"Carbon" - TV on your Xbox360
The Xbox360 just became a more integral part of your home media experience. Carbon adds IPTV support to the dashboard - allowing you to watch high quality digital TV without needing a third party set-top box, TiVo or a Media Center PC.
Cool features such as picture-in-picture, media guide and full PVR support make this a great add on.
Luckily it's early days yet for this product as I think there are some questions that will need to be addressed before it's prime time.
- With only a very small HDD on the Xbox360 how much content are you going to realistically be able to store?
- Will it talk with a Media Center PC - allowing me to deliver live or recorded TV to a tunerless but still MCE capable machine (like my laptop)?
- Will it be able to consume recorded TV from a Media Center?
- Will it be able to store recorded TV on a Windows Home Server device?
I'm a huge fan of the idea of totally integrated, seamless home entertainment but I think at the moment we need to do some work to get that goal. I'm happy to have an Xbox360 and a Media Center as they're both good at different things, but limiting content to one platform or place is frustrating as it means I can't optimize placement and setup - having a Media Center capable Windows Home Server (or a pair of devices) that does all the gruntwork hidden away in a cupboard and just needing the Xbox360 in the living room would be awesome. But at the moment the "best of both worlds" involves having two living room devices, some hacks to get the MCE working with WHS and it still won't stream archived DVDs or CableCard content to either device.
Still, the delivery is slated for the 2007 holidays so there's a lot of time to tweak all the platforms to make something truly awesome...