Rick's MCE: My dad sent me a link to a video the other day on a media center edition of his fav OS. The video was smug, biased, and really made me want it. But, there were so many features that I would probably never use that it makes little sense, or does it? Tonight we took our first steps towards building our own media center, sort of.

The first step was to get the cables to hook my laptop into the TV. No problem, I had them in the office. Then I decided that we needed a test video. I knew that I could play a DVD, but I really wanted to see what a movie of lesser quality would look like. So I shot over to my favorite torrent site and decided to grab a TV show that we could all watch. Done. We were set.

I hooked everything up, clicked a few buttons on the ol' laptop and started eating popcorn. Wow! The quality was incredible. The only hiccup was the sound, which we could certainly remedy with another cable, but we did fine with what we have.

Now, here is my suggestion. Let's say that you are a major production studio (movie, TV, whatever). Why not put your shows up with the embedded commercials that you show on broadcast? Isn't the purpose of putting those things up to make some money from the advertisers? It is. Sure, the creators of the show want to share their art, but the rest of the folks are there for the money. So let's put this thing together in such a way so that Arbitron and Nelson can track Internet viewers as well as those through broadcast and cable/satellite. Fact is they don't know if I am watching it that way or any other way. But, if they have the shows available for download, with the commercials, then everyone can track how many episodes are downloaded. I am not sure what the hang up is on this, just do it!