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Technology Lifestyle Downloadable TV goes live on Xbox 360 in US today
Technology Lifestyle Downloadable TV goes live on Xbox 360 in US today | Downloadable TV goes live on Xbox 360 in US today |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 23 November 2006 | |
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It’s finally here. A downloadable, virtually ‘video on demand’ service that will soon cover the entire world, from one provider. Microsoft. TV shows and movies, in standard definition at 480p, and high definition at 720p. 720p is certainly good, but it’s not as good as Blu-ray and HD DVD’s ability to display content at 1080p – if you have a TV that can display content in that ultra high-resolution format. But given that most people’s HDTVs are capable of at least 720p, this is a good first step, for now. Whether your 1080p TV will upconvert 720p content to 1080p is unknown – it probably depends on your TV, and results will likely vary from TV to TV, depending on the chipset inside. But 720p HD is still a lot better that 480p standard def (SD). The age of high-definition really is here and content from games to TV shows to movies, the things we usually use TVs for, is here in full force, with only more announcements to come from Apple, cable TV operators and free-to-air TV stations (many of whom already offer some HD programming). TV shows can be downloaded and kept on your Xbox 360’s hard drive, while movies seem to be for rental only at this stage, meaning they’ll disappear after a set period of time, or a set number of viewings. As a bonus of sorts, anyone who has downloaded a TV show in HD format can download it free in SD, but exactly why you’d want to do that isn’t exactly clear, unless you plan on taking your Xbox 360 hard drive to a friend’s place that is using theirs on an SDTV and watch it there. However with HD gaming one of the really big selling points of the Xbox 360, if you aren’t already using your Xbox 360 with an HDTV, it has to be on your wish-list, and probably quite high up there, too. But downloading content that’s hundreds of megabytes in presents some problems. To start with, big downloads of this size eat big chunks out of your ISPs download limits. Download ten 1Gb movies, for example, and my quick math skills (even without using a calculator!) tells me that this is somewhere in the vicinity of 10Gb of downloads. That’s a lot. The other big problem is the amount of space on your Xbox 360’s hard drive. Of the 20Gb you get, if you have the hard drive model at all, which you’ll need to download movies and TV shows, you only get around 15Gb of usable space. Part of this will already be filled with game demos, music ripped from CDs and other content from Xbox Live. Downloading several hundred megabyte TV shows and gigabyte movies will fill this space up very quickly, indeed. So the question everyone is asking Microsoft, is – when will you let us upgrade our hard drives to a much larger size to save and play movies there? While you can already plug a larger hard drive into the Xbox 360, you can’t save your content there, which makes it useless for the video download service. So, is it possble to upgrade the Xbox 306's hard drive, even if Microsoft says it can't be done? Read onto the next page to find out the latest, plus the predicted impact on BitTorrent, Blu-ray, HD DVD and more... |
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