Thomas Hawk points to the announcement that the TiVo guys have come up with Bloglines On Your TiVo.
I’ve never understood this one. Why would I want to read normal RSS feeds using my TV? I can’t imagine trying to read this site on a TV – or, for that matter, any site with posts more than a sentence in length, which describes about 90% of the feeds I subscribe to. Trying to read even a tiny subset of the 240 feeds on my Bloglines list would result in a terrible experience, regardless of whether I subscribed using TiVo or Media Center.
Now, I can totally understand why I might want to subscribe to media-specific feeds with a specialized RSS reader that can play video and audio enclosures on my TV. The ability to capture video blogs and podcasts and random multimedia content delivered through RSS feeds would be a cool addition to any TiVo or Media Center. But Bloglines isn’t optimized for those types of content, and I have a hard time imagining how it would work, except to think it would be kind of a mess. In fact, that’s exactly what the sample screens look like.
Props to the developers for taking a stab at this. But really, someone needs to think about an intelligent marriage of the two media. Simply forcing them into a shotgun wedding is a mistake.
Ed Bott 
I think the power of an RSS reader in MCE is not necessarily for heavy duty usage. Although I guess with a wireless keyboard the functionality might improve.
I presently track about 200 feeds on Bloglines. Of these feeds I probably discard 98% of the articles that I find. Of the 2% that I read I might blog 10% or .2% of the total reviewed. (The percentages with edbott.com are significantly higher of course!, quality, definitely quality).
The power of an RSS reader on MCE would be to screen feeds and either click to save for later review or quickly view, discard and move on. Of the time that I spend on RSS, about 50% is probably reviewing and discarding stories and the other 50% is more indepth reading and writing.
The reviewing part is important as there are always diamonds in the rough and it could definitely be done via MCE (and an extender in the bedroom at night) as it really would just be reviewing headlines and clicking one button to save or move on. The saved feeds would then be reviewed later in front of an actual PC.
I would use this all the time. There is an existing NewsGator RSS reader at present for MCE but I’m not interested in paying a monthly subscription for RSS (news is free, right?). There are also those like Ian Dixon who have already developed RSS readers for MCE but I just haven’t found the time to try yet.
The beauty of bloglines for me would be that it’s something that I already know and love and it would be nice to review feeds in the living room without having to stand up and do it in front of the monitor.
Just an FYI…
NewsGator’s MCE product doesn’t require a monthly fee. It’s free if you own the Outlook Edition.
Have they made the MCE version free now? I know that you can get a free version of NewsGator but I know that originally in order to get RSS on MCE you needed a premium version or something that charged a monthly fee. I actually expressed to both Microsoft and NewsGator that a montly fee for this was crazy and that given the relatively small install base (and even smaller install base who might read RSS on their MCE machine) that they’d be better off giving it away for now and trying to build more users and figure out a way to make money off the deal later.
A representative from NewGator said that this was actually the same realization that they had come to and that in fact NewsGator on MCE would be free but I never saw this or heard anything else on it other than this email.
I might be interested in trying it if it is indeed free now through MCE. But, boy I do love m Bloglines and would probably still rather have that.
By “own” the Outlook Edition do you mean that I’d have to buy that software and then I could use RSS for free on MCE via NewsGator?