Why HP Chose MediaSmart over Media Center Extender

CEPRO speculates a bit more on why HP decided to ditch the Media Center platform and instead go with their own solution. There is no word yet on what DRM it supports. A TV like this could play nicely with a non-DRM platform like SageTV or BTV. hrm. Well, it looks as though we have another competitor in the distributed media market. No one has gotten it quite right yet.  Hopefully, someone pulls through. Here are my winners for who has done what is right so far.

SageTV: Very powerful PVR plus very strong media distribution (placeshifting plus client/server + network encoder)

BeyondTV: Great and simple UI plus strong client server architecture

Meedio: Best Community, great user contributed plugins

MCE: Great UI with lots of third party support

CEPRO

The MediaSmart ecosystem isn't exactly the Media Center ecosystem. There are no third-party developers for MediaSmart, there are no accessory devices like SideShow remotes. It's a very limited HP environment.But apparently HP really isn't competing against Media Center. The company seems to be positioning itself instead against Apple TV, which is a simpler, more self-contained solution akin to MediaSmart.

 

tagged with

Related Posts