First up, Microsoft has announced “Xbox Live Video” – basicly a download service for TV and Movies. No details on pricing as yet, but it looks like a pretty good deal.
On the TV front it allows you to purchase the shows, and keep indefinitely, and re-download them as much as you like (or your ISP will allow). Given the deployed user base of the Xbox 360, this is certainly a big move for MS, and is a (big) step towards edging out the other pretty much non-existant Movie-Download services.
You can also watch them on any of your other XBox 360′s, or take the movie (on the detatchable drive) over to a friend’s console and watch there.
Movies are currently only “for rent” – they expire after a day or two.
All of the HD content is delivered are as WMVHD, and 720p w/ 5.1 Surround, I assume SD content is also delivered as WMVHD, but with lower resolution.
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Over on the code front – they’ve shipped Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework.
I was only telling my boss on Friday that it’d probably be out sometime in the new year, I guess I was wrong. (Maybe that’ll be the next version of Visual Studio – Orcas?)
Now we can tell the Intranet Platform guys at work to forget about going for .NET 2.0 (Yeah, we’re still on .NET 1.1), and go straight for .NET 3.0.
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Staying on the code front, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 Library (aka Atlas – which is much easier to say) is out now.
This lets developers (like me) do fancy stuff* on the client side — without having to do a whole lot of additional work in a different development environment, with a different language.
Practical example of what kind of fancy stuff I can do, that actually improves the user productivity: Customer-search-as-you-type.
I can be typing in a customer/service key, it automaticly does a search, and displays the results right there – no page reloads.
Typically the time it takes for the system to do that search is less than it takes for someone to switch to a mouse and click the “Search” button. It’s always faster than waiting for a page to re-load with search results.
More AJAX goodness == good fun, good productivity increase, happier users, happier management. Being able to do this stuff easily == happier developer.
* = Fancy Stuff is the technical term for it. Other accepted terms are “”Magic” or “Holy crap that’s fast”
Thanks for linking me! Love you blog! keep the good work …. mate!
Ohh, you got a fan Will!! hehe
So what happens if you haven’t got a n x-box (and not likely to get one)? Will th format be readily downloadable to a PC??
Doubt it – They have other types of related-ish services (MSN TV) which arn’t getting this – so it looks like MS is trying to push the Xbox 360 as an all-in-one entertainment unit for the household.
Given that you can add it as a Media Extender for a Windows Media Centre Edition machine, it’s actually a pretty neat little bunch of integration.
The one thing they are missing, however is integrating the MCE stuff itself into the XBox (i.e TV Tuners, etc). Perhaps not enough CPU grunt (let alone disk space) to run 2x HDTV Tuners, Plus HD games at once.