Xbox 360 users experience video download issues

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 24 November 2006 21:42

Your IT - Entertainment

Microsoft says an extremely high number of downloads from the Xbox Live video download service over the past couple of days has caused the slow download speeds and video download issues US customers have been experiencing, but that a fix is in the works, with engineers working around the clock.

It had to happen. You launch what is the beginning of what will be one of the world’s largest and legal direct-to-the-consumer sales of TV shows and movies from a single online source, to reportedly very high interest, and your system shows problems under the massive load over the two to three days it has been active.

From one point of view, it’s bad. Not only are users experiencing problems, doesn’t Microsoft make server software and work with PC and server hardware companies? This kind of interest should have been easy to predict, even as a ‘worst case scenario of massive popularity causing overload’.

From another point of view, this is a great problem to have. There’s not too many other high-def video stores on the market that people are clamouring to at the moment. If there are, they aren’t getting the global news right now and probably aren’t experiencing the load Microsoft says its download servers are under.

Consumer interest has been so strong it has helped to overload the system. It now needs to be fixed and immediately or very shortly upgraded to handle larger amounts of traffic. It’s certainly better to have this problem than to have a store that no-one ever visits or few make purchases from, especially if you can fix this problem quickly and do your very best to ensure it doesn’t happen again. 

People who download TV shows have said that if there was an easy, reliable and fast way to download their favourite TV shows at affordable prices without needing to worry about BitTorrent downloads and software clients, dodgy download speeds and possibly badly encoded content, many people would gladly pay the money.

Whether that actually ends up being true is yet to be seen. iTunes is monumentally successful as an online digital media store, but illegal downloads have still outpaced legitimate downloads by a very large margin.

iTunes now offers TV shows, movies and more in the US market, but only at standard definition TV resolution, just slightly lower than DVD. The dominant Australian ISP ‘BigPond’ offers a TV show and movie download service which can only be watched on your PC but has a growing selection.

In Australia, Universal Movies have committed to a deal with Reeltime.TV, allowing consumers to download DVDs and burn them to a physical DVD or in portable movie player format on the day of the DVD’s release, starting November 29th, 2006. It’s not yet being able to watch a movie on the day of its theatrical release on your own home theatre system, but it’s surely coming within the next 5 years, if not sooner.