Shortly after WMP10 went live I checked around the
Windows Media portion of Microsoft.com. Besides the update to match the rest of Microsoft's online branding they also added some more
WMV HD content to their showcase. This is probably one of my most liked portions of the site, they've even got a stand alone URL for it at
wmvhd.com (maybe something bigger planned for it soon?) for some reason this stand-alone site always has less content, who knows. Anyway, the featured vide on the WMV HD Showcase is currently the
Windows Media Player 10 HD Trailer.
It's really worth a watch, just once at least. While this clearly isn't TV spot material it would obvious be great for showing off at conferences and other gigs. One thing that struck me right away was the fact that they didn't have some random uncool Microsoft sponsored group doing the music. They had The Helio Sequence a relatively new group on SubPop Records; probably helped that SubPop is in Seattle. The song you hear in the trailer is called Repeater off of the album Love and Distance. It's really quite good and unlike most other songs Microsoft has featured in the past. With maybe the exception of Overseer's Horndog which most will probably remember best from some car ad (think it was Nissan or Mitsu) as well as the LH video shown at PDC recently. Madonna's Ray of Light for Windows XP can't really be counted because everyone knew the song so that made it inherently uncool I'm afraid.
At any rate, besides having a cool song they managed to make a video that isn't so bad after repeated viewing :). I still can't quite get past the people dancing around with their eyes closed and such. Or that guy's quirky smile towards the end. But looking beyond that and the fact that the people dancing around is so close to being an Apple iPod ad it's not a bad way to show off what's really hard to show off. That is, the Windows Media Player, just a little piece of software. I would've liked to see less people and more player in use doing cool things like showing the ease of the Auto Sync and such, pop in a CD and show it ripping with album info, not to mention MSN Music. I'm sure some money could be saved as well, just have two good looking people for eye candy for each sex, not too stunning though since we wouldn't want to take away from that new UI. In addition make sure there's plenty of other cool tunes to go with each spot, and give the group a nice plug, especially when they're on some indie record label. That's one thing Apple always has going for it, whenever I see an iTunes/iPod ad, on the web at least, it's always got some basically unknown but cool tune and they plug it as being available on iTunes. It's sort of the IKEA effect, people buy into that sort of thing, especially when they see it on display in it's proper environment. Apple and IKEA go hand in hand imho. Besides that, just stay away from people dancing with their eyes closed looking just a bit too into, it'll also help fend off those comments about it so closely matching Apple's rotoscoped dancers.
All in all, I give it 
.