A big thumbs up for the XBox 360 as Media Center extender

Chris Anderson (Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of the The Long Tail blog-and-book project) is one of the first to get an Xbox 360. He loves it:

Given my interest in the Media Center PC as a Long Tail video platform, I was particularly interested in how well it worked as a Media Center “extender”, serving as the link between one of the TVs scattered around our house and the Windows Media Center PC running in the study that serves as our media library and DVR.

The simple answer is very well indeed.

I’ve got two first-generation Media Center extenders. Despite their flaws, they do an excellent job of streaming media around the house. The extender concept, I’m convinced, is the killer feature that differentiates Media Center from other platforms, and Chris Anderson has come to the same conclusion:

I suspect that the release of the Xbox 360 is going to be one of two breakthrough events that take the Media Center concept mainstream. The 360 is a mass-market device (the original Xbox sold 22m units worldwide, and the Xbox 360 will presumably do better than that) that is built from the ground up to distribute digital content around the house. Having a Media Center extender built into a hot videogame console will go a long way to legitimizing that concept.

The second breakthrough event will be the release of Microsoft’s next version of Windows, Vista, which will come with the Media Center technology as a default in the home version….

Between these two forces–the inclusion of Media Center software in most new PCs and the spread of tens of millions of Media Center extenders in the form of videogame consoles–it’s not hard to see the Media Center becoming the leading DVR/streaming standard in a few years. Its rise is also helped by the fact that it’s both a relatively open platform on which other companies can create software and services, and it supports more standard media formats than the closed-box DVRs of TiVo or DirectTV or the proprietary technology of cable company set-top boxes.

I never thought I’d say this, but by the standards in this industry Microsoft is actually looking relatively innovative (Apple is playing catch-up with Front Row, but until it comes up with its own version of the extender concept to distribute content easily to TVs around the house, it won’t have broad appeal).

What’s important about the Media Center is that it takes the DVR concept and extends it to all forms of content, whether broadcast or downloaded from the Web. By having a broadband-connected PC at its core, it’s by nature a full-featured connected device that can keep up with the pace of innovation in digital media online. If the Xbox 360 and the new content marketplaces of its associated Xbox Live service continue to take off, we really could have the beginnings of a Long Tail platform that could challenge broadcast TV.

Provocative reading.

Guess I’ll start saving my pennies for an Xbox 360 in the new year.