Bad new for the very, very few of you who used Windows Media Center: Microsoft has announced that it’s killing the software. While current Windows versions will obviously still support the software, Microsoft announced at its big developers conference this week that it won’t be bringing Windows Media Center over to Windows 10. It’s almost sad how many people won’t even care.
Windows Media Center is dead. In a private meeting this week at the Build developers’ conference in San Francisco, a Microsoft executive confirmed to me that there will be no update to the company’s Media Center software for Windows 10. The decision is a disappointment to the small but incredibly vocal army of Media Center enthusiasts, who had held out hope that a Windows 10 Media Center add-on, similar to the one offered for Windows 8, might appear at the last minute. That’s not happening. Any PC that is upgraded from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 will lose the Media Center functionality, and there’s no way to get it back. Windows Media Center “isn’t compatible with Windows 10,” and it’s not going to be. That decision shouldn’t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium” editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, shortly after delivering the final Media Center code for Windows 7.