I’ve been a big fan of PVRs for years, buying a TiVo for the few months they were available in the UK. I retired that and bought an Acer Aspire iDea 500 as soon as it was released in 2006, it being the first MCE machine designed for the UK; Core 2 Duo, quiet(ish), plenty of connections, including SCART, which given my ancient CRT TV is a requirement. To this day it’s one of the few, if perhaps only, machine with SCART. These days plasma and LCD TVs are easy to connect to, but any CRT TV in the UK is SCART based.

Recently the power supply on the MCE box failed (a common problem it seems, which could be why Acer don’t make it any more), but a new one was sourced, more memory was added and I installed Windows 7. It’s perhaps a little underpowered, the VFD display doesn’t work, but otherwise is mostly excellent. Occasionally, and for the last few days, a couple of channels are suffering massive breakup and are therefore unusable and won’t record. It could be the transmitter, the weather, or maybe one of those fat pigeons I see in the garden, sitting on the aerial. My Windows 7 machine upstairs has no problems, nor does the TV itself, which puts it down to a tuner/driver issue, but given the MCE box under the TV isn’t officially supported by Windows 7, I have little come back. But I can’t live without it and can’t afford a new one. So I’m left to rant, like the old man I am.

Looking around, there are very few dedicated MCE machines in the UK, even fewer designed as one you’d want under the TV. There are a fair number of dedicated PVRs, obviously cheaper, but more limited in capabilities than MCE and from what I’ve seen, mostly having awful UIs that are hard to use. No one seems to care. Hardware manufacturers don’t, and I doubt Microsoft do either. There’s so little MCE in stores that most people haven’t heard of it. A PVR is a consumer product, sold alongside TVs, literally, shelved underneath them in the stores. An MCE machine? Well, computers are over the other side of the store; they’re computers, not PVRs, right?

And anyway, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for the general public anyway. So many have enough problems with PCs that a PC under their TV controlling the recording of their shows, just isn’t sensible. A dedicated PVR, at around £100 and you don’t expect perfection and is almost an impulse buy; a PC for £500, well, you think twice about the cost and expect it to work. All the time. No problems.

The MCE interface itself is consumer ready, but everything around it isn’t and until these things get to the white goods level of simplicity I doubt they’ll ever take off big time. Apart from Windows and Office, Microsoft’s penetration into the consumer market in the UK is so small that it’s no wonder things don’t get released here. The vicious cycle of “no product, no demand” just escalates. The Windows Phone 7 Series will be interesting once it reaches these shores; a device firmly aimed at consumers might raise awareness and might be the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft realising that the UK actually exists.