It's official: Microsoft wants to take over your living room, and their weapon of choice is the Xbox 360.On November 22nd, Microsoft will launch Xbox Live Video, a service allowing you to download standard-def or hi-def movies and TV shows. At launch, material from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Warner Brothers, and Paramount will be available.
Pricing details aren't available yet, but you'll use Microsoft points instead of real dollars to rent or purchase content. This is a bit like when you go into a video game arcade and trade all your money for tokens. Before you know it, you've spent far more than you intended. Whoops.
There will be about 200 hours of HDTV programs available on November 22nd, and 800 hours of standard definition programming. The movies will only be available for "rental," while you have to "purchase" TV shows. What that means is you probably won't pay very much for the movies, but you'll have to watch them within a fixed period of time. TV shows are yours to keep, although it's not clear if you'll be able to burn them to DVD or archive them in some other way. I'd love to see Microsoft integrate this store with the Zune Marketplace, but for now this is an Xbox-only product.
For a boatload of additional information, including a partial list of launch titles, check out Engadget.
1. nice im getting my 360 around december and im hopeing that all the new movies will be available for rent!!!!
Posted at 8:22AM on Nov 19th 2006 by askeraquestionqwertyuiop