Online Spotlight

Originally introduced in MCE 2004, the Onlight Spotlight section of Media Center is a way to offer third party content to MCE PCs without breaking the Media Center interface.

While the theory is a sound one, there is a lack of quality control when it comes to the Online Spotlight experience. Not only does the interface for most of the Online Spotlight begin to look like a cheap Media Center knockoff but it's far too common to have to do something outside of the Media Center UI to complete a setup feature in one of the Online Spotlight applications.

For the most part, the Online Spotlight applications are just web pages that are designed to be viewed from within the Media Center interface. Through the Online Spotlight you can sign up for RSS feeds to be delivered to your MCE PC, purchase music through Napster or even order movies on demand.
The movies on demand features are provided by three companies: Movielink , CinemaNow and interActual. Remember that you're basically downloading these movies for a fee, so the quality and the speed at which you download the movies are dependent on the provider as well as your internet connection. It's obviously not as fast as cable TV on demand services but is about on equal footing as far as quality goes in the sense that you're not getting the highest quality video and anything above and beyond the bare minimum 4:3 format and 2 channel audio isn't usually provided. You're much better off recording your own movies (at least they're free this way) or renting a DVD.

Overall the Online Spotlight section of Media Center is interesting and it definitely has promise, but the fact that just about all of the interesting features of Online Spotlight are paid subscriber features and that the entire section itself feels like you've exited Media Center and entered a much less polished program ruin the experience.

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  • glennpratt - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    ^ I thought the same thing... How could they have possibly thought that was a good idea?
  • ViRGE - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    Ok, you know the world has gone downhill when even MS is throwing in one of those dancers...
  • glennpratt - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    Yes it works with set top boxes, using an IR Blaster. Though my remote box only has ports for two IR Blasters... I guess having 3 set top boxes attached to the same computer would be overkill. I wonder if it supports 3 different sources like digital cable + DirecTV + OTA HD. That would be sweet. I may have to try that out if I ever get my grubby hands on 2005.
  • haci - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    It looks like BeyondTV can handle 6 tuners just fine:

    http://www.snapstream.com/community/articles/medus...

    It would be interesting to see how the CPU requirements under BeyonTV and Windows MCE compare while using hardware encoders.

    I would have expected the requirements to be similar, since most of the work is done by the encoder card anyway, but the MCE review seems to imply high CPU utilization under MCE.

    Would it be possible to do some sort of comparison?
  • louisb - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    Will this work with a digital cable set-top box? Or is there a tuner card thats works with digital cable?
  • Cygni - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link

    On page 13: "The movies on demand features are provided by three companies: , and . "

    Man, thats the same company three times! They are dominating! heh.

    The multituner support is a big step forward, and i cant believe how polished everything seems to be. My current rig doesnt have the unf (or the right tuners) to get into the MCE game just yet, but it certainly looks very appealing now.

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