Having been off sick and confined to feeling sorry for myself on the sofa at home I decided to try out the delights of my recently installed Windows MCE 2005 PC via the Media Extender in my living room known as an Xbox 360. What that last sentence means and I know it sounds like complete gibberish is that Windows Media Centre (Microsoft's media'd version of Windows XP) can play its TV shows, DVD's and movies through something other than your computer screen but actually through your Xbox 360. Using your Xbox kind of like a conduit to your TV screen which you can control with your Xbox controller.

The idea behind it all is super, but my main goal was to watch some of the SkyAnytime shows I have on my Windows MCE machine. I selected "Online Spotlight" from the menu screen now displayed on my TV screen and selected the SkyAnytime feature from here. After that my whole love affair with being able to interactively select SkyAnytime shows from the comfort of the sofa of my living room disappeared. Some how the Microsoft spotlight service thought that SkyAnytime was available to use from within the Media Center. Sky's website on the other hand had other ideas, the Media Centre informed me that Sky's website was not compatible with Windows Media Centre browser. What was more annoying was there was no plugin to add it to my "more programs" section. While I could use the SkyAnytime service in a normal browser on the Windows MCE PC I couldn't use it in the MCE browser. What was the point of that! To top it all, a lot of the other items available in the spotlight menu also didn't work or their sites had long since changed to be incompatible with Windows MCE. The experience was shoddy to say the least, while I know I could download shows separately in BBC iPlayer, SkyAnytime or 4 On Demand and place them in a folder for MCE to pickup and display to me via the Xbox, it was a hassle and my Windows MCE machine was far from the sofa. Microsoft and these 3 players really haven't thought it out properly they could have made so much more out of this and in my mind the user interface is a real shambles. Annoyed by my experience I switched back to good old fashioned morning chat show TV complete with adverts by loan companies such as Ocean Finance which soon sent me back to the land of nod.