The folks at NewsGator must be spitting mad over all the attention that the TiVo Bloglines add-in is getting. (Over the weekend, I posted my preliminary thoughts, which basically boiled down to “Why would I want this?”) They must have gone crazy when they read this post from Alexander Grundner at eHomeUpgrade, who acknowledges that the TiVo add-in has many shortcomings and “looks like it’s still in alpha or beta.” Then he adds:
In any case, hat tip to the developers on getting started on such a desirable HME add-on (you still beat MCE to the punch).
Sorry, Alexander, but the NewsGator developers had their MCE version out in June 2004. Now, I’ve been a happy user of NewsGator Outlook Edition for some time. I tried to use the Media Center edition earlier this year but had never been able to log on and didn’t try to push the issue. Well, today I figured out the problem: my NewsGator account password included two special characters, which apparently caused the software to choke. When I changed the password to one containing only letters and numbers, I got right in.
And hey, this is pretty cool! The folks at NewsGator have designed their service specifically with media content in mind.
It takes a little jumping through hoops to get everything to work properly – if you add a feed using Media Center, it doesn’t show up in your list. You have to go to the NewsGator Web site, log on to your account, and add the subscription to the NewsGator Media Center Edition “location.” That’s too confusing. But after you go through that configuration, you can scroll through a list of feeds on the TV screen. If they have audio or video enclosures (podcasts or video blogs) you can play them through your Media Center PC with the push of a button on the remote control.
The “featured feeds” at NewsGator’s Media Center Edition home page include some bland, safe choices. I subscribed to the Blogdigger audio and video searches and was rewarded with a big mess of wildly variable content, from sober news broadcast clips to home videos in the Girls Gone Wild genre. I also watched a couple of the Channel 9 videos from Microsoft. The nice thing about watching a media clip from NewsGator on the Media Center is that you can just click a Play Video or Play Audio link and it works.
In search of more consistent content I went over to the Podcast/RSS Feeds page at IT Conversations. Unfortunately, the user experience for adding feeds is hopelessly confusing. I subscribed to the RSS feed in NewsGator Outlook Edition, went to the Web site and added that feed to the Media Center location, and then went to the Media Center PC, where none of the 15 clips were available. I’m not quite sure what the problem is, and the interface doesn’t offer much feedback for helping me sort it all out.
The NewsGator Media Center product is free, which is a good thing, as it’s obviously still a work in progress. I’ll keep trying it out and see if it lives up to its promise.
Update: The original release of NewsGator Media Center edition last June required a paid subscription, but NewsGator online services have been free since October 18, 2004. The Media Center version used to be a premium service, but it became a free service sometime earlier this year. (NewsGator never issued a press release on the change.)
Ed Bott 