Discussion: Where Next for Media Centres?

Until recently, media centres were a simple affair, not much more than dumb terminals connected directly to a television.  They could play music and video files, and show your photos, but that was about it.  We had to make to do with the handful of features they did have--but also put up with the long list of things that they couldn't do.  Things have changed though, and today's media centres can do a lot more.

Now that they're connected to the web, they have access to a whole range of online services.  Products can grow and develop, with manufacturers providing free updates to extend their capabilities over time.  Because problems unfortunately do still arise, it's become important to maintain a healthy dialogue between manufactures and end users.

This dialogue often leads to new versions of the firmware, the internal software that powers media centres.  These upgrades not only iron out the bugs reported by users, but also add new features or support for extra file formats.  It's just this kind of ongoing support that is the hallmark of a serious manufacturer. 

The current trend is for media centres to go on sale with a list of features that they will be added later.  For some people that's making money from products that aren't ready yet, but for other it's a chance to keep what's on offer constantly up to date.

We're going to interview some of the biggest names in the field to give you a vision of what's coming to the world of media centres soon.  What have they got planned for tomorrow?  And might the current generation of products evolve any more?  Over to them …