Russell Heimlich over at our sister blog DV Guru
has a great article on Microsoft's step into the living room (beyond gaming) with their TV offering, which soundly beats Apple's actual delivery of their iTV device. We have all known for awhile that Microsoft was aiming for our living rooms with the sexy stylings of the Xbox 360 and the many media-streaming features it offers. Along with HD-DVD support, Microsoft is far ahead of Apple, giving all us dumb consumers a way to have living room Internet-enabled content. Of course I am talking about us consumers other than Russell, who has had this functionality for a year, and some of our readers even longer I suspect. So what of Microsoft, Apple, and your living room or den? Is the Xbox 360 the killer app of cozy-home living room multimedia, or will Apple reign supreme, eventually? If it isn't operating systems we're fighting over, it's the living room, or MP3 players, or browsers. Xbox movie downloads, here we come. If the Xbox contained a HD-DVD burner, that would be sublime.
Tags: 360, apple, downloads, living room, LivingRoom, microsoft, movie, news, streaming, tv, video, XBOX
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Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsStevenNov 9th 2006 4:04PM
Yeah, and how long will it take the normal person to download an HD movie? Days?
aabombNov 9th 2006 5:30PM
Wow - Apple Bashing on the Internet. Am I in an alternate universe? It's good to see Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division start to really crank out interesting products and services and its good to see some bloggers recognize this. I wish the blogosphere would divide MS into its respective parts and make it clear which part they are bashing.
whatevsNov 9th 2006 7:17PM
60 minutes of HD-res-size usually clocks in around 700mb in scene releases, meaning that you could pick up a compressed HD movie on cable in under an hour -- on DSL maybe an hour and a half.
Don't tell me people won't be satisfied with lossy HD downloads either, considering itunes uses 128kbit aac.
whatevsNov 9th 2006 7:18PM
"DSL" here meaning standard 1.5 mbps down DSL that every joe blow has.
jamesNov 9th 2006 9:49PM
The 360 is too loud and too power hungry to use for anything but games. I don't know how loud the PS3 is, but it reportedly is even more power hungry then the 360, so that is out too.
As for lossy HD content, I know I won't be satisfied with it. When I eventually make the move to an HDTV I am not going to feed it low quality video with crappy looking digital artifacts, that is what HD cable is for. Though, whatevs, I think you might be right that most people will put up with it.
ELCHANMANNov 9th 2006 9:52PM
This suit is NOT! black.
FinalFan3Nov 10th 2006 6:15PM
The PS3 is as quiet as the slim PS2 (very), but, yeah, it uses like 8x as much power.