Well now we get to see Microsoft’s video to your home strategy in the form of Xbox Live Video. Maybe this is the reason for Apple's pre-announcement of their iTV? Engadget has some screen shots. Also some leaked info on a larger hard drive coming soon. This looks pretty cool. Now if I could only figure out how much a ‘point’ was worth in the real world, I could decide if this is a good price or not.

Coming Nov 22nd.

Link?

Here you go. I have also seen this date on other sites, and on the 360 itself. Nov 22 is the one year anniversary of the 360. There is a link to the official press release on that page as well.

I'm pretty excited by this, even if I don't use it very much. Currently I only watch a couple of shows on TV. Most of the time I just record them with media center. But occasionally I miss something, like this Wednesday when my power was out and I missed Jericho.

So the next day I had to buy it on Itunes to get caught up. That sucked - for a couple of reasons. First although I'm very happy that Steve decided to grace us with 640x480 content recently instead of that postage stamp stuff. But I normally watch all my TV on the projector via the 360. Having to sit in front of the computer monitor is a bit of a drag. Second, ever since the new ITunes upgrade the thing pegs my CPU all the time. Just bringing it up and viewing my library in list mode (no graphics at all) will hover between 80 - 100% (unless I minimize it). So we started downloading Jericho, and usually you can start to play shows as they are downloading, but when we tried that Itunes was already sucking down the CPU so the video would barely even play. In fact it got so lagged out I could not even close the video and had to kill Itunes altogether. Which meant I had to start the download over and this time wait until is was completely done.

The MS guys are talking about distributing HD TV shows as well as movies. This could be pretty cool if the price is right. Since it might be cheaper for me to buy seasons of the two or three shows I watch, than to upgrade to either digital HD cable or Satellite with an HD DVR solution. Of course they will need to release a larger hard drive to make this practical.

They don't list any prices, but likely, it'll be "points". Yay.

I have a season pass on iTunes for BSG and "The Office", and those files get pretty big: a one hour show like BSG is around 500 MB. That's a lot of data to suck down if you aren't on a good connection. I think that, and the original video iPod screen size made the initial video size what it was.

One more day. Time for a rumor update. Yes of course points will be the currency. Rumor says that Movies will be rental only at around 4.00 equiv. After download you have a limited amount of time to watch the flick before it expires (14 days I think). Once you hit play you have 24 hours to watch it as many times as you can / want. TV will be purchase only at around 3.00 equiv. I hope the TV turns out to be cheaper. It would be good to compete with Apple's price. The current uproar is more about hard-drive size than price however. The 360's 20G drive won't hold that much HD content. One way that MS is going to offset this is that they will allow unlimited downloads of the content you own. So there is no big reason to hoard all the shows, watch and delete. Download and watch again in the future. Just like Audible. (Are you listening Apple?) Of course indications are still pointing towards a larger HD option as well. Although I expect it will be a pain to transfer all your existing save games etc. from your old drive to the new one. (I wish they would just support downloading to an external USB drive). One use case scenario I heard mentioned was that you could download a show, then remove the drive and take it to your friends house to watch on their 360.

Why not just allow the Xbox to save paid content to and stream it from a Media PC (with its nice 500 GB disk)? They could certainly DRM up the files if necessary, but any determined hacker could probably get them off the 360 disk anyway. That certainly seems more reasonable than re-downloading HD movies.

Yeah I agree that would be pretty cool. And who knows, maybe they will get there with Vista and Media player 11. I hear the Vista gaming experience is supposed to be like Xbox Live - so maybe the marketplace will show up as well.

But for now I can see why they would opt for a complete stand alone solution. You can buy, download and watch movies from your couch, no computer required.

I took a quick look. The interface is very nice and easy to use. It looks like they have 45 movies available and around 47 TV shows. They also offer music videos and trailers etc. Currently the servers are very full so downloads are pretty slow. Also the video sizes are large so we are going to need another storage solution soon. 2G for an HD TV show, and 6G for an HD movie typical.

Here is the pricing breakdown in dollars:
TV: $2 SD, $3 HD
Library Movies: $3 SD, $4.50 HD
New releases: $4.00 SD, $6.00 HD

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