Looking at reaction to the announcement of Apples new extender type device called iTV (I bet ITV the UK TV company will love the name!) there is one thing that hasn’t been talked about and that is the opportunity for 3rd party developers.

The thing I love about the XBOX 360 as an extender is that I can write a 10′ application for Media Center in HTML and have that work on my TV via my XBOX. My RSS reader is a good example I can check the latest news from my sofa, so while my wife is making a coffee I can get all the latest motor sport news without moving :)

With Vista the development story gets better with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) applications and MCML (Media Center Markup Language). Developers will be able to get the full power of Media Center on the XBOX 360.

I don’t see that being an option for the iTV box, so it misses much of the benefits of a Media Center extender.

I do hope that we will get to see more Media Center Extenders for people that don’t want a XBOX 360 (built in to a HD TV would be great) but for me the 360 is the best part of my Media Center setup.

For more reaction to iTV on Charlie Owen’s blog

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 7:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.