Something fascinating about blogging is the network aspect is folks doing keyword matches to follow up on what others are saying online about their products and services. This makes the effort of reviewing products and services seem even more meaningful. Case in point, I posted earlier today that we returned our new Gateway Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE 2005) to the store yesterday and a little later Matt Goyer stops by and writes:

Hi. Sorry to hear you’re returning your Media Center. I’m a program manager on the Media Center team and would be interested in discussing further why you returned the box. If you have time please send me an email.

After visiting Matt’s blog and seeing earlier where he commented on Thomas Hawke’s blog comments, the Investor Business Daily article and Slashdot post he must not have seen my prior MCE 2005 feedback and I pointed that out to him via email. Just for him taking the time to dance with my CAPTCHA and leave a comment, I wanted to provide even more detailed information why we returned this product after not even a week’s worth of usage. So, why, why did we ultimately take MCE 2005 back? I can think of several reasons that involved not just my own opinion but our family of five. Here they are in no particular order:

• The kids, nor my wife, didn’t like how you search for information using the cell phone like keypad system. TiVO’s system of picking the letter or digit from a menu and pressing one button is more friendly and intuitive.
• It took an embarassing amount of time to figure out how to exit MCE 2005 mode to go back to Windows. Maybe a Windows exit button should be on the remote? (was it there and we just didn’t figure it out or what?) Yeah, you can cursor up to the upper left corner and click that and then you have to confirm. That’s too many steps! It should be fast, fun and simple to switch back and forth. TiVO took great care in making things simple, but the MCE 2005 menus are too often asking for confirmation or expecting an extra click on the more options to get to the real information that’s important. Yes, if I’m about to switch from a channel that I’m recording ask me to confirm, but why do I need to confirm changes or go to submenu upon submenu for almost every menu? Users shouldn’t need to have too many confirmation or submenu screens for regularly used functions.
• No auto recording feature based upon user ratings like TiVO that tries to guess what programs our family would like and automatically records them when nothing else is happening. Though the accuracy can be called into question this feature provides some fun serendipity to the TV viewing situation. Is there a third party program perhaps which provides this functionality?
• Inability to watch a different program while recording. I am guessing with dual capture cards this could be accomplished, yes/no? I have WinTV card on another machine and though I didn’t try I’m guessing it would be possible to route the signal from the coax to this card and watch at least channels 1-99 this way. Still no premium channels, though We do have another cable box in the master bedroom. TiVO has the same downside, BTW, but for the extra money spent it would sure be nice to get around this issue.
• DVD playback as mentioned in my other post was better through our $79 progressive scan DVD player directly into TV as opposed to using the DVD player in the MCE 2005. No way to output better than through the digital cable or S-Video out of the card to the HDTV. I bet the picture on an LCD monitor would be good but a family of five watches TV on a TV not a 17″ LCD monitor. Yeah, I realize for like two or three grand bigger LCD or plasma TVs can be purchased but even so it isn’t outputting true HDTV which is a bummer.
• To extend the media capabilities into another room would require the addition of another $300 Media Extender device? Something about this just seems wrong. Here we just spent nearly two grand and in order to pipe the info to another room we need more hardware? We can buy five 80 hour TiVos with media option for less money and power consumption (more on this shortly). So why is it when we buy the Media Center does it not come with at least one of these devices so people can share their info across multiple rooms? I mean, really, what family doesn’t have more than one television? In our house, there’s a TV in every room … so if I understand this correctly, I’d need an extender in each room to share the files? For another $100 or so I could buy an entire other computer and add to our LAN. I don’t see the desirability of this device?
• What’s up with the power consumption? This thing devoured power and required at least a 400 watt UPS to run. That’s more a hardware issue I realize our TiVO can run on a small fraction of what it takes to power this badboy. This has to be factored into a bill in that no, there’s no TiVO subscription with MCE 2005, but what about the increase in electricity? That extra wattage and the UPS isn’t going to be exactly free.
• Multitasking as computer with TV watching option (not!). I thought about using this as my home office computer since it was pretty powerful alongside it being the family device but when the kids want to watch Starz they have to either go into our Master Bedroom (which we don’t want them in there) or come into the family room and I didn’t see without buying additional hardware how I could work on the computer while they watched premium cable channels. It was an either/or scenario.

It just seemed to us that everything we might actually want to do was going to require us to spend more and more money on hardware. To outfit three additional rooms with Media Extenders, and buy an additional HDTV ready card (when it became available) we’d need to drop another $1000-1500. That’s not targeting any family’s budget when you start running into $4000-5000 for a home entertainment system not counting the televisions; MCE 2005 seems to be targeting the gizmo geeks (which I am one of them, but I couldn’t sell the rest of the family or really even myself that the end would justify the means on this one) and the gizmo geeks would probably rather put a computer in every room and/or run the files across their LAN — where does the Media Center fit into this scenario? Somebody help me out here.

Sure, you can listen to your music through the TV, but how many families actually do that? We have a couple hundred CDs ripped and burned and I was a subscriber of Rhapsody and then Napster but ultimately gave them up because of the inability to move the rented music across to my PDA. Convoluted DRM schemes for music that I’m paying to rent or have bought as downloads (which I’ve bought very few downloads because frankly it’s a PITA dealing with all that DRM stuff … if I like music I’ll go buy the CD and rip it so that I can use it in my car, in my portable device or on my computer with equal freedom). I hold three fingers up and ask the RIAA to read between the lines, because Microsoft isn’t at fault for this one.

Anyway, in my opinion the biggest problem with MCE 2005 besides the price tag is that it seems to try to make a niche all its own; it’s not really a PVR when compared to TiVO in functions or features, it’s not a great DVD player when playing through an HDTV (through an LCD monitor it’s good quality), it’s not something people will likely use as a computer in their family room because it can’t be shared with the TV (without purchasing additional hardware?), it’s not an HDTV PVR (unavailable at this point) … so what is it and where exactly does it fit? Who is the MCE 2005 for? 

Matt Goyer said in his blog: ”Consumers are just starting to get excited about higher end multimedia experiences.” My question is what type of consumers? If people like me who gladly spend thousands of dollars on consumer electronics and gadgetry can’t get excited and see this fit then how is the average consumer who spends less on consumer electronics going to gravitate towards MCE 2005 as a viable solution for a home entertainment system?

Unless Microsoft answers these relatively easy questions from a marketing standpoint then they are going to have more families who buy it like we did and become ultimately disenchanted and confused about how and/or where it will fit into their entertainment world and just return it and pay the 5-15% store restocking fees. An expensive trial purchase that ultimately doesn’t convert. Overall MCE 2005 grade: C-

Update 1/2/04: While updating the review menus along the front page column, I just realized that in my initial review I gave MCE 2005 a B+ rating, so how can I rate it a C- less than a week later in this entry? I guess the answer is that we didn’t use MCE 2005 enough and see how it actually fit into our family situation before coming to the final conclusion that it just didn’t work for us at the present time. Or we just didn’t have enough time to discover the nuances. Anyway, I’m going to average those ratings and make it a C+ overall which will go in the review section along the right permanently. Sorry about this discrepency, it’s the first time (please correct me if I’m wrong) that I’ve ever graded something twice. It wasn’t meant to be a re-review.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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