Tag: XBOX

XBOX Live Arcade Sales Increase After NXE Release

Xbox 360Gamasutra cites statistics from Microsoft suggesting that sales on XBOX Live Arcade increased by as much as 300 percent following the release of the New XBOX Experience back in November.

Hmm . . . so, in theory, if you replace a shitty looking, almost unusable interface with a pretty looking one that actually makes sense and sales increase.

Nah, that’ll never work.

What’s amazing is just how bad the XBOX 360 interface was for so long.  It’s almost like Microsoft didn’t have any clue how to create a usable interface so they just swiped Sony and Nintendo’s best ideas.

Nah, that would never happen.

XBOX 360 NXE Update

So early this morning my XBOX 360 downloaded and installed the NXE update which overhauls the visual interface for the XBOX as well as adds Netflix streaming to the device (rather than having to use third party software).

The XBOX interface is, for the most part, a vast improvement. The original XBOX interface was extremely ugly and nonintuitive. The new one is pretty and a lot easier to figure out what to do next.

The Netflix streaming is a mixed bag. One the one hand, it works a lot better than the third party solution I was using did. Specifically, fast forward and reverse never really worked when viewing Netflix streams. The official Netflix app does suppor that.

On the other hand, the third party app sorted all of the things in my Instant Queue in nice alphabetical system of folders and subfolders. So if I wanted to the second Disc of the Voltron series, I’d scroll down to the “V” folder, then wait a second for it to refresh and select the Voltron disc, and then finally it would list all the episodes and I’d select whatever episode I wanted to watch.

The official Netflix app uses a lameass coverflow-like setup which is bad enough. But it also sorts the queue by strict order rather than alphabetical. So if I want to watch Voltron I have to scroll through all of the DVD covers that are in completely arbitrary order until I get to the correct one. I’d at least like the option to sort alphabetically rather than by queue order.

Asshats at Sony Pull Netflix/XBOX Streaming of Columbia Pictures Films

Tomorrow, Microsoft pushes out an update to the XBOX 360 that, among other things, allows Netflix subscribers to watch streamed videos from that service on the XBOX. And today — purely by coincidence —  all Columbia Pictures movies and TV shows are blocked from being streamed to the XBOX.

Columbia Pictures, of course, is owned by Sony. So instead of streaming them, I’ll just have to get that Family Guy boxed set in my Netflix queue and see if somehow I can figure out a way to overcome the impenetrable DRM on the DVDs to rip them to my server.

Stream YouTube, Netflix, etc. to Xbox 360 with PlayOn

Microsoft’s upcoming update to the XBOX 360 will add the capability to stream from Netflix to the device, but I was intrigued when I read some positive reviews of Media Mall’s PlayOn which promises to let the user stream not only Netflix, but also YouTube, Hulu, ESPN and CBS and, eventually, others.

Installing the software on my server was a breeze and my Xbox saw the PlayOn server with no problem. Netflix streaming worked very well…I had no problems watching numerous videos in my Instant queue on the Xbox. You do still have to go the computer to add things to the Instant queue (I’m assuming the XBOX update will have some way of searching within Netflix).

YouTube also worked great. I was able to scroll through recent videos, top rated videos, my favorites and my playlists.

I had problems with Hulu. The PlayOn software wasn’t properly buffering the Hulu streams, so shows there drop after about 10 seconds. The PlayOn software is still in beta, so I’m assuming that’s some sort of bug that will be fixed by the time they get to release.

CBS and ESPN worked fine, but neither had any content worth watching (CBS, for example, didn’t actually have any shows but rather just short clips which is weird since some of the same content is available on Hulu.)

The thing I don’t understand is why Microsoft just doesn’t provide this sort of functionality to watch YouTube and other video sites natively within the Xbox instead of forcing users to go pay for a separate piece of software that then has to be installed on a Windows PC, etc.