Windows Media Center

» see microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

windows media center launched on october 29, 2002 as part of windows xp media center edition, a special sku that oems shipped with branded hardware. the pitch was a "10-foot interface," meaning big text and big buttons designed to be read from a couch, with a remote control instead of a mouse, and a tv tuner card recording cable broadcasts to a hard drive. it was microsoft's answer to the tivo, repackaged as a pc you also kept under your desk.

by vista it was bundled into home premium and ultimate. by windows 7 it had its widest distribution. enthusiasts loved it: cableCARD support, plug-in ecosystem, the green wmc orb interface that fans still post screenshots of on retro-tech twitter. mainstream users barely knew it was there. by the time windows 10 shipped on july 29, 2015, microsoft had decided the product was carrying too much regulatory baggage and not enough users, and pulled it out.

media center was region-coded at the cultural layer. the htpc dream depended on american cable infrastructure, on the dvr being a thing you wanted to replicate with your own hardware, on cableCARDs you could buy at retail. turkey did not have that. cable here meant a coax cable into a digitürk decoder. a pc under the tv recording broadcasts was something you read about in magazines, not something the neighborhood electronics store would help you build.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

microsoft's eHome division spent years trying to make media center happen as a consumer brand. there was a partnership push with hp, gateway, and dell, who shipped wmc-branded desktops with remote controls in the box. there was a separate xbox 360 product, "media center extender," that let you stream from a pc upstairs to the console in the living room. dvd playback, music library, photo slideshows, the works.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks were never about the software. they were about everything around it. tv tuner cards were expensive and finicky. cableCARDs required a cable company truck roll and a willing technician. drm restrictions tightened over the years. the cable companies were not interested in helping people skip ads on a pc the cable companies did not control. cord-cutting changed the question entirely: by 2012 the people who wanted a 10-foot interface had a roku and a netflix subscription, and the box under the tv did not need to be a windows pc.

~ the postmortem ~

microsoft announced in may 2015 that media center would not be in windows 10 and would not be sold separately. customers upgrading from a wmc-equipped windows 7 or 8.1 install got a free copy of windows dvd player as a consolation prize. the windows 8.1 media center pack add-on stayed on sale until october 30, 2015, then it too went away. the wmc community wrote unofficial install scripts for windows 10 and kept the interface running for a few more years on a hobbyist tier.

~ what it left ~

plex picked up the home media library job. roku picked up the 10-foot interface job. the htpc, as a category of beige tower under the tv with a remote balanced on top, was gone before media center officially left.

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