Advection.NET: Selling to End Users

Products For...

A tech guide to Auragan’s appliances and software for streaming media and DRM

Media Center PCs bring movies, music, photos, television, and games to the family room or the desktop. The latest Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (“MCE”) supports up to three standard and HDTV tuners, spacious hard drives, flash memory slots for your digital photos, and even an electronic programming guide with the ability to record, pause, and rewind TV or radio. All this is displayed on your standard or widescreen TV, and controlled from a typical TV remote. When it’s not being a set-top box, it’s a Windows XP computer, so you can also use all your regular applications.

MCE shopping on tv screen

Shopping for albums on a television through Auragan’s Windows Media Center store

Why does this matter? Retailers like BestBuy or Circuit City know entertainment purchases are an impulse buy, and stock featured DVDs near the checkout. With an MCE store, you stock your media in your customer’s living room. Combine home shopping with instant gratification?customers browse and buy from their living room couch, and get what they bought right then.

Storefronts for Your Customer’s Devices

Web sites are modeled on print and paper, but music and video sells better when presented in familiar ways: TV channel guides, TiVo™-style set top box interfaces, or even DVD menus.

Auragan has developed a suite of storefronts that work with the most common end user platforms: Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer web browsers, Windows Media Center Edition computers, media players, and even portable devices or mobile phones. Your stores share the same database, so when you change a product or price, the change shows up in all your storefronts.

If you already have an e-commerce engine, we offer inexpensive custom development services to rapidly integrate these storefronts with your existing solutions, or to help you update your commerce engine to better support a variety of media platforms.

MCE registration tv screen

Registration is designed for a Windows Media Center remote control, not a keyboard

Media Center Edition Store

Why not just use a typical e-commerce web site for your media store? It’s no problem, of course if you’ve already built a web store, our other tools help integrate your store with a distribution network or our digital rights management back-office.

Unfortunately, web sites don’t translate well to television resolutions, and remote controls aren’t made to move a mouse pointer. A standard TV set has less than 1/4th the resolution of even the most basic PC, so fonts and colors have to be designed for legibility on TVs, and the user interface has to be simple to navigate with just a few buttons.

MCE playback tv screen

Easily watch DRM protected videos on a living room TV

We based our MCE store on design and usability recommendations gathered during the past decade of home entertainment research. Browsing through albums or DVDs takes a couple clicks. Users can even register through their television set, using a familiar video game style alphabet.

Following an MCE store purchase, the content can be streamed live or downloaded in the background while the user watches something else, just like they can record one TV show while watching another.

Everything functions in a way familiar to your user so they don’t have to learn anything new.

Media Player Store

The same usability principles apply to playing media on a PC. When a user is playing music or video using their media player software, why not let them browse and buy content inside the same application? There’s no question this model works. Apple’s iTunes crossed the 500 million download mark in July 2005.

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it’s going to work.

Auragan built on Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 10 embedded store technologies to help you offer a similarly accessible experience. Users can browse, sample, and purchase your music or video without leaving their media player software. With Auragan’s WMP store, your customers can fill a shopping cart with tracks or clips and download the entire batch in the background while playing other music or videos.

Our digital rights management platform fully implements Microsoft’s latest DRM, commonly called “Janus”. If your customers want to put the media they’ve purchased on portable media players, they can even transfer songs or videos without ever leaving the Windows Media Player application. Just tell your customers to look for the PlaysForSure logo.

How to Buy

You can buy a media center PC at all major computer retailers, as well as from direct sellers like Dell and Gateway. Virtually all portable digital music players support Windows Media audio, and most recent portable digital video players, such as those from Creative Labs, Samsung, and iRiver, support Windows Media video as well.

More media center PCs than you can shake a remote at…

Auragan’s storefronts and the server-side software to drive them are available to our streaming network customers, as well as through managed hosting or licensing contracts, either from us or through our partners. Just ask us for details.

Trademarks and Copyright Information