IPTV and the 360 a "fair bet"; future Xbox 360 revision?
Although some at Microsoft insist "It's not about owning the living room" others lay bare underlying strategies behind Microsoft's frenzied attempt to enter the video game console market. XChange magazine has conducted a lengthy interview with Microsoft TV's Ed Graczyk; while most of it deals directly with IPTV, they do ask him about the role of the 360 in their strategy. He says, "The initial iteration of [the Xbox 360] is focused on gaming... but it’s a fair bet at some point in the future you’ll have an Xbox console that could be also an IPTV receiver – that will have the IPTV functionality built into it."
Are we talking about a new media-centric Xbox 360, with IPTV functionality and maybe PVR and HD-DVD? Microsoft will surely try to avoid the fate of Sony's failed PSX varietal. Microsoft's ambitions in the living room are storied, and this interview shows their strategy and the resources they're willing to invest in satisfying it. While the Xbox 360 might be a killer game machine, do some at Microsoft still see it as their trojan horse, a set-top box waiting to deliver goods and services through a Microsoft-controlled gateway? (And we're not talking about Live here.)
[Thanks, Farooq J Alvi; Via Xbox 360 Fanboy]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
MthdDirector @ Jan 4th 2006 3:48PM
They would be crazy not to be looking in this direction. But I'd bet that IPTV support would come from an add-on box that would sit next to the 360. With half a terabyte of storage or more.
IPTV won't be taking off until 2008-9 - so anything is possible.
kevin @ Jan 5th 2006 11:50AM
to support "IPTV" all it really needs to do is support some kind of multicasting protocol, like IGMP or PIM and be able to locally decode mpeg2 or H.264 at SD and HD resolutions. PVR functionality would merely be a bonus. and the services really aren't that far away either.