Homestation

Here's an article that I copied from the preview issue of Digital Home (from the same folks who publish the Brit techie mag "T3"). Please forgive the spelling errors, I was reading the magazine and typing it in....any misspellings are mine. It discusses a MicroSoft set-top unit. To me it sounds like MicroSoft is floating rumors just to stave off other developers (there must be a million companies trying to crank out the killer set-top unit these days....I'll bet that whole paradigm turns out to be a flop).



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HOMESTATION

Microsoft's hybrid set-top box: truth or dare?



There have been rumblings about Microsoft's HomeStation project for months. It's said to be a home entertainment hub that sits in your living room fulfilling every major consumer electronics role you can imagine, independently of your PC. It's not directly connected to either of the confirmed Mira and Freestyle projects-they're both essentially living-room extensions of your PC.



Rumours of HomeStation's existence surfaced last year, and immediately drew a stern denial from Microsoft. But the gossip was recently galvanised by a report by Hans Mosesman, an analyst at Prudential Securities, which described a convergence box which would incorporate Xbox game compatibility with PC, Personal Video Recorder, Bluetooth, Dolby Digital and broadband.



Too Good To Be True?

Hans went to the recent CES, where Bill Gates gave a speech about bringing PCs to the living room, and spent the week discreetly asking around. "Our visit provided us with enough datapoints to confirm that a project of this nature is currently in the works at Microsoft,"he says. "But all they'll do at the moment is agree that, looking at their roadmap, something like HomeStation makes sense."



Enigma Theory

Nobody really knows wheter HomeStation is a set-top box, a server that sits somewhere out of sight-or even whether it'll be released at all. Many beasts are reared in Redmond that, for whatever reason, are never set loose. But Mosesman reckons that the HomeStation will be based on the Xbox design (which is built with standard PC components); it will act as a digital video recorder like TiVo, but also browse the web, send email, and play DVD movies and digital music tracks.



Mosesman claims HomeStation will also hook into MicroSoft's .Net online strategy, by serving as a conduit for services like streaming video and online shopping. Apparently, MicroSoft's plan is to license the HomeStation design to hardware manufacturers - as it has with Mira, Freestyle and the Tablet PC - and make money from fees for the Windows software.



If the rumours are correct, then, MicroSoft wants the home of the future to have a sleek silver slab running Windows XP at its heart. Not exactly science fiction, is it?



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