Xbox Live Video Marketplace – needs more work under the hood

November 26th, 2006

Windows Vista and Xbox live, try to interconnect and make it easy for users to share content and media. The Xbox live in particular is a system meant to bring HD movies and TV series to Xbox 360 users, it’s a point based system where you buy points with money and with points you can download content. This looks simple enough and if you think that the same point system might be used by Microsoft for it’s new mp3 player, Zune, it sounds rather good.

But as always there are ups and downs, one of the downsides is that Xbox 360 only has 20 Gb available for storage and that’s not a lot when talking HDTV. Besides there were some technical problems with the actual download for the video content, the Microsoft officials say that issues appeared due to “the extremely high number of downloads.” as Larry Hryb from Xbox live says. Problems range from delays to situations where content was never delivered, the same Larry Hryb assures that refunds are in order if it’s the case:

“I also want to mention that if you see the ‘Points have been deducted from your account…’ message when you are trying to download free content, we are NOT deducting points. Thanks for your patience, and please know that the team is prepared to make things right for those affected, including refunding Microsoft Points where appropriate and as quickly as possible.”

I’m no big Xbox fan but it seems that with a few tweaks here and there and some technical support the Xbox Live can be a success.