Consumer Electronics Show 2005: Keynote with Bill Gates & Conan O'Brien

Microsoft Teams up with TiVo

One last tidbit of information from the keynote was that Microsoft announced support for TiVo series 2 boxes. Tivo Series 2 owners will finally get the ability to transfer their recorded shows to any Windows XP/MCE PC or Portable Media Center device. The partnership is quite unexpected as Microsoft's Media Center Edition is a direct competitor to TiVo, but it makes a lot of sense. The parntership increases the value of Microsoft's offerings (enabling functionality that wasn't there before) while leveraging the hard earned success of TiVo.

Microsoft's TiVo announcement pretty much summed up the take-away from the keynote, a lot of interesting things are happening, but they are all quite strategic. In all of Microsoft's various announcements they weren't trying to force MCE PCs down anyone's throat, they were simply leveraging the strengths of other CE devices and tying their functionality in some way, shape or form to the PC - a Windows XP based PC of course.

It seems that Microsoft's vision of the future doesn't have a Media Center PC driving every TV in the home, rather it has every TV and other CE device in the home offering additional functionality or support to that Media Center PC. Quite interesting...

As usual we'll be here all week covering the show so stay tuned for up to date coverage from the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas.