05.26.2007 — It's the perennial Media Center question: Where are the Pika products?

Pika is the hardware platform that allows third-party CE devices to double as Media Center Extenders. Currently, Microsoft has a monopoly on Media Center Extenders -- the Xbox 360 -- but the company has promised for more than a year that the release of Pika would unleash a wave of Extender-enabled TVs, A/V components, storage units, digital media adapters and other devices that would let consumers enjoy the Media Center experience remotely. No Xbox required.

And still, not only are there no third-party extenders on the market, not a single company has even announced intentions to create such a thing (except for Monster Cable, which apparently jumped the gun).

People in the Media Center geek circles are incredulous. Why all the secrecy? Where are the extenders?

"We haven't announced vendors yet," says Scott Evans, lead program manager for Microsoft eHome Devices, the group responsible for Media Center and related products. "You'll see those announcements later this year."

He said this during the Digital Convergence Summit, held May 20-23 for some 150 CE and IT professionals, who were just dying to know.

He added, "We appreciate your patience."

The subject came up after John Ball, general manager of Microsoft's U.S. OEM business, addressed the summit attendees.

He lauded the experience of extending Media Center throughout the house via Xbox 360s, but conceded, "Whilst any child would love that, it's probably not the best experience. ... Major CE companies are coming out implementing Extender capability within CE devices, so there won't be a need for the Xbox 360 to make that come to life."

Anticipating our questions, he asked, "Why not sooner?"

And he answered: "It took a while. Now, with the support of the industry overall, we'll see more coming out."

And on to the next subject.

What Gates Had to Say

The Digital Convergence Summit took place just a week after Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), where Bill Gates made a few comments about Pika that got industry tongues wagging.

He said, "One of the things I think will be very important is this ability to remote media experience and user interface, the underlying technology we call Pika that we've got there in the Xbox 360. We're going to make sure that that's easy to put into all sorts of consumer electronics devices, so when you go out and get an HDTV set, that will be built-in. We'll enable PCs themselves to be Pika display terminals so you can do the extensions that way.

Huh? Pika capability in a PC? Why would anyone want that? There's at least one good reason: to play CableCard content recorded on another Media Center PC.

Currently, only Media Center Extenders can play the content. For DRM purposes, you cannot stream protected content from one PC to another.

Sounds like a good idea, then, a Pika-enabled PC. But apparently it won't come to pass.

Dennis Morgan, a program manager on the Media Center Extender team, subsequently clarified "What BillG said at WinHEC about Pika."

It is natural that the comments made by Bill Gates in his keynote and others could imply that our plan is to port the specific Pika implementation to PCs. A number of partners and users have asked us for details on this configuration. We are investigating the right way to enable these popular scenarios between PCs. It is unlikely that the specific Pika technologies will be appropriate for this due to the different challenges this configuration presents.

Spoken like a true program manager with PR people breathing down his neck.

So what's taking so long with Pika? My guess is that it boils down to cost. Microsoft needs to make the platform cheap enough to run on thin clients that don't have the processing power of an Xbox 360. Maybe Microsoft doesn't need to make money on its gaming machines, but surely manufacturers of other CE devices don't want to use their own Extender-enabled devices as loss leaders.

Presumably, that's what Morgan is referring to here:

Pika specifically is a set of technologies that enable relatively "thin" devices to present Windows Media Center scenarios with fidelity and richness that is usually restricted to a PC or Xbox360. The level of computation and graphics performance on the latest HDTVs, HD-DVD players and Digital Media Receivers, while impressive, still trails PCs and game consoles by a wide margin. The Pika architecture is tuned to compensate for this performance mismatch and distributes the computational load in ways that are not necessary or appropriate for PC-to-PC or PC-to-Xbox360 distribution scenarios.

Morgan says that Pika devices should be available by the holiday season.

He adds, "Delighting our customers is our primary goal."

No doubt.