Ars Technica:
If you partake in Microsoft’s free upgrade offer from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10, Windows Media Center will be removed without warning. In its place, a new app called Windows DVD Player has been added to the Windows Store. It costs the princely sum of £11.59, or $14.99/€14,89 if you live in the terrifyingly parched wastes outside Blighty.
Microsoft doesn’t exactly hide the fact that Windows 10 forcibly deprecates Media Center, but the information isn’t in the most obvious of locations either. If you visit the Windows 10 upgrade website, and then click the “Windows 10 specifications” link in the small print at the bottom of the page, there’s a big list of deprecated features. Media Center is the main one, but you’ll be dismayed to hear that Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts have also been removed.
Now, the good news: if your computer had Media Center before the upgrade (most versions of Windows 7, or Windows 8/8.1 with Media Center), you will be credited with a free copy of Windows DVD Player. In practice, this means that most people upgrading from Windows 7 will have access to the Windows DVD Player app for free, while most Windows 8 upgraders won’t. Likewise, if you bought a full Windows 10 Home or Pro licence, or a new Windows 10 computer, you won’t be eligible to download the DVD Player app for free.
What the heck is Microsoft thinking? This latest trend is a troubling money grab. Smacks of desperation.
With that and the 10 bucks a year to get ads out of Solitaire – it looks like Microsoft have a whole new definition of “free”.
I can’t wait to see Ed Bott justify this.
Anyone who is still using Windows deserves this.
I don’t know. Seems to me that the few people who want DVD playback should pay the development costs. The price of a free OS I guess?
Who watches DVDs on computers anyway, other than laptops at the airport? Even then, I stream Netflix, or have digital files.
Or could there be another motivation? Buy an Xbox One and play your DVDs and Blue rays on that. Stream it to other devices.
Hmmm. Not entirely convinced that the cost of DVD playback hasn’t already completely amortised.
This is merely the concept of “free” being parsed when actually they are going to Nickel and Dime you… 10 bucks here, 15 bucks there and you know? Pretty sure it’ll be costing you as much as buying the OS in the first place.
This actually reminds me of pre-Nadella Microsoft, the company that built itself on licensing fees. Sounds as though there are still people there who think, as rattyuk describes it, that nickel-and-diming customers for every little thing is a good business plan.
Probably the accounts dept.
A bit like the pre Jobs return to Apple where the bean counters and the sugar water salesman held sway…
(don’t get me started!)
Desperate, indeed. Good ol’ fashioned shakedown on par with racketeering. Microsoft loves to punish their users.
I don’t know that it’s the whole company that feels this way. Remember, it’s a lot of different micro-cultures within a very large group. Every large corporation has this sort of disparity. See Rattyuk’s comment about Apple above.
Could be worse, Apple wants you to pay $80 for DVD drive with a Mac.
Perhaps Microsoft decided it doesn’t want to pay the MPEG-LA a fee for each user that get a free upgrade. Most of these users weren’t going to use the DVD player app anyway.
I doubt the licensing fees can be amortized like that. Microsoft probably still pays a license fee per copy.
What’s a DVD?
They’re thinking that there’s a DVD licensing fee and people who didn’t already have it paid via having Media Center have to pay, or Microsoft will have to.
In the real world, it’s 2015 and who cares about a DVD?
The nonzero number of physical-media people who are still buying them?
Well, to be fair, this is pretty much a non-issue. Remember when Apple had to charge iPod Touch users for software upgrades because of the Sabanes-Oxley Act? If no revenue has been reserved for such additional cost, MS can’t give it away for free, because that money has previously been reported as profit to the share holders and the SEC. As we talk about payments to external parties (patents etc.), this can’t be creatively hidden in some R&D pool either.
We can debate the price, but it is not as if Media Center was free before.
It is the movie-containing device that cannot be taken away from you by raising licensing fees or cutting off your “cloud” access. The one you can possess for the rest of your life without additional charges.
It also often has considerably fewer ads and extraneous junk that you don’t want to get in the way of watching the actual movie than more “modern” formats.
Boy, I bet your rec room is just chock full of stuff. 😉
Microsoft promised free.
It appears that you have to buy it buy the license. That’s still pretty much bait and switch.
That went away. With Apple if they say it’s free, it’s free.
yeah, and we should charge for bridges! and only parents should have to pay for public school!
/s
that’s because it’s no longer standard equipment. you know, like a floppy drive. I consider myself a gamer and I don’t even remember the last time I used my dvd drive. thank you Steam and MAS.
dvd drive usage is now an outlier use case, and you’re more than welcome to buy a drive. it’s nice to see the MacBooks and mini get cheaper.
oh, you mean the movie-containing device with the license that by law doesn’t allow you to rip it so you can move it or play it back on any of your devices? or even play on different regional playback devices? that one? sounds like crap.
At the risk of defending the indefensible… maybe they’re thinking that VLC already exists, and is free, and if they have to pay some licensing on a per-unit basis for putting DVD playback into the OS, the end user should cover that fee, plus margin, if they want or need that particular feature? Maybe their statistical analysis shows most people don’t want, use, or need it, and that those that do constitute an addressable market?
So, next the government will cover the cost of popcorn at the movies? DVD playback is not a public utility.
True, it’s no longer standard equipment, but I find it ironic that Apple is so concerned with industrial design and yet they have no problem with what amounts to a giant dongle if you want to use optical discs. It could just as easily been a build-to-order option in the iMacs if they weren’t so obsessed with “thinness.”