Okay here are my thoughts on this. They are not necessarly design oriented, but more about the functioning of the program, and intelligence in design and functionality. I stress that this is very much a wish list, and some of it might be very hard to impossible to implement, both for internal resource reasons as well as external factors impossible to control.
I would like Mediaportal as a whole to be more proactive and intelligent in linking in with external content. MP should become my buddy when it comes to picking content to watch and record, making life easy for me and allowing me to pick the most interesting stuff I want to see. I want to see the short EPG (a couple of lines of text about a movie or series) extended by such external content, ratings, user comments, additional media (stills, video previews of content ...). Obviously, this will depend on those external data sources as well. This content should become easily searchable, sortable and filtered interactively.
What I mean by that is from the EPG information, MP could proactively go out and try to gather more data on the tv channels, Movies and Series and other programs. This should happen in the background, so it doesnt interrupt my UI experience. It should then use all of that information to enrich the EPG and allow us to make intelligent decisions on what to watch.
For example, say I want to know what good films are on this weekend!? It would be great if I could see on one page, the 5 best films to watch this weekend on all channels. (This could be done by MP recognizing films automatically, go on IMDB and download information for all these movies, and then make all attributes like ratings, genre, actors, directors ... accessible to the user.) This is similar to what is already possible in MyMovies, but I would like to see that concept extended and refined for a more general application. CRUCIALLY, it has to be transparent to the user, eg no waiting bars and so on while stuff is downloading from the Internet.
Another example, I watch a lot of CSI and other crime type series (I dont actually but just for the sake of it). IF MP knew that CSI a fictional crime series, and was aware that I watch it a lot, it could propose to me that there is similar content on other channels. Somehow like Amazon proposing you other items to buy based on your previous purchases.
