XBox Live VoD: close but no cigar

My friend Sanjay pointed me to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday about the new HD Video on Demand service for the XBox 360.

This new service allows XBox360 owners to download TV and movies on demand, via the Xbox Live service – further pushing the boundaries of online console services and further establishing the Xbox360 as the ultimate trojan horse platform. 

They haven’t yet released pricing details, but I’m assuming their pricing will be in line with what Apple charges for iTunes video downloads. 

The ability to download TV and movies directly to a device that is built to interface with TVs is a great selling point. While it doesn’t offer the portability benefits of an iPod video solution, I think it offers something even more compelling for many non-techie people by being a direct download to the display device, with no PC interfacing required. Of course, I say that as someone who thinks portable video is overrated and who owns a video capable iPod but rarely uses it for anything other than playing music.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get too excited over Microsoft’s new service when the Xbox 360’s hard drive is only 20gb (of which only about 75% is usable for user downloads) and HD movies take up 4-5gb each. I already find myself constantly running low on harddrive space on my 360 just from Xbox Live Arcade downloads. Trying to juggle space to fit large videos in to the mix seems like more trouble that its worth at this point.

Hopefully Microsoft will offer a new, larger harddrive upgrade option in the near future, though it could be difficult for them to do this in a way that doesn’t piss off the customers who already bought the 20 gigabyte harddrive as part of the premium system or as an upgrade. An even better solution would involve them allowing any standard USB disk or flash media to be used as storage for Live content, though that seems unlikely for DRM/content protection reasons.   Given the space limitations, I’m not sure if this service will be as great as it could be, but it’s an interesting start.  Glad to see they included one of my favorite shows, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, as one of the content options.