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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."
Launching soon, live goatse TV channel, and goatse on "demand".
Sky currently only operate in the UK - you can't buy SKY tv overseas - unless you have a UK based bank account - so I wonder if this means sky are becoming more global - or if this really is just content for the UK market only...and will Sony respond by cutting a deal with Viacom?
From the article "Millions of Xbox 360 owners in Britain and Ireland" Pretty sure this means it's just us in the UK. Bare in mind that the US only has had access to netflix for quite a while now. Personally I'm more interested in the pricing of this service, the post says "no cost to existing subscribers" but I can't find any evidence of this anywhere. As an existing subscriber I think it should be free but I doubt it will go that way.
Oh, better cancel this then guys. Microsoft? Sky? Hi. Turns out that this isn't necessary. viyh's computer can do it already.
From TFA: "Millions of Xbox 360 owners in Britain and Ireland will be able to watch live programing such as Premier League soccer and movies following a deal with pay-TV group BSkyB"
That's not very "global" to me - what about the millions of Xbox users outside UK who'd also want to pay and see Premier League and other stuff on their Xbox? And yeah, that was rhetorical question, I know we're hosed until the "global" train arrives on our little local station.
You can now use an Xbox 360 as a really expensive, loud, and fragile cable box? Woohoo!
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)
Watch me build my house
A bit of news for you...only the Republic of Ireland (Eire) became independent in 1922
UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" in full.
So at a guess, "Britain and Ireland" can either mean "UK and Eire" (interpreting Ireland as "the whole of Ireland, Northern & Republic") or UK (interpreting "Ireland" as "Northern Ireland"); Perhaps we should ask Reuters.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
"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.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Sky is just one of many brand names for News Corporation's broadcasting services. New Zealand has Sky, Germany has Premiere and Australia Foxtel.
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...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Neither Sky not Microsoft have ever given away for free what they could charge people for.
I am pretty sure this will be based on that stupid Microsoft iptv middleware named Microsoft Mediaroom(formerly known as Microsoft TV IPTV edition) witch is already ported to Xbox360. Mediaroom is full of DRM, not based on OpenIPTV Forum standards, doesn't scale well(while it is based on multicast, it uses unicast heavily) and is a real PITA for developers( you have three choices to develop apps on the platform: XHTML/JS/CSS running on Tasman rendering engine, with was the renderer used in IE for Mac witch is real slow and very limited, you can also use a stupid XML declarative language(called Mediaroom Presentation Foundation) and RDP on a remote terminal server (yes, remote desktop)! With better choices in middlewares, i just don't know how operators keep choosing this piece of crap middleware
I can't believe that this has not been tagged as skynet yet.