At the start of a new year, I thought it would be interesting to look back at our progress over the past year.

TunerFree MCE has gone through a number of fantastic milestones. From the first basic release with just BBC support, we have added Channel 4, ITV and Five support, bringing our channel support count to 18 (BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News, BBC Alba, ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, Channel 4, More 4, E4, Five, Five US and Fiver). We also have live TV available on 11 of those channels too, meaning that anyone in the UK with a TV licence can watch live digital TV on their PC wherever they are.

We have been through a few UI iterations, starting with a basic list of program episodes that loaded quite slowly. We added offline caching which really sped up the program loading dramatically. With input from a number of our most helpful users we also had fantastic evolution of our UI, with the critically acclaimed V2 making it incredibly easy to use.

The first release supported vanilla 32bit Vista. Since then we added support for TV Pack, 64 bit, and now Windows 7 support has been added too on the same day that the public Windows 7 beta was released by Microsoft.

In terms of popularity, as of the time of starting this article we had 18,633 downloads of the software, and our hosting company, hostgator, never flinched even at the busiest times. I added a link because I really like them, and I get commission if people sign up via the link.

Speaking of commission – I got my first cheque from google for the advertising on the site. The current low value of the pound against the dollar is good for me and makes that worth a whopping £70. Thankfully there have also been a number of people who have very generously donated to me to help me continue development. I'd like to thank each and every one of you for that again – no matter how large or small, each donation has motivated me to continue development.

We do have a wishlist of things to do in future, and it's a never ending task to keep the software working with the never ending changes from the TV companies, so look forward to more releases in 2009. We rely on you,  the user, to point out anything that doesn't work and to suggest new directions, so keep those comments coming to martin@milliesoft.co.uk.

Thanks for your support

Martin