If you’re in the US, have an Xbox 360 and have tried downloading TV shows and movies from Microsoft’s Xbox Live video download service, you may have been experiencing problems. Extremely high numbers of downloads from the Xbox Live video download service over the past few of days has caused the slow download speeds and video download issues US customers have been experiencing, reports Microsoft, with a fix in the works and 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.
No doubt the PS3 and improved services from cable TV service operators, other websites and even Internet TV channel sites such as Youtube will do their best to also compete in the new reality of legally downloadable video content that people really want, although the legality of much of Youtube’s is yet to be determined.
In Australia, we don’t have access to the Xbox 360 download service at all, so we can’t even experience the same problems or add to the load. Imagine if it had been a global launch!
So while problems are there, at least US Xbox 360 owners can now try out the system for themselves, or at least try it again after the problems have been sorted out.
Just as we have a large range of music download stores, an avalanche of legal TV and movie download sites will emerge, with more Youtube clones than ever, until some form of equilibrium and market consolidation occurs.
Over the next twelve months, Microsoft’s video download store for the Xbox 360 could be one of the major services out there, especially with the way it cleverly mimicks the way the iPod can easily be filled with songs you purchase from iTunes in a ‘closed system’.
While the Xbox 360 can play video files from DVDs, soon HD DVDs and streamed from a Windows XP, a XP Media Center PC or an appropriate version of Vista, it’s not fully closed just as the iPod isn’t fully locked down as it can play mp3s and more after all.
The difference is that the Xbox 360 now comes with a TV show purchase and movie rental store built-in, no separate program on your PC required, with the checkout point connected right to people’s TVs in their homes, soon to be ready for watching in only a few minutes.
If ever the VHS and DVD movie rental companies could really start getting afraid that future technology will make them redundant, the Xbox 360’s new video download service, despite teething problems, is the true ‘half way’ tipping point that will eventually make that long feared prediction for DVD rental stores come true.
The battle to be your home computer server and full entertainment system has been on for some time, with only quality technology at affordable prices along with high speed broadband holding up the proceedings. Now with the latest next-gen consoles, that war for home entertainment supremacy is back on with full force, with each player hoping to become the dominant video content download provider.
The future of TV may be delivered to millions around the globe… through their games console that’s really a powerful computer in disguise.
