Chris Pirillo asks...

"I have a PVR and all the premium movie channel subscriptions for digital cable. What I don't have is a service that IMs me and says what movies are playing on TV at that moment. This way, I could either decide to record the movie (if it notified me early enough) or watch it live. Or, better yet, a Media Center program that told me what movies were playing that month on my movie channels - and I could set it up to record them whenever conflicts weren't happening. Charlie, can ya help me with that one?"

You betcha (or at least I'm hoping).

Joe Belfiore demonstrated this feature almost exactly as Chris describes during the Bill Gates keynote at CES this year. Here is the transcript excerpt (full transcript here as well as a webcast of the keynote) from that section of the demo -- Joe Belfiore is speaking...

"What I want to show you to expand your thinking on this is how the service [Windows Live] can offer lots of different ways of interacting that fit with the personality and care of the particular user who is using it. So, switching over to the beta, a beta of Windows Live Messenger, you can see I have my buddies in here. One of the buddies that I have is a TV service. So, think of this as me interacting with a smart agent that's part of the TV service that I signed up for. So, here I am, and if I'm like some of the people in my family, addicted to instant messaging, then this is an incredibly comfortable and natural way for me to communicate with the service. So, I'll say hello, and it looks like our service might be offline, the risk of Internet based demos. So, I will close that and give it one more try. Let's see, okay, TV service are you there? Hello. Here we go.

Hi, Joe, would you like some help figuring what to watch. The TV service is inviting me to start a TV service activity. This idea of activities is new to the Windows Live Messenger, and when I click accept you can see over here it presents me with a bunch of interactivity. The service says, these are the shows your friends like. That's kind of an interesting thing. Immediately the idea of community becomes something that's factored in and the service can use to do a better job of helping me find things that I like. It knows who my buddies are because I've signed up with buddies, and as Bill described, if I choose to share information about my preferences, and what I like, then that could be used to make everyone's experiences better. So, these are shows that my buddies like. I can just move over there and choose one of those to record.

That's not what I want to do, how about what's on tonight? So the TV service is finding out what's on tonight, it switches over to a grid based guide, only reminding me that I'm here with you instead of watching the Rose Bowl, that's OK, because that's not actually what I want to be doing. How about showing SciFi. I like SciFi. OK, well, here's what's on in SciFi tonight. It further filters the list to show me that. And even better it says, I have a strong recommendation for you and a trailer to watch, cool. The trailer is for "Battlestar Gallactica," would you like to watch the trailer? Yes. Show me the trailer.

And instantly, the service can find promotional material, trailers, background information on content I might be interested, and it starts streaming it to me directly so that I get better information up. It says, if you like this trailer, would like to record it let me know. OK, record it. It finds my Media Center PC, sets up the recording, and now in the future I'll have this show available to watch when it's convenient for me."

I don't know when (or even if) this will ship -- I'm pinging the 'folks in the know' to get you a definitive answer Chris.