Downloadable TV goes live on Xbox 360 in US today

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 23 November 2006 08:57

Your IT - Entertainment

A website online purports to explain how you can upgrade your Xbox 360 hard drive today, to a larger drive. They say you need to use Norton Ghost or a similar program to make an exact copy of your 20Gb hard drive onto a larger one, say 80Gb to 160Gb in size.
Some people have reported success, while others claim this is hogwash.

We haven’t tried it ourselves, so we can’t say. But the pressure will be on Microsoft to do something here, sooner rather than later, as the PS3, which in its premium configuration, not only comes with a 60Gb hard drive, but lets you play whatever content you want from an external hard drive that you connect to the PS3 via USB 2.0.

Microsoft doesn’t like Sony having an advantage in anything, let alone in the console wars, so we should all look out for an announcement soon, be it at the very least a much larger hard drive from Microsoft themselves, or the ability to use whatever hard drive you want in your own Xbox 360 system. Perhaps this will come at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January 2007.

If you didn’t already know, Apple has decided to run Macworld at almost exactly the same time as the CES. This is very, very annoying for consumers and journalists wanting to attend both shows, so Apple must have some very, very big announcements planned. We already know about their iTV service to download TV shows, movies and more and to watch them on your big screen TV with a wired, or wireless connection.

Microsoft knows this, so may well be holding back their announcement to dent Apple’s news.
But no matter what happens, the age of legal TV and movie downloads that you can watch in the same or better quality than existing TV broadcasts is finally here.

Sure, there are issues with hard disk sizes, the need for as fast a broadband connection as you can handle, and as big a download limit as you can possibly get. But the broadband world is good enough to handle Microsoft’s new service for now.

BitTorrent downloads will hardly be affected, as they are still free and you don’t need an Xbox 360 to illegally download them, and the range of content available there still far outstrips what Microsoft will offer, at least in these early stages.

Blu-ray and HD DVD still hold the upper hand in the resolution stakes, although you still need to buy a high-def player to watch those discs.
But TV networks must be quaking in their boots at the thought that consumers can bypass them almost entirely for prime time TV shows and hit movies. Sure, they’ll still offer live sports, news and other programming. But the cream of their crop comes from prime time TV and all of the associated advertising.

Consumers are getting the power to choose their TV media in their hands at last, without monthly contracts or endless channels of guff they don’t want to watch, but is included in their monthly bill.
We can’t wait to see this new world emerge and how it will affect all the players, but whatever happens, there will be casualties. It’s a war, after all.