Ok I checked out the demo. It does look nice. However, using OpenGL I can wrap any video stream onto a 3D object. Add an audio mixer and we're on our way to replicating this thing.
It sounds like Microsoft have designed a multimedia presentation system that's somewhat like Andreas Falkenhahn's Hollywood for the Amiga, but with video and 3D extensions.
My suggestion is this, instead of being wowed by this product, or, dissing Microsoft and Vista, how about we look at developing AVI, quicktime and mpeg datatypes so that Hollywood can play video. We already have avcodec.library (at least for OS4) so it should be doable. Alternatively Andreas could use avcodec directly. That would mean he'd have less time to develop other stuff though so it's preferrable that someone else does that work.
For the 3D stuff, that's something Andreas can aim for in Hollywood 3.0. AmigaOS4 has Warp3D/MiniGL and will be getting MESA, Morphos has a TinyGL derivative (does Aros have anything) and classic Amigas with 3D cards have Warp3D. There's no reason why we can't have the same thing. I think that Hollywood, as it stands now, is a good starting point toward a media development framework that can do the same thing.
Hans