I bought into the HTPC movement back in 2005. I built one and put a terabyte in it, both to demonstrate to myself that it could be done ("Cool, my own personal Terabyte..."), and because I was tired of my important data being at the mercy of small, failure-prone laptop HDDs. Back then, a Terabyte required a RAID 5 array of at least 4 HDDs, so that PC required the use of some of the highest-end consumer components available in order to fit in a ATX box.
So much has changed since then that a completely different paradigm makes better sense.
- XBOX One is moving in the direction of integrating everything - cable STB, game console, PC, Smart TV / social browser, disk player. The next XBOX will have everything that a full-fledged HTPC has, albeit with a closed architecture and software. When that happens, there will be very little reason to get an HTPC - especially when you factor in the added headaches of system setup, configuration and maintenance.
- Microsoft seems to be killing off the old WMC 7 interface, which became apparent when they didn't bother integrating it from the get-go into their Metro UI in Windows 8, but instead made Media Center an add-on, special, non-PC-device interface on top of their Metro add-on, special, non-PC-device interface. Yeah. Want a great way to kill a piece of software? Don't invite it to the software upgrade party. There are other HTPC UIs out there, and some of them can do some fantastic stuff, but XBOX is going to have a full team developing and enhancing its UI for the next decade - that's going to be a tough horse to out-run.
- Video streaming is now much easier and much less expensive than movie library compilation. Never mind the questions of legality that arise in some countries, it's easier and less expensive to let someone else maintain the hardware and data management for thousands of movies than to try to manage your own library locally. No, the HD quality isn't there - but anyone who really wants that level of quality isn't going to want a single big HTPC box in the middle of the living room anyway. They're going to want a bunch of rack components in the server closet acoustically isolated from the movie room.
- Cable co's are doing everything in their power to make the use of anything other than a rented STB a PitA. Between switched digital video, "accidental" misconfiguration of cable cards, frequent changes to channel offerings, schedules and channel assignments, and timing out of switched channels without user intervention, they've done their best - and will continue to do their best - to make using an HTPC on a cable connection a marginally-effective system architecture.
Steiger is plainly trying to expand or migrate into a new market with these workstation products, because they (rightly) perceive that the HTPC market is dying. Unfortunately for them, there is a very limited market for single-box LR shelf components like this one. Customers either don't need / want to spend that much, or they can afford to put the PC hardware elsewhere (such as a utility closet) in which case it doesn't need to be pretty, can be built more cheaply, and is easier to maintain anyway.