remembered that they wanted it controlled at the hardware level via the motherboard. I wondered if this is a manifestation of that idea.
Edited 2005-11-17 21:40
MS dream is to DRM everything so you have to pay the piper to watch or listen to anything.
Right, and I’m sure that the content creators themselves have absolutely nothing to do with any DRM schemes, so we’ll continue to blame the whole thing on Microsoft.
>MS dream is to DRM everything so you have to pay the
>piper to watch or listen to anything.
Bang on the nailhead. They’re attempting to drastically limit choice, mostly to lock content into the Windows platform only, whilst simultaneously make massive amounts of dough from the content developers.
To their way of thinking, it’s win, win, lose – where the losers are absolutely everyone but Microsoft. Even the content developers lose, because an open DRM standard would open the entire market up to them at decreased costs.
They’ve been pretty transparent about this. DRM is clearly their next big plan to lock in their market.
You can’t just connect your coax to your TV tuner and watch HBO even if you are paying for it because it is scrambled.
If you want to watch any of the scambled channels you are paying for you have 2 options:
A) Get a set top box or DVR from your cable company for every TV in your home.
B) Use a CableCARD compatible HDTV, DVR, or media center PC.
(Yes, many HDTV’s come with CableCARD too)
This isn’t really about MS taking your first born, it is about being able to bypass having to use one of your cable companies set top boxes.
If you would rather rent a DVR from you cable company for $8/mo than have CableCARD support in your media center PC have at it.