Intel’s Hard-to-Define Viiv Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype

Posted on April 24, 2006
Filed Under Innovation |

I’ve been looking at Media Center PC’s for a couple of years, and they basically all suck. The problem isn’t the hardware or even the software, it’s the ideology behind PC companies (Apple could likely pull of a good media center Mac, even though it would only work with iTunes). When have you been forced to click through a EULA on your Tivo, or configure a firewall on your VCR? Despite all the criticisms that the lowly VCR takes about the blinking clock, the fact remains that the blinking clock doesn’t prevent you from using the VCR.

Instead of adding features and hardware options, companies making media center gear should focus on taking stuff out, both software and hardware, and make these things easier to use and more reliable at the same time. Microsoft started to make a decent smartphone OS when they stopped thinking about a phone as just a small PC (and stopped telling handset manufacturers how to design them). Intel and Microsoft are both guilty of thinking of media center PC’s as just super feature loaded computers. HP gets a little closer by at least making their media centers not look like PC’s but make no mistake about it, that’s only the case it’s enclosed in.

The current generation of media centers will appeal to alpha geeks who aren’t bothered by occasional inconvenience at the hands of technology, but for mass market adoption to happen something has to change in the way companies are designing and going to market with these things. It’s a huge opportunity given that the pairing of streaming content, massive digital storage, and a decent software platform for integrating devices (AV receiver, DVD, set top box) is much needed.

Intel’s Hard-to-Define Viiv Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype: The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel’s own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a “Windows Media Center Edition required” error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that “EntriqMediaServer” was a high-risk program that it should always block.

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