In the Wednesday Keynote Joost CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik explained a bit about their service. Joost mostly behaves like normal TV. You can “channel up, channel down; volume up, volume down” (as described by a well known Cable Exec.) We can look at the screen to get an overall view of the service. The EPG on the left shows a fairly standard line-up which includes My Channels. However you can watch shows like a TV as well scrub back and forth like a PVR. Also since there are content objects you can tune into at any time it also behaves like VOD. The area at the top displays the content owner’s information and what’s really interesting is that after you

OK. This is an unfair comparison as some of these products involve hardware, some are just software, but really if all I want to do is watch video do I as a consumer care? The answer is of course yes! The reason is that aside from the price there are other considerations that will make a big difference in how they are used. Especially if you use them with traditional broadcast television, but more on that in a moment. Lets start with the 'oldest' solution Media Center PC. As we all know, it needs a PC (and one with a fairly robust video card) in order to do the processing and display of the TV signal as well as the

Forget all the comments about backwards operating systems (PCs) and elegant simple to use interfaces (Mac); I wanted to see for myself if this extremely well-hyped device could do all the stuff that it was supposedly able to do. Things such as levitate objects, create food ("Earl Grey tea hot"; the Enterprise PC had to be Mac-based, no?) and other feats of magic. Seriously this device had to live up to a lot of hype, not the least of which involved super-easy setup and use. I actually used Macs off and on over the years, from the Mac Classic back in 1991 to PowerMacs in the mid-90s to even a super-powered (at the time) G3 to do video editing and