Microsoft
revealed Windows Live for TV (lame name) a few days back [via
Neowin], featuring integration with
Windows Live Spaces and
Windows Live Messenger, allowing you to browse spaces, chat in text, voice and video, via a nice 10-foot UI (see link for screenshots).
All that's great, but hopefully its much more than that. For example, hopefully it'll be able to update your personal message in Messenger with the song you're listening to or TV show/DVD/video you're watching. You should also be able to blog/IM about the current show/movie/song with details like the title, description, episode number, artist, album, and cast all available for you to use. Even better if you can blog/IM in real time as the show is being shown/broadcasted, allowing you to add timestamps and a thumbnail along with a comment like 'how can he possibly not be dead following that explosion!'. Effectively, its a running commentary on the movie/show. It can also be taken into the audio and video realm too, with the chance to watch a show/DVD/video with someone's audio commentary, or with someone's video commentary in a small inset box, showing you their reactions.
There should be enough metadata connected to each post on spaces such that as soon as someone watches a particular show or movie/listens to a certain song, they can push a button and instantly browse through other user's comments on that same episode/movie/song.
Integration with Windows Live Soapbox and other on-demand content providers would be cool also, with users
able to swap links over IM and have them play in a 10-foot interface.
Song and video swapping should be possible too, with user being able to send a song/video to a mate. Even if it had the Zune 3-in-3 rule, it'd still be good (of course I'm hoping it doesn't or is more lenient, but there's not a lot anyone can do about that crappy RIAA/MPAA). Playlists should be easily sharable as well, and a recommendation service like last.fm for TV, DVDs, music, soapbox videos, and other media content would be very powerful too.
These are some of the many things that Microsoft can do to finally bring the TV experience into the 21st century. No one else has anything close to this (unless the 'revolutionary but secret' iTV has something up its sleeve...) but this is clearly an emerging market. One thing that's holding all this back is due to the PC manufacturers and partly Microsoft too for not forcing it. No one wants a box that looks like a PC in their living room - its ugly and looks badly out of place. Yet most Windows MCE computers from the big manufacturers like HP look like this - go figure. The smaller, niche computer makers have got a better idea, but they don't have the market power to affect people.
Why can't manufacturers just make a nice pretty hifi-styled, independent media centre for people to put in their living rooms? Once they have one, and decide they like it, they can then extend it using extenders. And while we're at it, stop promoting them as PCs, but rather as media centres. People associate PCs with being able to word process, check emails, surf the net etc., not watching TV, videos, DVDs, and listening to music, radio etc. Hide the Windows desktop, and focus on making the machine a media centre first and foremost (and keep working in this too
).