My Digital Life

The arrival of the new Grand Theft Auto game has left with a bit of a dilemma… I have an xbox 360 which I’m pretty happy with.  A bunch of my workmates have PS3’s.  We’ve been talking quite a bit about GTA and they’ve been telling me how good it is, and how it’s got online play that I should join in with. 

So do I buy it for my xbox and play without my mates, or buy a PS3 and play online with them. 

I don’t like having problems like this… I rarely need much of a reason to blow cash on sexy technology so having an argument to do just that doesn’t help my bank balance.  It strikes me that the reason I have this dilemma is that there’s no unified identity or play across PS3 and xbox. 

Xbox Live is now pretty well developed, but the impression I get from my mates is that the Playstation Network is less so.  Without knowing the in’s and out’s of games development I would imagine that sorting out the online play is quite complex and that its something you’d want to do as fewer times as possible. 

Given that end users probably want cross-platform play, and that developers would probably quite like to have one way of doing things, if I was Microsoft I’d be looking at providing some sort of Xbox Live dev kit for PS3’s.

I’m guessing there are some pretty well defined API’s there that aren’t necessarily tied to a hardware platform.  And it’s not necessarily something Sony could stop (unless the PS3 developers are contractually tied to the PSN), so I imagine its technically possible.

I can see why MS wouldn’t want to do this, after all it might be one less reason by an XBox over a PS3.  But given that the PS3 seems to be gaining momentum now that Blueray has won over HD-DVD it might be nice way of MS cashing in on Sony’s success.   If PS3 users are able to play on XBox Live it would seem like quite a good way of driving new subscriptions and giving the PS3 owners a taste of what’s available on the full Live Marketplace on xbox.

Does that make sense or am I just daydreaming?

I couldn’t make it to Mix this year, which is a real shame as from what I’ve heard it was a great conference.  To try and catch up I’ve spent a good few hours this week watching videos of the sessions over on the Mix site. 

Now I think the Mix site is great, having these sessions online and freely available is fantastic resource for anyone who couldn’t make the conference.  Whether they’re professional geeks like me, students or people who were there and missed a particular session.

So last night I found myself sat on my sofa with my laptop and headphones watching the Steve B interview.  As good as the Mix site and videos are, I realised it would be much nicer to be watching these things on my TV.  I did briefly consider how I could hook up my laptop, but I figured it would be much easier if I could just watch them through Xbox Live.

There’s some pretty good content on Live these days, especially in the US (the UK seems to have a lot less for some reason).  To my mind the more content that’s available. and the more choice available the better it is for the customer (user?) and therefore for MS.  Content like the sessions from Mix are like gold dust for geeks and IT pros, and making this stuff available on XBox Live would seem to be a quick win.  At the very least it says good things about MS’s openness and willingness to share MS resources with the wider world. 

(Though Steve B might want to beep out his email address!)

I’ve just been catching up on a few days worth of Tweets and Blog posts.  One of the articles I’ve been reading was a piece on c|net about the MS Mediaroom IPTV solution.   It sounds like there are 1 million or so people on the system now which is great.  My guess is a fair chunk of those are from BT here in the UK through their BT Vision product.  The article talks about how IPTV will merge into Media Center, and find it’s way into homes through that route, but to be honest I think they’ve missed a huge piece of the story.  Xbox.

The announcement last month of MS IPTV integration into the Xbox 360 gives the platform 10 million potential users in one go.  At an Architecture Forum seminar on Tuesday it was mentioned that roughly 75% (IIRC) of Xbox’s are online using Xbox Live.  So that could be 7.5 million IPTV consumers.  Not a bad number really.  To my mind the key will be how well the services are integrated into the Xbox console, and how the services are provided and billed. 

From what I’ve read it sounds like the new Xbox IPTV services are being launched though the existing telecoms partners, BT in the UK, AT&T in the states etc.  From what I understand, in the UK at least it’ll only be available to BT broadband customers.  If it was me, once I knew it was all working I’d try to open this up wider.  Give it free to BT broadband customers (god knows we need something to chear us up…) but charge a small subscription for everyone else.  Use the MS Points model for billing so you can order it straight through the XBox console.  Easy. 

(Of course there there would be problems around bandwidth etc.  Here you need at least 2MB/s to even get the BT Vision installed… but those are problems that will ease with time)

Bundling content and features into games consoles is a great way of making technology mainstream.  It worked for Sony and Blueray, why not for IPTV?