Yesterday we announced a brand new offering for Windows Media Center users: Sports Channel. Sports Channel will be offered to Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate users as a new tile under “Sports” in Windows Media Center.

Sports Channel offers a variety of sports content from great sources CBSSports.com, Fox Sports, MSNBC.com and more. Content flowing through Sports Channel ranges from breaking sports news to interviews of your favorite players to the ability to track your fantasy sports teams.

Sports Channel is a great example of our continued investment in providing new and easier ways for people to find and access compelling content through Windows Media Center.

Instead of going through my own experience with Sports Channel, I’d like to call out Ian Dixon’s overview of Sports Channel here and Stuart’s screenshots of the Sports Channel experience here from The Digital Lifestyle.com (one of the best Windows Media Center sites on the web today).

For the best experience with Sports Channel in Windows Media Center, a broadband connection is highly recommended. Today, Sports Channel is currently available in the U.S. only.

I also recommend checking out MSNBC News in Windows Media Center (which I blogged about last October) – which is no longer in beta.

Under the TV + Movies menu in Windows Media Center, you may have noticed a new tile: MSNBC News Beta. The MSNBC News Beta tile will begin appearing in Windows Media Center for users in the United States and Canada running Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. Users don’t need to download anything to enable MSNBC News Beta in Windows Media Center. MSNBC News Beta gives users quick access to the latest election news, top stories and weather all from one screen.

Directly within Windows Media Center, users can browse Editor Picks and Most Popular videos (which are selected by viewers). I discovered that when I click on a specific video, a “+” icon appears. When this “+” icon is clicked, it gets added to a custom news video playlist. There are quite a few videos to choose from which is nice.

I was able to quickly browser through a bunch of MSNBC’s Decision ’08 videos and add them to a custom news video playlist to watch all at once.

I was also able to browse other categories such as Business, Sports, and Entertainment which all have videos I can either watch as I go or add to a custom news video playlist. MSNBC News Beta also sports some pretty neat search functionality that lets me search for stories with specific keywords.

And the 5-day weather forecast (available for any ZIP code in the United States) is impressive too!

As a heavy Windows Media Center user myself, I for one will be using MSNBC News Beta to stay on top of not only the upcoming U.S. Election but all the latest news.

For more on MSNBC News Beta and Windows Media Center – click here!