Vongo — Video On The Go, as explaned by SVP Bob Greene — launched with a big splash this week, including a starring role in Bill Gates’ pre-opening keynote Wednesday night and on the new portable Windows Media Center players being demoed by Microsoft here at CES. (Starz Entertainment Robert Clasen is being interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box as I type. His message: content may be king but “convenience drives adoption.”)
Vongo’s inability to operate within the PC Media Center environment, as I noted here earlier this week vis Russell Beattie, juxtaposed with Microsoft’s emphasis on Vongo strikes a jarring note. I got some answers about the apparent disconnect at the Digital Experience event Wednesday night when Vongo architect Rick Brownrigg, VP-technology for Starz Entertainment, walked me through the service. The situation is temporary, waiting for him to solve a user interface issue. Starz’s agreements with the studios require that Vongo content be stored in its own area, something that requires additional effort. Brownrigg first described it to me, “A lot of people want to use that Media Center 10-foot UI and we haven’t developed one yet.” It can’t be used with a Media Center extender yet, either. “One of the things we have not built in is the capability to allow simple transfer over a home network yet. We just have it working on a PC and a portable Media Center. We’re working with Microsoft,” Brownrigg said. It works with Media Center PCs and movies can be played within the Media Center environment but it can’t take full advantage of Media Center until the issue is resolved.
“How do you expose the content to the users? Microsoft has a paradigm where everything that you get gets thrown into a video category. I can’t do that for the studios. I have to have it in a area called Vongo. … I haven’t built that yet. I have to make my content Media Center aware. … I’ll get there.”
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