Russ Pearlman's Blog

Day 2 at E3 was a bit calmer for me. I had already had a chance to look quickly through everything yesterday, so today I had the chance to slow down and take a closer look at a few things.

Let’s start of by focusing in on Microsoft. I was able to get a bit more specifics on their public XBox Live offerings. This includes:

• Zune Video Store. Movies will be sent to your XBox 360 over the Internet in full 1080p. There are a few caveats that you need to be aware of. First, the movies don’t buffer – which is good – but that means that they expect you to have about an 8 Mbps connection to the Internet. If you don’t reach that threshold, the movie’s audio will be reduced from 5.1 to stereo. Second, you don’t need to have anything beyond an XBox Live Gold subscription. However, they were unable to describe pricing for movies at this time – obviously there is an additional cost, but it isn’t clear yet what that is. On a related point, third, movies are on a ‘rental’ model. At the show, the representative was unable to clarify how it would work – do you get access to the movie for 24 hours?, can you pause it and watch the rest later?, etc. Finally, Microsoft did not specify what movies would be available at launch. So, it is unclear if we are talking blockbusters or deeper into the catalog. This functionality is being promised for the Fall, but it is clear that they are unable to publically confirm a lot of details that will decide how attractive this capability is really going to be.
  

  XBox Live

• Games on demand. Surprisingly, this wasn’t particularly highlighted during the Microsoft press briefing on Monday. But, Microsoft confirmed that over 30 titles will be released for full digital download this summer. Since purchase of these titles is a full-blow game, there are some details you should be aware of. First, it will take approximately 2-3 hours to download the games. This isn’t surprising, but it does present a barrier to some impulse buyers. Second, they were unable to confirm pricing, but after repeated attempts to get an answer, the representative told me: “You should expect [pricing] to be in-line with full-retail prices.” At launch, there will be a number of Microsoft Game Studio titles available along with titles from other publishers – again, Microsoft did not supply a complete list of titles at this time.
• Social movie watching. If you have friends who also happen to have XBox Live Gold Subscriptions, are Netflix members and are willing to watch a movie with you at the same time – you are a candidate for this form of interactive movie watching. For those of you familiar with BD Live – the BluRay offering available on some compatible movies – you are looking at something similar, though the Microsoft platform provides the experience instead of the BD Live service on a title by title basis. I’m not sure exactly how popular this sort of thing is, but clearly Microsoft is exploring areas where the XBox can be used for more social interactions. This extends into their support for Facebook and Twitter on the console as well. In looking at the demos, this felt more like ‘dazzle-ware’ than a compelling offering. But, then again, E3 is about dazzle…

For my next blog entry, I’m going to focus on devices. And, I’m going to wrap up with a dicussion on monitization.