Thanks to a commentor who found this WinHEC 06 Presentation, Preparing For TV Beyond Windows Vista [PPT] by my co-worker (on the TV team) Bernhard. This Power Point deck lays out what our plans are for supporting worldwide TV standards. If you’re passionate about DVB-x, ISDB, etc, read this.

The deck doesn’t address why we focused on what we focused on for Windows Vista but it does show that we understand what standards are popular throughout the rest of the world, the challenges being faced and what we’re enabling in the future.

In the comments I’ve heard several concerns that while they won’t see the next version of Media Center until 2009. We can’t talk about future plans but historically the Media Center team has shipped a new version or major rollup every year.

I’d also like to point out that Media Center can’t be everything to everyone around the world. If a different program suits your needs then please use it. While I love Media Center if you can’t watch TV in it by all means use Media Portal (it’s built on .Net afterall!). Or if you require the stability and simplicity of a standalone CE device try a Tivo (though I sure hope you give Tivo hell for not even supporting DVD changers or non-US countries!).

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This is my favorite comment over the last week:

Matt - when MS made you a PM for the MCE application - have you considered that your not the right person for the job… Come on - I dont work in the television industry but I know what dvb-c dvb-s etc are…

[cut]

Your ignorance of the rest of the world standards and wanting of features just gives the impression of a 30 something guy who has never left the west coast of the USA. There is a big world out there….

[cut]

Seriously Matt - I respect your blog, but read some forums outside of the green button and read some blogs outside of the MS ones, look at some newsgroups - either learn what the people and the community want or maybe move on to the excel team, and let someone who knows more or cares more take the reigns….

Please read my bad decision post again and then read it again, and again.

Two things. Firstly, and unfortunately I likely can’t disclose how many program managers there are who work in eHome but the number is high. Very high. I am just one of a very large number of program managers who themselves are just a portion of our technical team. This means we each have highly specialized feature areas and are somewhat insulated from other technical areas. Secondly, there are two separate teams working on Media Center. There’s the core team of which I am a member and we have absolutely nothing to do with television or television standards. Then there’s the TV team who is responsible for those things. And so, yes, if I worked on the TV team I should likely know what DVB-x is, but I don’t.

And for the record I’m twenty something and have lived on the west coast for two and half years, and I have travelled the world, but spent my time outdoors and not indoors watching TV :P.

Please remember folks I blog because I enjoy blogging. It is not a part of my job. Many of the comments I’ve read recently posted here really take my enjoyment out of sharing with you what is happening. If you want me to continue sharing please show respect to both me, my weblog, Media Center, and Microsoft.

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We, eHome, seem to be taking some flak in the comments here for what’s not included in Windows Vista. This reminded me of this post by Dare (and the original one by Scoble), Every Bad Decision Has a Good Reason Behind It.

For example, one thing I’ve noticed about internal mailing lists is that there are always people who seem to assume that they are smarter and more knowledgeable about a product or technology than the people who actually work on the product. You can tell these people by the way they point out obvious features that are missing in the product and berate the team for not having them.

Please remember that what you see as ‘bad decisions’ are likely not bad decisions if you saw the big picture. Of course to see that big picture you’d need to cross the fence and join eHome as an employee :). I’m not saying that we don’t make bad decisions, we certainly do (I know I’ve made one or two that made it into the product…).

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Todd at the Seattle PI has a quote from senior executive Robbie Bach in his blog post Microsoft explains its Zune strategy about the number of MCE units sold:

We have Media Center with over 14 million units and growing around the world.

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I’m a little surprised by the attention my post titled, Thoughts on MCE beta feedback, received. It was picked up by TechMeme, Gizmodo, eHomeUpgrade and a bunch of other MCE/Vista blogs. What’s most surprising to me is that I really just read the Windows Vista Beta 2 Product Guide and put all that enough into a bulleted list :). But really, it’s great to see some much excitement about Windows Vista (and some disappointment about what we’re not doing :P).

I will probably respond to some of your comments in the comments but some of the biggers themes are worth dealing with here (so in no particular order):

Q: What’s going on with HD-DVD?
A: I’ll address this in it’s own separate blog post next week.

Q: Do you believe that the Start Menu needs seven links to the Online Spotlight?
A: The Online Spotlight you see in the beta builds today is not the Online Spotlight that will ship with the product. When you see what we’re shipping I think you’ll find our Start Menu organization makes sense and provides the right balance between user needs and the service providers who want to extend your Media Center experience.

Q: The best use of a media center is hooked up to a lounge TV and operated with a remote… not a mouse. The lounge TV environment has to be the core design goal
A: We have the data about how many people use it hooked up to a TV with a remote control versus how many use it with a mouse. Since there’s a significant number of people using it with a mouse we absolutely need to invest in ensuring it works well at 2′.

Q: The old method of adding folders for each category of video, pic or music allowed for much more control of media discovery.
A: I’ll address this in it’s own separate blog post next week.

Q: Don’t forget about all those killer features that you have already developed but switch off for the non-US markets… i.e. the Movie portal feature… why oh why oh why, ohh hum i guess we will just have to keep tricking media center to switch it on and suffer no cover art for movies in the guide or non region 1 DVDs!!!
A: We’re working very hard to add metadata providers for non region 1 discs but it’s not an easy task licensing all that data and won’t be happening for Windows Vista.

Q: There were lots of questions/statements around DVD ripping, DVD streaming, etc.
A: DVD ripping is illegal in the United States. Enough said.

Q: All I want is an MCE that can recieve MPEG-4 DirecTV and stream to extenders all over the house.
A: Fortunately we announced at CES 06 that we struck a deal with DirecTV. Unfortunately, we can’t comment on the specifics about when this is happening.

Q: Will I be able to buy a cablecard reader off the shelf, a video card off the shelf and be able to playback [OCUR] content?
A: No.

Q: Can I stream that protected Digital Cable Tuner (formerly called OCUR) content to an Extender?
A: Yes

Q: When are you going to provide more information about Digital Cable Tuners (formerly called OCUR)?
A: Soon. I’m sorry that we can’t provide a firm date.

Q: DVB-S, DVB-S2, DVB-C support?
A: I honestly didn’t really know much about these standards and so I went and talked to our expert on them, got educated, and all we can say is that we won’t be supporting these in Windows Vista but they are standards that we are considering supporting in future releases.

Q: MCE is mainly targted for the US market. Why doesn’t MS care more about others?
A: We have been targeted at the US market but with Windows Vista are shipping into all the same locales and languages you will see us targeting features at specific markets.

Q: When is there going to be a solution for someone who owns more than one media center PC?
A: Great question, we were hoping to address this during the Windows Vista timeframe but it has been delayed until a future release. We definitely want to support those of you purchasing not just one, but two or three Media Centers.

Q: What about recording AM/FM radio and playing it back later?
A: This is definitely feasible but I’m guessing that the number of people who using AM/FM radio makes implementing the UI for this feature not worth the investment compared to other features. Sorry.

Q: What about a TV guide for Australia ?
A: Unfortunately due to licensing issues we are unable to offer EPG data for Australia.

Q: When will MCE support a video playlist?
A: Hopefully next release! In the meantime check out this post.

Q: Another feature would be the ability to have two different lineups like cable and satellite at the sametime
A: We are investigating supporting this in future releases.

Q: Why don’t you offer support for more than 2 HDTV cards?
A: It would sound like it’s due to the added development and test complexity. To be clear we do support up to four tuners. For instance, one configuration in the US could be two OCUR devices with two ATSC tuners.

Q: what is the record number of comments for one of your blog entries?
A: I don’t know :)

Q: Will it be possible to disable the “delete” option in Vista MCE?
A: There is a ‘Media Only’ feature which I’ll address this in it’s own separate blog post next week.

Have a good weekend. Talk amongst yourselves. And see you on Monday.

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For the sake of completeness, here’s the new Radio Now Playing (it also animates):

radionowplaying Hosted on Zooomr

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Sometimes it’s the little things that get me really excited about Media Center on Windows Vista. For instance we updated the Music Now Playing experience from:

musicnowplaying2005 Hosted on Zooomr

To this:

musicnowplaying Hosted on Zooomr

I love the darker color and what you can’t see is how the background animates. Very cool. We also made it easier to launch a photo slideshow by including that command right on this page.

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Speaking of new features… In the most recently released build you’ll find a new ‘pivot’ in the our photo library. It’s the ‘tags’ pivot and enables you to see your photos grouped by tags.

This is what tags look like in the Windows Photo Gallery:

photogallery Hosted on Zooomr

And this is what they look like in Media Center:

mediacentertags Hosted on Zooomr

In the comments to a recent post I believe Peter Near asked for more improvements to be made to the photos experience. What would you like to see in the next version of Media Center (not Vista, the one after :) ).

Update: Someone asked if WMP supports this and they do (since we use WMP as the data store for pictures). Oddly they’re called tags in Photo Gallery and Media Center but keywords in Media Player. Here’s a screenshot:

wmpkeywords Hosted on Zooomr

And yes, the tags are written back to the picture and are transportable. It’d be great to see Zooomr, Flickr, etc all rally around the same standard.

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I seem to be one of the few program managers on the Media Center team who reads our beta newsgroups on a daily basis and I must say that I find the experience to be just a little bit frustrating. While I’m tempted to respond to every post I’d like to clear up as much as I can in one blog post and see if I can get this weight off my chest by posting some thoughts here on the feedback we receive.

Build Quality

One thing I find frustrating is seeing you all struggle with the builds we deploy to you. I certainly know there’s problems with them, I install a new build at least every week at home; but I’m paid to install it. You’re not. You’re installing it because you love Media Center. So when I see you struggle with our bugs, bugs that prevent you from really testing the software I get frustrated that we can’t be dropping you better builds. Fortunately, every build gets better and better and a surprising number of you are very patient. Thanks for your patience and thanks for your continued participation. Every bug filed helps (even if we resolve it won’t fix/by design).

We did add new features!

I read over and over about how we haven’t actually added any new features to Media Center this time around and that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from Media Center 2005. Puzzled by this I decided to pull together a list of what’s changed (not an exhaustive list by any means, we still have a few key features hidden up our sleaves):

• Support for 64bit machines
• You can upgrade to Windows Vista Media Center from XP
• Media Center is included as part of two Windows Vista SKUs
• No need to buy a Media Center. You can install yourself.
• Domain join
• Available worldwide in every locale that we ship Windows to (160 new locales! 15 new languages!)
• More content on screen in our photos/music/videos/TV libraries
  Faster perf for the music library

• Digital Cable Tuner (formerly called OCUR) support
• It was very hard to use a mouse in MCE 2005. We’ve made some big improvements to mouse handling.
• Likewise, hard to use with a touch screen before, should be better now
• Run on your Tablet PC
• New start menu to get you to where you want to be faster
• Start photo slideshow from Music Now Playing
• Now playing item on the start menu, should be more discoverable
• More ways to slice and dice your music collection
• New music Now Playing
• Way better queue management
• View photos and videos by folder or date
• Mini TV guide
• TV favorites/most viewed
• TV categories is now discoverable
• TV guide is an overlay
• Easy to get to TV categories
• Thumbnails in recorded TV library
• PAL exhaustive channel scanning
• Microsoft DVD codec
• Native burning solution
• Extender platform. Now any hardware manufacturer can integrate a MCX into their TV, DVD player, etc.
• Tighter integration on start menu for third parties. You’re no longer buired in More Programs
• Windows Media Center Presentation Layer, now you can build apps that have the same fidelity as Media Center
• Windows Presentation Foundation, re-use your Avalon code to build Media Center applications
• Hotstart

If you look at that list I see lots of features that you’ve asked for over the years: 64 bit, native DVD codec, native burning, upgradability, retail availability, better development platform, etc.

Something not on that list that we’ve likely spent more time on than anything else is getting Media Center to integrate with the Vista codebase. It was a lot of work getting Media Center to work with Vista and all the changes to the things we’re dependent on like drivers, graphics infrastructure, sound infrastructure, networking, etc. We paid a very high development cost to become a part of the Windows Vista SKUs but you’re seeing the result in terms of worldwide distribution, retail availability, etc. And yes, sadly this meant we couldn’t do other things we wanted to do like a movies library, or more TV format support, or DVD playback on Extender. All this takes time and we only have some much time before we need to release and hard decisions had to be made. Understand that we want some of the features we cut just as much, and possibly more than you do (not surprisingly many of the developers here are very hard core Media Center fans).

Who is our target market?

You’re probably wondering why there are features that you want and that we want but aren’t included. For instance the biggest request I get as the DVD program manager is about why we don’t support streaming of DVDs in DVD changers to Extenders. What we as program managers do when we get a request for a new feature or a decision change request is step back and ask ourselves how many users this impacts. Media Center is used by millions of users and with Windows Vista will likely be used by tens of millions of users. Of those tens of millions of users how many are buying DVD changers? 10,000? 20,000? Is it worth investing weeks of dev, test, and usability time on a feature that will be used by 0.01% of our user base? Or should we spend more time working on building an Extender platform enabling any hardware manufacturer to build an Extender? Or should we spend more time striving for the highest DVD playback quality? I know many of you are unhappy with some of the decisions we’ve made but hopefully we’ve made a decision that is going to have the biggest impact for our large user base. Also rest assured that there will be another release of Media Center, this is not the last release! We’ll hopefully get to your favorite feature eventually. And if we don’t, brush up on those coding skills, after all, Media Center is a platform.

What can we do differently?

While I like to think we’re already pretty progressive in dropping builds on a pretty regular basis (how often does Tivo have large pubilc betas?) and open about what’s going on (for instance our participation in newsgroups, chats, blogging, etc.) we can still do a better job. The biggest area of improvement I see is growing the window of feedback. Currently once we drop a build there is very little time available for us to respond to your feedback. In the future I would like to see us drop builds early and often so that we have a bigger window of opportunity to incorporate your feedback.

I’d also like to see increased participation of my team members posting, blogging and providing more transparency about the decisions we make so that you can understand the options we had and the tradeoffs we made. Contrary to popular belief we don’t purposely try and make your lives difficult by designing complicated start menus :).

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a sense of where we’re coming from and I’ll keep an open mind about where you’re coming from with your feedback.

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Making the decision to remove features (or regress functionality as we call) are never taken lightly. For this release I’m actually the only program manager who removed whole features areas (caller ID and messenger).

Both these decisions were painful but made together as a feature team and then were communicated very broadly within the group before actually happening to ensure we were making the right decision for the product. For both cases we had very good reasons to remove these features. We removed Messenger because Windows Messenger which have a very large dependency on was removed from Windows Vista and it would have been a very large investment for our team to build our own Messenger backend functionality from scratch. And we removed Caller ID because of the high on going dev and test support cost for a feature used by a very small number of people (none of our major OEMs ship caller ID modems and those who do disable the feature in MCE because TAPI conflicts with most fax software) while third party addins do a better job.

While we really had no choice about Messenger I know that by removing the caller ID functionality our dev and test teams have been able to focus their attention on areas of the product used by several order of magnitude more users. So unfortunately I can’t point to a new feature and say, we cut caller ID but implemented XYZ, because that’s not the case. I can say that the dev who would have spent their time on caller ID is now better able to focus on delievering a solid Media Center platform for our developers. A platform which has already delievered better caller ID programs then what we built.

I’m sorry we cut these features but it’s the right decision.

Update: Check out my co-worker Charlie’s blog for his spin on this, Our Loss Is Your Gain:

So, what company will be first to take advantage and deliver experiences which put our originals to shame (using the new Windows media Center Presentation Layer Application model, of course).
Well said!

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