Windows Media Center launches sports channel

Screenshot of Windows Media Center's new sports channel.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In its bid to broaden the appeal of Windows Media Center, Microsoft is launching a new sports channel that will offer a range of sports coverage, including replays of NCAA basketball tournament games.

WMC has yet to go mainstream and is still primarily used by hardcore techies. Microsoft is out to change that by making the WMC easier to use, as well as acquiring rights to premium video content.

Microsoft has licensed the rights to sports content from Fox Sports, CBSSports.com (owned by CBS, parent company of CNET News), and MSNBC.com.

The new sports channel goes live Thursday and is available in Windows Vista Home, Premium, and Ultimate. The new channel will only be available in the United States and will not be available for Windows 7 beta users.

The replays of the NCAA tournament games--only marquee match-ups from the first two rounds and then every game after that--will replay within hours of the live action and be "condensed versions."

That means you don't have to sit through timeouts, ball retrieval, or halftime. WMC will also offer clips of game highlights and post-game interviews.

[Berke.h]

Good article Greg,

Do you know if this feature Geographically aware? I doubt it will be unavailable outside the U.S.

Also there's a line that partially precedes itself, maybe check it off:

"WMC has yet to go mainstream, and is still primarily use"

[iertry]

Will it be available to Windows 7 beta users? Is it US Only?

[Mr. Dee]

I am sure by the time Windows 7 RTM's, it will be supported.

[Dalkorian]

Reading comprehension fail? It didn't take long to find this sentence in the article ...

"The new channel will only be available in the United States and will not be available for Windows 7 beta users."

[ArtInvent]

That's pretty smart strategy. One big problem with getting a lot of your video and tv off the net at this point is the lack of good sports programming.

And the switch to digital tv transmission means that a lot of my over-the-air channels aren't available anymore since the digital signal is not strong enough to actually watch (whereas I would watch an analog channel with a little snow in it.) That also means less sports since a lot of sports are on broadcast.

Windows Media Center is actually quite good as a DVR and local media player, but the Online Media section has long been pretty awful. You've got much better video options just opening a web browser. It's high time they put some better programming on this thing.

[Life_on_Mars]

I sure hope it's better than the current "What's on Now/on later" listings. Most of the time it doesn't list all of the games on of any sport, just whatever FOX has rights to. I also hope that the streaming is better than the current "Internet TV" on WMC; it's slow and buggy even with broadband connection speeds.

But I too love it for the DVR functionality.