Should the TV networks be quaking in their boots? What about BitTorrent and p2p users?
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 find out the latest, plus the predicted impact on BitTorrent, Blu-ray, HD DVD and more…
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.
