Hi WanMan.
I saw a similar poll for the HW on the HD HW forum, but didn't think much about it. What makes you suddenly interested in people's opinion on this Microsoft matter, eh? Care to spill the beans?
IMHO, 11 mbps WM9 might be at the edge for 1080i material, 720p would be fine. Encoding will need to be tweaked here and there - WM9 is not very good at handling fade-outs / fade-ins, and on very dynamic materials (again IMHO).
In any case, if there exist a satellite HD provider, that provides PQ as good as DishNetwork's offerings, I would be interested in it - Pricewise, monthly, let's say about $2 per HD channel available at the start (4 or 5 channels), tapering down to $1 per HD channel when it gets to 20 channels. Would be nice to do ala carte, but we know it's not gonna happen - no business in their right mind would do that.
For most people, however, it's the commitment that's usually the problem. Microsoft has never been known to commit to something for too long, if it doesn't generate enough money/sales. UltimateTV, Windows CE and the sidewinder joysticks stuff are not making enough money, so they just drop it. The XBox is at the edge there - if it makes a bit less money that what they make now, it might be made obsolete. And people won't want to upgrade their STB every 2-3 years

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MS has a lot of bad publicity upfront - it might make more sense for them to team with a cableco, and let the cableco do the PR for spinning off a satellite division - with MS pulling the ropes behind it. Just my thought.