After all these years, how do we still not have PIP?!?

As I sit and am battling with my remote control switching between the Dodger baseball game and the Monday Night Football game, I can’t help but be frustrated that my thousand dollar Windows Vista Media Center cannot do what my father’s television set from 1990 could do–PIP, Picture-in-Picture . You know that feature, where you can watch something on the big screen and then another different channel on a small picture in the lower left?

In this day with widescreen TV’s being so prevalent, there is so much real estate on-screen that you could easily have two channels on screen both of an acceptable and viewable size. Technology should not be an issue either since the majority of MCE systems today have at least two tuners. So I ask myself–as I do every year around this time where I am forced to choose between my sports–how is this still not in Media Center 6 years later?

For those of you saying this feature is only for sports fans, I beg to differ. I can’t imagine I’m the only one that would not mind watching the Presidential Debate on a small screen with audio, but then watch something else. Think of how much faster you could just switch the audio between the shows during commercials, and then go back to it as soon as the show is back from commercials.

I think what’s more suprising to me, is that more PVR software companies have not taken advantage of Microsoft’s efforts here–to date, the only software I’ve heard of that offers PIP is CtPVR . So what’s your take everyone, am I alone on this need? What do you think? Either way, fear not sports fans, I’ll continue bringing this up at every MCE MVP meeting until they kick me out, or implement it