Site Feed of the Day: Thomas Hawk

This weeks theme for the Site of the Day feature is going to be Windows Media Center blogs. I chose people that I regularly read and that I feel always offer something interesting to say about digital media.

Today’s Site of the Day is Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection. Thomas has been an early adopter of Windows Media Center as well as Tivo and has lots of insightful writing about the convergence of the digital lifestyle. Thomas was kind enough to do an email interview with me and below is the interview. Well worth the read and you should definitely go check out his site.

How did you get involved with Windows Media Center?

So I was very interested in Media Center technology when early rumors started to fly in 2001 about Microsoft developing it. I’d been a pretty early TiVo adopter and was already into time shifting television. For me, the opportunity to be able to put my time shifted television on the same system as my photos and music seemed pretty exciting. I was also growing tired of my Series One TiVo as I had explored every nook and cranny that the thing had to offer. My TiVo did time shift TV well, but for me half the fun is in the exploration.

Microsoft and HP finally announced in Fall of 2002 that the product would be shipping at the end of October. I was pretty excited. HP and CompUSA at the time had splash pages on the product that I was checking every day. I was pretty obsessive about the whole thing. Then one day, about two weeks before the official release actually, I noticed online that CompUSA had one available at the local store here in Emeryville. I immediately phoned, reserved it, and bought it that afternoon.

Since then I’ve spent many many hours poking my Media Center, tweaking it, playing with it, putting it through tests, etc. When I started my blog last year it seemed like a great way to get more involved with the Media Center community and to provide a way for me to write about something that I feel pretty passionate about.

What is your Windows Media Center setup? What other home entertainment equipment do you have?

Well, believe it or not I still have my original HP 873N that I bought from CompUSA back in October of 2002. It’s pretty antiquated and I know that I could buy something much more powerful but I’m kind of waiting for what I feel could be the convergence of Longhorn Media Center, 64bit computing and cable or satellite HDTV MCE support. I guess I keep hoping that these things are right around the corner and suspect that we could see them in 2006 so I’m hanging in there with my old clunker.

I’ve upgraded the sound card to provide an optical out and put a gigabit ethernet card into the unit and have made some minor upgrades and improvements – it’s running MCE 2005 of course. Lately I’ve been toying around with the idea of upgrading the video card in the unit and putting in an ATI Wonder card to try the whole OTA HDTV thing but I’m not quite there yet.

In terms of other equipment I guess you could say I sold out last year and broke down and bought the Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV TiVo box. It records satellite HDTV and does it with a better user interface than anyone else. The unit has four tuners, 2 HD and 2 analog and let me tell you it’s quite simply amazing to watch time shifted Sopranos in HDTV. Although lately I’ve been kind of worried. DirecTV has announced that they plan on shifting their HDTV content to mpeg4 and there has been some speculation going around places like the Washington Post and PVRblog that I may end up losing my network programming on this unit.

In addition to the DirecTV HDTV TiVo and my MCE box I’ve got an Onkyo HTS 760 home theater sound system and a 500 gig LaCie drive for TV. And I’ve got a Home Theater Master MX-500 universal remote to tie it all in together.

I’ve got my entire living room connected in through a gigabit network where my office PC, which is really my workhorse, holds all my media on about seven 250 gig external drives.

I run it all on a Pioneer 43" HDTV plasma display in the living room.

I’ve got a photo up of my set up on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/page2/

Sean Alexander of Microsoft put together this great Flickr group where all kinds of people have uploaded photos of their MCE set-ups at http://www.flickr.com/groups/mediacenter/

I think this Flickr kind of thing is great for building MCE buzz.

You write quite a bit about Tivo. What has your experience with Tivo been and where do you think it is going?

Like MCE, I’m also pretty passionate about TiVo. I have fallen absolutely in love with my HDTV box personally. This being said, TiVo has to be careful. TiVo is trying to walk the fine line between empowering the digital consumer while at the same time trying not to get their pants sued off. We saw what happened to Replay when they crossed the line in the sand with commercial skipping. TiVo is on shaky ground from a financial standpoint and so they have to be much more careful. They can’t push the envelope entirely in ways that I’d like them to because they have to stay in business and in order to stay in business they can’t get sued.

A good example is the recent TiVoToGo technology. Look, I’ve been able to copy television shows from my Media Center to my laptop, simply and unencumbered by any DRM since 2002. As a consumer I love that. But can TiVo do that? Hell no.

Microsoft is in a pretty good position to say to the content providers that, hey, this is fair use, it’s ok to do and it’s legal. And just try and sue us to tell us that it isn’t. They have some of the best legal minds on the planet working there and plenty of money and guns to back it up. And they’re right. Do the studios want me copying the Sopranos from my MCE machine to my laptop? Probably not. They won’t sue Microsoft but they could sue TiVo. So before TiVo can do the exact same thing that Microsoft is already doing, they have to appease the studios with a key/password DRM system and they even had to go so far as to take something to the FCC, who ruled in their favor much to the chagrin of the NFL and the MPAA.

But TiVo still has an opportunity to do some pretty cool things. They just have a harder time at it than Microsoft because of their financial situation at present and because they are a much smaller company. They do a pretty good job of walking the tightrope between the consumer and the content providers though.

Two things to expect from TiVo. I think that you will probably see a dual tuner standalone cable HDTV capable DVR from TiVo by early next year. And I think that the trend for more advertising through your TiVo will continue

I think you will see TiVo actually in the end abandon their ads through the fast-forwarding thing that they are doing right now. The backlash has been intense. But they will find other ways to advertise to you. Although advertising represents less than 10% of TiVo’s revenues today, their recent agreements with Comcast and DirecTV are not big revenue makers for them on a per unit basis but they will get them eyeballs and the more eyeballs they have the larger that advertising revenue can potentially get. They can’t ignore it.

What do you think are the strengths of Media Center? What needs to be improved?

The strength of MCE is its power -- but this is a two edged sword -- something as powerful as a PC demands a certain level of complexity. A PC is an incredibly powerful machine and can do a better job at running media than any dedicated device out there today no question – and as time goes on the PC will do more and more and more. Now this is great for someone like you and I and many in the geek community. But many in the mass public are pretty scared of technology and rightly so in some regards. And so this is the challenge for Microsoft – to keep up with the advancements possible as the power of the PC increases for geeks like you and I but to also through the same platform build a dumbed down version that will be as rock solid as a TiVo is for the masses. I think that Microsoft has made great strides in improving on the stability of MCE since 2002, but this is their longer-term challenge. And I think that they will get it right and that in the end in my mind there is no question as to the trade off value of getting all that power for a little extra complexity.

The other strength for MCE comes from the fact that Microsoft is committed to MCE and that the people working on it for them are passionate. Passion is huge. Recently I listened to a podcast interview with Joe Belifore, the Microsoft General Manager for Media Center on Inside Digital Media and you can just feel the passion that bubbles out when he talks about this product. That’s super important. Charlie Owen, Sean Alexander, Matt Goyer – and these are just some of the more visible guys -- really care about what they are creating.

Microsoft’s strong commitment to the product is also a huge strength. No doubt Microsoft has the money, talent, R&D and might to do a lot of things A lot of people have talked about how Microsoft has abandoned products in the past though -- UltimateTV, for example. With MCE though Microsoft is very committed. I think it’s great to see Bill Gates personally give the technology so much attention and I think that they really do expect this thing to be huge in the long run. Gates talks about things like literal exponential sales growth and recently I saw where one of their SVPs William Poole projected that we’d see 20 million MCE machines by 2008. That’s a huge number.

Microsoft has got a lot of money and tie that in with strong commitment and I think you are going to see some pretty exciting things from them and MCE in the future. At present MCE does a pretty good job overall of tying in all of your media: photos, videos, music, television, and increasingly more micro content through online spotlight. These are its strengths.

In terms of what needs to be improved. Certainly cable or satellite HDTV support would be top on my list. Even if the HDTV audience is not that huge yet, and it’s already pretty big, it will be huge and it would be good to see Microsoft stay ahead of the curve here. They should and I’m sure will be offering this in the future.

I also think that Microsoft should aggressively begin to build more micro content on their platform. They are already doing this with online spotlight and later this year when things like Brightcove come out, etc. I think you will see even more of this kind of long tail niche content available through your MCE box. I think they should be partnering up with the Internet Archive and pulling content from there as it should be pretty easy to get around a lot of the rights issues.

I’m sure you saw the recent announcement with regards to MTV providing content directly on Media Center. Look, everyone out there is passionate about some small thing – high school football, podcasting, blogging, obscure sports, self produced reality television, church services, community meetings, Scoble’s stuff with Channel 9, these are all kinds of things that Media Center could aggregate and manage and rank and sort and suggest and these are things that people really care about. I think in the home entertainment system of the future you will see us consuming about 70% of our content through traditional cable, IPTV or satellite platforms and 30% through internet based stuff. People will feel pretty strongly about this other 30% though.

More than getting more sources for micro content though Microsoft needs to organize and build compelling search, suggestive and ranking technology to make this most effective. They should build a team of editors to both find and organize this micro content for them.

I think there are other things that they need to do to still fix some bugs in the software. It’s pretty solid right now but there are still things – like I’ve got a massive .mp3 library, much larger than your average user and WMP can’t handle it effectively right now. This is really a memory and resources issue more than anything, but they need to fix some of this stuff still.

What do you feel is the best feature or add-on for Media Center that makes people go 'wow'?

Certainly managing your television is impressive for everyone. Whether it’s TiVo or MCE people are impressed by the management of your television – fast-forwarding through commercials, time shifting, portability of content, etc. I get some pretty cool reactions from people when I’m watching Law and Order on my laptop on my BART rides to and from San Francisco.

I find also that people are equally impressed when they visit me with some of Media Center’s other features though. One that people really like is when I customize a photo slide show for them. I’m a huge digital photography nut and pretty much have my camera with me wherever I go. I have over 50,000 digital photos now and it runs the gamut from street scenes to nature scenes, obviously photos of the kids and photos of friends.

Recently my wife had a friend bring her kids over for a play date. Before our friend arrived I did a quick search by last name of photos for them. I had about 120 photos with their last name in it. I created a folder and copied and pasted these photos into this folder and then when they arrived I had that slide show playing photos of them with music in the background. People love seeing themselves in photos. Having my buddy’s two-year-old daughter look up at the plasma screen in front of her mother and say, hey that’s my daddy, was pretty cool. Definitely a wow factor. As these friends hadn’t seen some of these photos before it was a pretty great way to show them off.

Last Christmas we had a Holiday party and I ran the guest list through search and while the Holiday music was playing a custom slide show of the guests over the past year was rotating on MCE. People loved it.

What is the message or focus of your blog? How long have you been blogging?

The focus of my blog is the digital lifestyle I’d say. Certainly much of that revolves around things like Media Center, TiVo, digital photography, and media consumption. I started the blog last year in June and have been pretty happy with it. It provides me a great outlet for writing which I love and has allowed me to meet a lot of interesting people that are working in personal digital media today. At present I get about 1,000 to 2,000 unique vistors a day and it’s been a lot of fun interacting with people that read my blog.

Back in college I did a lot of writing and edited my college newspaper and really loved the opportunity. I think the opportunity to have a voice can be an incredibly fun, fulfilling and empowering thing.

As a publishing medium, blogging kind of has made that all available again to me with its low cost and relative ease of entry. As a one person operation though I still struggle as a journalist with finding the best balance between news and opinion which I think is a challenge for any blogger.

Traditionally with print journalism you have news and op/ed and what blogging really is is kind of a mixture of both. And this can be good and bad and it’s something that I’m still going over in my head and something that I still need to figure out for my blog. I feel that I do report on news but I definitely have biases and oftentimes news and opinion gets merged together. This isn’t just how it is for me, I think this is how it is for the blogging and news business in general and something we are all going to have to figure out and contend with going forward.

You have some really great photos that you take. What do you use for a camera? Any websites that you really like for digital photography?

I love photography and have been taking photos for many years. At present I’m using a Canon EOS 10D. I absolutely love it. Last October I had an opportunity to spend a few days in New York just shooting the streets of New York and it was one of the best two days of my life. I’d also recommend the Canon Digital Rebel for those that don’t want to spend quite as much money as a 10D or 20D cost. Photoshop is also an essential for me and I use it to create a lot of different effects with some of my photos.

I think there are a lot of great websites for digital photography. Brandon Stone’s photoblogs.org is one of the best. Brandon has cataloged, ranked, organized and aggregated a lot of the photoblogging content out there today.

This is another area that I think Microsoft should pursue for "my photos." I know that I for one would happily provide all of my photos up for other Media Center users to run through their my photos section if they wanted to. I think Microsoft could get a lot of photoblogers who would allow their content to run through MCE’s my photos and could again bring some pretty cool content to the mix. Through "more programs" MCE has Gallery Player which provides some interesting photo/art content but I think Microsoft could even do a better job aggregating this content for free from photoblogers like myself and a lot of the other ones up on Brandon’ site.

Some of my favorite photoblogers out there right now are Heather Powazek Champ and her husband Derek Powazek. I love a lot of David Gallagher’s photos up at lighteningfield.com. He’s been photoblogging for a long time. Martin Taylor’s got some great stuff. Travis Ruse does some phenomenal photographs of the New York City Subway system. Tom Karlo has some great photos up at Karlo.org. Friskypics.com, Chart Number Three, Joe Cunningham, Sensitive Light. There are some really great photoblogers out there. I’ve got a few of them on my blog roll over at thomashawk.com

Any predictions for Media Center when Longhorn comes out?

Great question. Obviously I have no actual knowledge of what this will look like but I guess I would hope that it would include support for cable or satellite HDTV and that the little bug with my music loading slowly would be fixed.

I do think though that Longhorn is going to be really, really exciting. I think that Microsoft will come out with new ways to organize and tag using metadata and that these will improve the music, photo and video experience tremendously. I think that there will be new ways to implement search into your personal media collection. I think that from a functionality standpoint we will continue to see improvement and enhancements. I’m not sure 100% on how all of these things will be integrated, but trust me, I’ll be blogging about them when they are.