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John Samborski co-founded Chicago-based Ace Computers in 1983, rose to $40+ million revenue success on the strength of high-end desktops at the height of the dot-com bubble, and watched his business crumble under the recent recession.

Understandably, this left a sour taste in Samborski's mouth for the consumer PC trade. Ace Computers found sanctuary in government sales, particularly with the U.S. Navy, and soon formed a new foundation in servers. Thus when Viiv came along in 2005, this Intel Premier Provider (one of the first Intel ever selected for its program) didn't set out to build a media PC. Samborski wanted to build a media server. Unlike so many others, he understood what Viiv was really about and what it could accomplish.

"People seem to think that Viiv is just a lot of Intel fluff about dual-core and media center," he says. "But it's a lot more than just hardware. Go back and look at Centrino. If it was only about a processor, chipset, and radio, you wouldn't see notebooks go from 12% wireless attach to 95 percent. Intel spent a lot money going out and making sure that people could use wireless wherever they wanted. Now, they're doing the same kind of thing with Viiv. A media center with dual-core and instant-on, instant-off is nice, but it's not going to win you new business. You're not going to get a dramatic shift in customer behavior. What Intel is doing now is lining up top-tier, grade A content providers who will put out material that people will be able to view online and download, and they won't be able to get some of this content any other way."

That was the missing link with Media Center Edition: irresistible content. And Samborski, based on high-level conversations with groups ranging from Intel to Disney and Paramount, believes that the Viiv roadmap has what it takes to finally make home theater computing a mainstream reality.

Ace Computers set its sights on the 2006 CES show Best of Innovation award. At the time, there was no chassis suitable for Samborski's vision, so he had to get one custom-made. (The design has since become SilverStone's LC18, shown on this magazine's cover.) The chassis' sleek, CE-style fascia is dominated by a 7" LCD touchscreen, enabling users, for example, to watch a movie on the wall flat screen while punching up IMDb.com details or queuing the next film. What became the LHD Limited Professional Media Server also featured a Pentium D CPU, ATI graphics, 2GB of DDR2 memory, up to 3TB of of 3 Gbps SATA storage, a LightScribe DVD burner, and four TV tuners, two of which were HD.

The results were stunning, and Ace won the coveted CES prize. The ensuing media attention from local newspapers to internationally famed Web sites was everything Samborski had been trying to attract to Ace's doorstep for years, and the resultant sales increase, most of it commercial, was greater even than Samborski had hoped.

Ace joined CEDIA (www.cedia.net), the leading home entertainment installer organization, and now sells its media boxes to CEDIA members for them to integrate. Closer to the mainstream, Samborski feels that, even short of incremental advances on the Viiv roadmap, today's Viiv 1.0 platform offers significant value to PC buyers. Why would anyone shopping for a home PC not spend the few dollars more for all of the extra functionality of the Viiv platform?

"If you want to go out there and try to participate in that rat-eat-rat $699 or $999 box world, the tier-ones will beat you every time," says Samborski. "But the big guys aren't watching this that closely. They're too hung up on commodities and pricing. The way you're going to do well with Viiv is to make it a services play."

That means installation and integration, networking configuration, NAS implementation, and other services that lend themselves to the sharing and storage of endless gigabytes of multimedia content. Ace Computers is proof that even at launch Viiv has the ability to dazzle and drive reseller business. The trick is to recognize the opportunity within your customer base and prepare to be lucky.