CE Pro says that "distributors believe Media Center Edition whole-house controls will be the most important trend" in 2007.  This is a very important step in the wide-spread adoption of Media Center and PCs in general for living room use.  People often forget that while you might not be personally interested in purchasing from a custom installer, when the CI market picks up on a platform it can mean very good things.  The hardware and third party software markets will benefit from the wide-spread adoption such as this.

Ian points to BSkyB officially pointing to the fact that they are working with Microsoft to provide access to services on the PC.  Only problem?  Only terrestrial television is pointed to, nothing about satellite support.  Over here in the US, DIRECTV support is moving along (with Dish possibility following) and it’s my guess we will see support in Fiji.

Speaking of Fiji, looks like Vista Service Pack 1 is about to see the light of day in beta form with the final release expected around the end of this year.  We should soon know for sure if I’m right about Fiji not coming until 2008.

I’m gone for almost three weeks and you still didn’t add your system to the Media Center Components Database?  I’ve been trying to highlight this as much as I can, because it’s very important that we finally have a resource that is getting large enough to actually judge and compare components and such.  Please take a few minutes to add your system.  The database is about to break 400 systems!

Back to Ian, he had Xavier Lauwaert from Sony on The Media Center Show to talk about the Sony XL3 Media Center Server and the TP1 Living Room PC this past week.

Part two is on the way....