Today I offer a review of Microsoft’s brand new Windows Media Player 11 Beta that overnight has become perhaps the last best hope for Microsoft to ever get a foothold in the Apple-dominated digital music/video industry.
A serious look at Microsoft’s own music package is merited by news that Microsoft plans a pre-Christmas release of its still unnamed iPod-type mobile music/video player, which will be Wi-Fi enabled.
Immediate reaction focused on the indisputable fact that Apple so dominates the mobile music player business with its iPods that Microsoft has a mighty hard row to hoe to catch up.
It is hard to argue with the conventional wisdom that both Apple management and Microsoft’s own brain trust know that the personal computer industry is becoming a flat-line mature business with little more room to grow. So they both need to expand the computer technology into digital entertainment.
Microsoft’s mobile player probably will look like an iPod but with a larger screen. It will access a huge Microsoft-sanctioned version of Apple’s online music store for 99-cent downloads using the Windows Media Player 11, Microsoft’s version of Apple’s iTunes music software.
It seems clear that the key to the whole thing must be the look and feel of the new Microsoft music player itself because in Media Player 11 Microsoft already has an iTunes-quality alternative.
The Media Player is the software that for years now has come up whenever one clicks on an MP3 file in Windows or when one clicks on most flavors of video files like AVI, MPG, WMV.
Only now, as Microsoft prepares to release the long-awaited Vista operating system to replace Windows XP, Vista’s Media Player 11 Beta release discloses the strategy to actually build home computers around audiovisual entertainment that can either be accessed from the familiar keyboard/mouse method or operated from the sofa using a nifty remote clicker. Microsoft’s TiVo-class clicker is far better than anything Apple has yet shown with the bare bones, up-down-left-right-only remote for the latest iMac computers.
This gets a tad complicated, but Microsoft’s Vista/Media Player 11 software model is built around what the strategists call Windows Live. The idea is to use the Media player to insert the Microsoft Instant Message software and Microsoft’s content-filled MSN Web sites into everything from word processing to blogging to online shopping and audio/video/text communications.
How much more 21st Century can you get?
Let me tell you some details about the beta release of the Media Center that point the way to Microsoft’s Media Master plan.
When you’re linked to a broadband Web connection on your PC or laptop, Media Player opens directly into WindowsMedia.com, a Web site that starts with small icons for videos of breaking news and sports followed by links to currently playing movies in your area. It features top 10 music cuts and such advertising as studio-provided movie trailers and trendy video sites like Rhino and Microsoft’s online games.
When you install the Media Player 11 Beta on your hard drive, it deposits a wealth of stuff that will make it far easier to buy things from Microsoft and its advertisers, even as they also make the experience more enjoyable and productive.
The biggest example of this stuff that Microsoft loads with the new Media Player is a huge database containing the catalog from its 2 million-tune music store.
This will be a big part of the plumbing for the new wireless mobile player, but it also brings an unwelcome whiff of Big Brother as one just sits at the desk and plays one’s tunes.
The software displays the list of songs you’re playing in one panel, and directly below it (or alongside it) appear lists of cuts you lack by the same performer, plus a computer-generated list of similar performances, each available for 99 cents a click.
Here’s how this works with the unnamed and yet-unseen wireless iPod-type Microsoft player: You fire up the Media Player software on your computer and then use either the computer or the player to order a bunch of music moved over your Wi-Fi network into the wireless mobile device.
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Having the names of all of the tunes in the catalog available lets the mobile user sit at Starbucks and purchase tunes from the Microsoft-connected store that will come streaming into the earphones or just be written to that 8-gigabyte hard drive.
This small device will be able to connect with other individuals’ players over a wireless link to swap files and share playlists. Apparently the only music that the Media Player will permit sharing will be tunes acquired from Microsoft’s store in order to prevent swapping pirated music files.
Remember that this same software is the program that you will use to play sounds and videos on your PC. There will be no escaping the Media Player when the next Microsoft operating system arrives.
If it sounds silly to say that the fate of the world’s biggest software company ever could hinge on something as inconsequential as a coffee shop music player, about all I can say is we’d better all stay iTuned.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.