Microsoft's latest trick for the Xbox may come as interesting news if you've been using the console as a defacto home media center, using apps like XBMC for the Xbox or Windows Media Center with the 360 to pipe your downloaded videos from your network to your TV.
Australian Xbox owners will apparantly be able to watch 1080p movies with 5.1 surround audio streamed on-demand from the Xbox Live Video Marketplace (now called Zune Video). There's no officially announced Australian switch-on date for the service that we've seen yet, nor how many movies will be available, though a quick visit to the US site lists 1,207 movies.
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The Xbox Live Video Marketplace (Zune Video), with Batman
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Screenshots provided by Microsoft show several menus including Top Movies, New Releases, and Featured, with titles like Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace, Yes Man and V for Vendetta. The Dark Knight menu screen lets you watch a preview, or "Play HD".
All this is interesting news. If you're one of those who've ditched regular TV for the Web (and have a big enough broadband plan) you've got a number of entertainment options online to choose from - BitTorrent for vodcasts, free shows like Underbelly and others from Nine and the ABC, and free video sites like Youtube.
The big missing link in the whole "ditch TV for the Internet" plan are the commercial video on demand Internet services you can subscribe to. Sure, there's Bigpond Movies, TiVo Blockbuster Video, and iTunes, but in the US, you can buy a number of set top boxes (including the Xbox) that sit under your flat screen with official support for services like Netflix, which lets you pick from 12,000 movies.
Sony has yet to announced a local launch of movies for PlayStation owners, but at some point it too might be turned on for Australia. They also have an ace up their sleeves - digital TV recording via a mini DVR-like device called PlayTV, which has been talked about for a long while now.
Mind you, if you've already got Foxtel or a TiVo, we can't see why you'd bother turning your games console into a DVR. The main game right now seems to be the actual movies.
