Michael,
Thank you.
What I saw regarding the multimedia capabilities of Win7 really opened my eyes. I realize that Media Center has been around for some time (and lots of similar products) but this seems to be the first one really to address whole house distribution of TV in a way that will accommodate subscribers of Cable, FIOS (IPTV) or The Dish Network. What it boils down to is attaching a media extender to each TV (I'm going to use $199 XBox 360s because it's a very easy way to go and contains all the inputs and outputs required), get a dedicated PC running Win7 and able to add cable cards (up to 4 tuners in the standard format), connect your TV service to your TV and connect all the Xboxes (or whatever media extender you want to use) to an Ethernet network and the computer. The bottom line is that the computer acts like a giant DVR, Win7 maintains all the menus for program watching and recording, any you can record and watch any programs on the server in any room on the network. There's an excellent Video Pod cast
here that Ron uploaded to the site where Kevin Collins of Microsoft shows exactly what the capabilities of Win7 are. You should check it out. The visuals probably do a better job of explaining this than I can. I'm going to implement this as soon as Win7 and all the components are available (probably at the end of October.)
