AfterTek

The Xbox 360 will continues its move toward becoming the center of the digital home. Today Microsoft is announcing that Xbox Live users will be able to download movies and TV shows to their Xbox 360s. When the service goes live on Nov. 22, Microsoft will have more than a thousand hours of video available for fans to watch.  The move raises the ante for rival Sony with the PlayStation 3, which debuts Nov. 17 and will have its own online entertainment network dubbed the PlayStation Network. Sony will allow for free online gaming on its console as well as game downloads. But so far it hasn’t announced a movie or TV viewing service.

We shall see if gamers really want to do this. It’s a good idea, of course, but I don’t know if there will be much demand for it. The trick will be in how easy Microsoft makes it, and how much it expands the service over time. Microsoft has about 4 million subscribers to both the free and paid versions of its Xbox Live online service, and it has had considerable success with the Xbox Live Marketplace where gamers have been able to download games, videos, movie trailers, and songs. Now those gamers can get TV shows or movies such as “Superman Returns.”

There isn’t much space on the Xbox 360’s hard drive only 20 gigabytes, with about 14 or 15 gigabytes of that available. And the downloading service won’t be available for anyone who bought the Xbox 360 Core console without a hard drive. Scott Henson, director of platform strategy at Microsoft’s Xbox division, said that is enough for about five high-definition movies or perhaps 15 standard definition movies.

Microsoft has lined up a lot of partners: MTV, CBS, Warner Bros., Paramount, Turner and UFC. Companies such as CBS, which is releasing 400 hours of video for Xbox Live, are seeking out elusive gamers who are no longer watching much television, Henson said. The TV shows can be bought, while the movies are for rental only. On a 3-megabit-per-second Internet connection, someone could download a “South Park” episode in about 13 minutes. At some point, the viewer would be able to watch some of the episode as the rest is downloading.

Consumers won’t be able to transfer the content to other machines, such as a PC or a Microsoft Zune media player. But they could take a hard drive out of an Xbox 360 and play a movie on it at a friend’s house. Apparently the content owners aren’t ready to allow consumers to move their content to “unprotected” gadgets.

To find the content, gamers will go to the Media and Entertainment section, or blade, of the Xbox Live Marketplace page on Xbox Live. They can then drill into the movies or TV sections, looking at either the most popular movies or the newest arrivals. Henson said the studios also liked the fact that gamers could search for content by brand names such as CBS.

The videos are stored as Windows Media Player version 9 content on the hard disk. A 22-minute “South Park” episode takes up about 300 megabytes of space. But Henson says that the good thing is that consumers can use Xbox Live itself for storage, rather than their own machines. Hence, if someone buys the entire library of South Park shows, they could download them at any time to the hard drive. If someone erases a show and then wants to view it again later, Xbox Live will allow them to do so.

What’s interesting to me is that this crosses a line in some respects. Microsoft had previously said that the Windows Media Center PC was the primary device for storage of movies or TV shows in the home. They could stream those movies to an Xbox 360, which would not store them. Now Microsoft is saying it is OK to stream movies and TV shows to the Xbox 360, but to store them there as well. It’s not such a big leap to say, “Why do I need my stinking PC?”

For now, the answer is that the PC can store a lot more. Henson said that Microsoft has not yet chosen to make larger hard drives available to Xbox 360 owners. The 20-gigabyte hard drives will fill up fast. If demand exists, then Microsoft will make the bigger drives available. Sony has a 60-gigabyte drive on a PlayStation 3 premium version.