Xbox To Get Live TV and Massive VOD Update

CNETNate writes "It's a global first for Microsoft, and massive news for Xbox owners. Redmond and the largest pay TV service in the UK — Sky, owned in part by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp — has tied a deal that brings simulcast TV, sports, entertainment shows, pay-per-view movies and back catalogue television to the Xbox 360. It's an entirely streamed service, offering no download-to-own content, and partly rivals the BBC iPlayer, which is available on UK PlayStation consoles and the Nintendo Wii. The service will go live later in the year at no cost to existing subscribers, and screenshots show it fits in seamlessly with the Xbox Live interface."

Comments

Re:Availability?

[rwjyoung]

Not strictly true, we needed a UK address for Sky to send there junk mail to but we paid with a credit card and viewed Sky TV in Switzerland for a couple of years. There is a company who will install the sky satellite dish and box with card all over Europe, but I am not sure how legit they are or if they affiliated with Sky in any way (my guess is no)

Re:Global or just UK only?

[Richard_at_work]

What about the billions of computer users outside the US that would like access to Netflix, Hulu and every other VoD solution that seems to be geographically limited...?

In short - the reason you can't have the Sky content is the same reason we can't have Hulu content, and that is that Sky doesn't have the distribution license outside of its particular viewership area. Premier League TV rights are a huge huge business...

Really! You have to admire their optimism!

[Chris Tucker]

"It's an entirely streamed service, offering no download-to-own content"

Anyone remember the first series of The IT Crowd, streamed online only to the UK, WMV DRMed up one side and down the other. And on The Pirate Bay as a .avi file within minutes after each streamed episode was over?

Good times, good times!

Really, why do they bother? The stream will be intercepted somewhere inside the XBox, or fed from the XBox into a digital recorder or computer, converted to .avi and upped to TPB. all automatically.

Assuming, of course, the programming is worth it and is unavailable elsewhere.

Price..?

[bhunachchicken]

Any mention of the price anywhere? Because if I need to sign up to Sky to use this service, then it's not really solving anything. Personally I want access to a massive library of films and TV shows to watch on a pay-per-play basis, without any ties.

The thing that is still stunning me is that you'd think Sony, being the huge entertainment conglomerate that it is, would've been offering this already with the PS3. Yes; I know that you can rent movies from the Playstation Network, but there are two major flaws with that service,

1) It's not available outside of the US (I mean, why? Seriously, why? Is it European law or something?!)
2) It's too expensive.

I'm sure they'll do it eventually, but to be honest you'd be hard pressed to believe we're living in the 21st century sometimes...