Xbox Live Video Marketplace Overview (gamezone)

- gamezone -

Even though it has a couple big issues hindering it at the moment, the Video Marketplace has great potential for Microsoft's premier Xbox Live service

Following hot on the heels of their meaty fall update, Microsoft launched their Video Marketplace download service on Xbox Live last month. The new service is a first in the console industry, offering on-demand movie content over a broadband connection. After a bit of a rough start, (Microsoft’s tech support lines fielded numerous reports of slow downloads, missing Microsoft points and generally spotty performance at the service’s launch) the Video Marketplace seems to be hitting its stride. The service has a great deal of potential, putting Xbox Live one step closer to being a full on media marketplace like iTunes (or even MS’s own Zune Marketplace, for that matter), and effectively giving the Xbox 360 something over the PS3. However, at the moment, the service raises a few issues, which I will go into shortly.

The Xbox Live Video Marketplace gives you the option to download movies and TV shows to your Xbox 360 hard drive, some of which are offered in both standard definition and high definition 720p formats. TV shows can be downloaded and permanently saved to your hard drive, though the movies are only available to rent. Renting movies requires that you pay a charge of Microsoft Points, which then allows you to download the movie onto your hard drive for a two week period. However, once you begin playing the movie, a timer is activated that counts down from 24 hours, after which time the film will expire and you’ll either have to delete it or fork over some more MS Points to get another two week period. Costwise, the films are close to you’d pay at a video rental store, costing about 320 and 480 MS Points (for standard and high-def, respectively) for new releases and 240 to 360 for older films. This puts them from $3 to $6 range, so about when you’d expect to pay for a rental.

There aren’t many options in the Video Marketplace quite yet, but what they do have out of the gate is pretty good, ranging from fairly recent releases (Mission: Impossible 3) to established classics (Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams) and even a few oddball titles for good measure (Pootie Tang…?) There are currently only 48 films offered through the service (only about a handful of which are available in HD), but hopefully there will be a lot more soon. The TV Shows seem a bit more fleshed out at this point, with a wide variety of shows and plenty of episodes (categorized by season) to keep you entertained.

For the sake of this article, I went ahead and downloaded a movie to see how the overall service works. I downloaded the HD version of Clash of the Titans (some may consider it an oddball title, but it will always be a classic to me). First off, these are full-length movies, so they aren’t going to be terribly small. Also, if you go for the less-compressed HD-quality flicks, realize that you’ll have to clear off several demos in order to get them to fit (Clash of the Titans was a healthy 5.2 GB download). Lastly, if you download these huge movies on a whim one night, be aware that you’ll more than likely not be able to watch them until the next morning due to long download times.

Fortunately, once those issues had subsided and I finally had my movie, it was a cake walk from here on out. The movies look great, even an oldie like Clash of the Titans really shone through in high-def. Navigating them is a snap too, working as though you put a DVD into the drive.

However, there are still two major issues that seem to be glaring in the Video Marketplace’s launch. The biggest one perhaps has to do with the technical limitations of the Xbox 360 itself: the hard drive is just way too small for video downloads. Granted, 20 Gigs is fine for gaming, downloading some songs and even a few demos, it doesn’t cut the mustard when we’re talking 5 Gigs per high-def film. Considering the push that MS would like to make with the Video Marketplace, now is the time when they should really start cracking on a larger HDD for the 360 (c’mon now, it’s detachable for a reason).

The second issue has to do with the current lack of content. Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly a blast to download and watch Harry Hamlin fly around on a stop-motion horse and fight giant scorpions for the first time since Reagan was in office, but for the service to really pan out like iTunes, they’ll need to get more content and newer films to truly make it worth the average 360 owner’s time and money.