Microsoft has been dropping hints since June about adding TV to its Xbox 360 entertainment hub, and today it announced the deals that will make this initiative actually happen. In the U.S., the company has partnerships with Comcast Xfinity, Verizon FiOS, HBO Go, Bravo, Crackle, Syfy, TMZ, UFC and The Today Show to bring on-demand television to the Xbox. In the U.K., the initial partners include the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Amazon’s movie and game rental service Lovefilm.
Sadly, viewers are still limited to using the Xbox to watch what they’re already paying for directly with these partners. Users are required to have an existing subscription to the content provider along with a subscription to the Xbox Live Gold service (at $60 per year). At this stage, therefore, these deals integrate tv, movies, games and music into one interface, as well as replacing the need for an additional set-top box, but they don’t give access to content unavailable by other means in each territory.
Users also can use Kinect gesture and voice controls in addition to a traditional controller, so searching for a particular episode of a TV shows can be done by talking directly to Bing.
“Today’s announcement is a major step toward realizing our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy,” Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Combining the world’s leading TV and entertainment providers with the power of Kinect for Xbox 360 and the intelligence of Bing voice search will make TV and entertainment more personal, social and effortless.”
Xbox 360 already has partnerships in place with AT&T, Netflix and Hulu+ in the U.S., TELUS in Canada, BSkyB in the U.K., Canal+ in France, Vodafone Portugal, VimpelCom in Russia, and FoxTel in Australia.
“I’ve had the opportunity to engage with some of the early beta services, and I know you’ll find that your Xbox 360 entertainment experience is unique and a cut above the rest because of your ability to easily search and discover content from multiple providers on Xbox LIVE and interact and enjoy the content in extraordinary new ways. For me, the biggest frustration has been the delta between what I know is out there and what I can easily find via my remote, or even my PC,” Frank X. Shaw, corporate vice president, Corporate Communications, Microsoft wrote on the company’s blog. “The ability to watch multiple Pac-12 games simultaneously via split screen is great, but the experience is completely transformed by my ability to voice and text chat with friends throughout the game. The term ‘smash mouth football’ is taking on entirely new meaning in my household.”
Wow,Marlowe you just missed the whole point. “but they don’t give access to content unavailable by other means in each territory.” The CONTEXT is the new entertainment. Being able to enjoy all your favorite media, on ONE box, where you can find what you want by voice commands, chat with your friends and use NEW stats dashboards during a sproting event IS new content.
Why don’t you try runnig with the interesting story here. The ‘everyting for one price’ business model doesn’t seem to be working so well. This just might be the model that does work.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I agree that this is a major step forward to a unified content experience, which is where I think things have been going ever since Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.
I didn’t intend to sound dismissive of this step forward. The features you listed are great, and they’re an impressive achievement, but Microsoft made that information public at E3. Today’s news was an announcement of the content partners that fleshed out the news they released in June. I foresee — and hope for — a time when we can choose what we want to watch regardless of the provider and pay for it through our Xbox Live (or similar) account, so that someone in the U.S. could watch the BBC for example.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying this model is different from the “everything for one price” model. How does today’s news change the business model?
sounds great but how long will it be till it gets over to the uk?
It’s not all going to happen at once, so there’s not an exact date when everything will become available in the UK (or the US, for that matter). But it won’t take long.
Your best source of specific information is probably your tv provider – Sky or LoveFilm.