Early returns on Xbox Live Video show it outperforming the competition
A report in Hollywood trade mag Variety paints a picture of the video download market far different from what many expected. Xbox Live Video has been doing brisk business since the service's launch in November, while services from Amazon, CinemaNow, Movielink, and others have lagged.
When Amazon launched Unbox in September, expectations were high because of the retailer's expertise with DVD sales and the brand's cachet with consumers. Unfortunately, the experience of using Unbox fell short of those high expectations. When we tried out the service, we found the Amazon Unbox Player lacking in the user interface department while experiencing undesired success in the resource-hogging department, and the service as a whole to be rather buggy.
CinemaNow and Movielink, while offering a more seamless download and playback experience than Unbox, have pitfalls of their own. For one, it can be downright difficult to watch the movies on anything other than a PC monitor, unless you have a home theater PC dwelling in your entertainment center. Until a few months ago, that was due to the inability of customers to burn DVDs of their downloads to watch on TV.
The download services have managed to convince the studios that DVD burning is necessary to the success of their ventures, but additional antipiracy restrictions placed on the burned DVDs throw up yet another barrier to consumers. As a result, DVDs burned using CinemaNow's Burn-to-DVD service are all but unplayable in many standalone DVD players.
The success of the Xbox 360
With the problems faced by other download services, the news that the Xbox 360's download service is apparently thriving has caught some industry insiders by surprise. But the 360's success is no mystery. Xbox Live Video does two things that the other services either cannot do or do not do well: it offers a simple way to watch downloaded content on TV and serves up high-definition content that HDTV owners crave.
Unlike competing services, which require a PC as an intermediary, Xbox Live Video bypasses the PC to bring the video content directly to the place you most want to watch it: the big-screen TV in the family room. That's a huge advantage, and one that Apple is hoping to capitalize on when it releases the iTV early in 2007.
Microsoft scratches another itch with Xbox Live Video. Owners of HDTVs learn early on that actual high-definition content is at a premium these days. Most cable and satellite providers offer only a dozen or so high-def channels in addition to free, over-the-air fare; AT&T's just-announced 27 channels of HD content is the exception rather than the rule. Xbox Live Video offers a number of movie rentals in 720p for a buck more than standard definition, and users of the service are proving themselves willing to pony up and patiently wait for the 5GB-plus download to complete. (Just be sure to delete enough content from the 360's increasingly cramped 20GB hard drive to make room for those downloads.)
The success of the Xbox 360 bodes well for other TV-centric offerings such as the PlayStation 3 and Apple's iTV device—assuming Apple is able to lock up content from studios other than Disney. It also demonstrates that until the average consumer is able to easily and painlessly move downloaded video from the PC to the family room, download services that rely on PCs as the central link in the equation will struggle to gain traction.
:source: Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061222-8486.html
