Xbox 360 To Offer Movie Downloads From November 22nd
Microsoft announced yesterday that users of Microsoft’s Xbox Live video game service will be able to download movies and TV shows from 22 November. The US software giant has teamed up with Hollywood studios to sell shows and rent movies such as such South Park and Mission Impossible III.
Although this was an expected development, I think it will be interesting to how other companies react to the move. Unlike iTunes, which already offers shows for download, the Xbox 360 is crucially connected to the TV. Watching downloaded content on a TV as opposed to a screen of a few inches obviously makes a big, big difference. I have first hand experience of this since I hooked up my modded Xbox to my TV using XBMC.
It’ll be interesting to see how the cable and satellite companies react to this, as it could eat into their lucrative pay-per-view revenues, at a time when they are steeling themselves for the imminent launch of broadband TV services from ISPs such as BT and Orange.
It’ll also be interesting to see how the ISPs that will have to carry this additional traffic will react. I had an interesting debate with one of my colleagues today about whether moves such as this by Microsoft, could lead to deals being struck with ISPs by service providers such as Xbox Live, where traffic for certain services is given a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) over others, and could ISPs ever go as far as to discriminate in favour of their own video/TV services?
Maintaining Network Neutrality, or not giving preference to any service provider or type of traffic over another, I think is going to become a major issue for ISPs over the next couple of years as more and more bandwidth-rich applications get launched. Already many ISPs are discretely rate-limiting P2P traffic during peak hours, and it’ll be interesting to see what the user reaction might be to any additional limiting that ISPs might enforce as users use up more bandwidth.
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