Microsoft is positioning Xbox Live and Xbox 360 for a new standard in social entertainment experience planned for debut in the fall of 2008, courtesy of a partnership with Netflix. The E3 Media and Business Summit acted as the stage where the Redmond company revealed that Xbox LIVE would permit users of Xbox 360 consoles to access and instantly stream a rich catalog of movies and TV episodes numbering in excess of 10,000 items.
"Watching movies at home will never be the same. Netflix on Xbox 360 is an entertainment
first, and we are bringing friends together with the best in entertainment content like no other device in the living room," promised John Schappert, corporate vice president of Interactive Entertainment LIVE, Software and Services Business at Microsoft.
Via the alliance with the world's largest online movie rental service, Microsoft is advancing past what rivals from Nintendo and Sony are offering to users of Wii and PlayStation consoles. Xbox 360 will permit Netflix content to be streamed to a television, in what Microsoft referred to as a new home theater experience. The new offering comes with a price tag of $49.99 for a year-long subscription, and is available to Xbox Live Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers.
"We are creating a completely new social entertainment experience, and Xbox 360 will be the only video game system where you can access your library of instantly streamable movies from Netflix and turn any room into a virtual movie theater," Schappert added.
However, the actual process for users to get Netflix movies and TV shows on their TV through an Xbox 360 is a tad more complex, and it involves accessing the Netflix website and populating individual instant Queues with movies and TV episodes from the online catalog. Only then will the content be featured on the TV from the Xbox 360. The promise from Microsoft is that all content will start playing within 30 seconds.
With Netflix looking for an alliance with a console vendor, Microsoft was the only possible solution. This aspect was guaranteed by Reed Hastings, chairman and CEO of Netflix, who is also a member on the Microsoft Board of Directors.
"Netflix and Xbox 360 are a perfect combination, the leading online movie rental service and the leading games and entertainment system joining forces to create an all-in-one entertainment experience with content for everyone. For Netflix, it represents an important step forward in making instantly streaming movies on the TV more broadly available to our members," Hastings stated.
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