Several companies announced this week upcoming releases of the second generation of media center Extenders. For $300, you can get an Extender that has a wireless Internet card and can play Divx files from your computer. While expensive, it is cheaper than an Xbox 360, especially if you need the wireless network connection.
Extenders make sense if you have a media center with four Digital Cable Tuners, which have also been recently announced but are only available through the custom install market. Currently, I pay $12.99 a month for my DVR receiver and DVR service through Cox cable. If I had two TVs with DVR receivers, I would pay almost $26 a month. Two Extenders would offer me the same functionality for only the rental price of 4 CableCards, which would cost just under $13 a month. I could save $12 a month by using Extenders or $144 a year. In two years, I pay for one Extender with that savings. Not too bad. The savings are even better if you have 2 Tivos and their monthly fees.
The real roadblock to Extenders is the cost of Media Centers with Digital Cable Tuners. To me, I am not interested in using Extenders unless I could watch HDTV through them. The custom install market looks to be the main consumer of these new Extenders, relegating this new hardware to the niche market. Hopefully that will change as media center computers fall in price.
September 29th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I agree with your assessment.
The Microsoft/CableCARD whole house distributed media content model is expensive and overly complex.
The cost of a CableCARD modem HTPC is too high to compete with inexpensive cable company supplied DVRs. I have a HD/surround sound Scientific Atlanta box from Cablevision that rents for $10 a month and includes 2 tuners. When the time to upgrade comes, all I do is replace the box at the local Cable company store.
The Microsoft media center and extender model is difficult to explain to prospective customers and the total system price is off-putting.
My customers want their A/V systems to work without much effort. They do not want to be system administrators.