Microsoft’s best product - abandoned
Jan 9th, 2007 by blindsquirrel
Anyone have any idea why Microsoft let the UltimateTV die? I’ve been in the IT field for almost 21 years now and their are not a lot of MS products that rank up there high on my “wow” scale, but UltimateTV was one of them. (Exchange2003, SQL2005, and Windows2003 are a few of the better products)
I realize that you had to have DirecTV to use it, but it sure seemed to be as good, if not better, than Tivo at the time. I always thought that they should have made a model that worked along with cable as well. The final straw for me was HDTV. Once I purchased an HDTV I wanted more and more HD content. DirecTV didn’t have much HD content and they were a year away from providing my locals in HD. That was the final straw that pushed me back to Comcast, but the 6412 HD DVR that Comcast provides is the worst DVR I have ever used. Very, very slow. At times just changing channels is an exercise in frustration.
But, this is not about the Comcast DVR, this is about what a great device UltimateTV was. They eventually came out with a patch that increased the performance, which was one of the last things I wanted out of it - except for HD. So the speed was good, dual tuner support, picture in picture, and a nice Guide. It easily passed the “wife factor” in terms of ease of use and series recording was simple. The UltimateTV did a great job at managing its own space, something the Comcast DVR seems to struggle with as it gets slower and slower the more HD content you have on its hard drive.
My favorite feature of the UltimateTV was the fact that you could add a larger hard drive if you really wanted to.
I never realized what a great product UltimateTV was until I was forced to use the Comcast DVR from Motorola. Hopefully Microsoft took the UltimateTV technology and incorporated it in to the XBox360 as their new television feature that is slated to be released around the 2007 holiday season. That could be the thing to put an XBox360 in my house.
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