DirecTV blade coming to 360 Dashboard?

by Christopher Grant { Feb 16th 2006 at 11:59PM }

During CES in January, Microsoft and DirecTV announced a "long-term agreement to expand the reach of digital content throughout the home and on the go." Part of that agreement involved extending "the DirecTV experience to the Xbox 360 system."

A scan of the March 2006 issue of Official Xbox Magazine reveals "that a DirecTV blade might be added to your Xbox 360 Dashboard to accompany the Xbox Live, Games, Media, and System blades. In that blade, you could download TV episodes in high definition, HD movies on demand, and standard-definition streaming DVR (i.e., TiVo) functions."

Looks like the PS3 won't be the only next-gen system with advanced media capabilities. Now the big question is, what'll it cost us?

[Thanks, dsub]

Tags: Directv, satellite

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Justin @ Feb 17th 2006 12:10AM

Well shit, then they better do something to speed up the downloading... took forever to nab the Fight Night demo!

Doile @ Feb 17th 2006 1:12AM

digg this story

James @ Feb 17th 2006 1:29AM

True that! I can consistently download at over 1MB/sec on my PC. On the 360 it seems to take anywhere from three to four times as long to download similarly sized files (500MB-1GB).

Talvish @ Feb 17th 2006 2:08AM

I would presume that we will see:

a) downloads in the background
b) bigger hard drives coming

As another, the reason why downloads probably take longer on the 360 is because MS is trying to ensure that you will be able to do it in the background. There was a reference once that online play must work at 64 Kbps. I assume they say this so that they can share the bandwidth on your broadband with other things...like downloads. And if you notice, when a download is complete now it shows the little notification icon saying it was complete similar to when friends come online. Given you are currently stuck on the download page it makes no sense for that notification ... unless backgrounds will be in the background ... it is all coming together.

Tucker @ Feb 17th 2006 8:40AM

hopefully they will offer some subscription-based model for downloadable tv content as I surely don't want to have think about how much something costs every time i sit down to watch some HDTV...what a psychological nightmare that would be.

Stuka @ Feb 17th 2006 9:21AM

You know when Sony started talking DVR capabilities with the PS3, but then also (supposedly) are saying the PS3 won't come with a hard drive standard, I thought that was pretty stupid. Now MS is talking about DVR capabilities for HD stuff, and they give people a hard drive that can hold 2 DVD-qualities movies barely. It just doesn't seem smart. Either the hard drive is for games and demos and is small, or it's for all that and DVR and is 60-100gb. Make your frigging mind up.

Maestro @ Feb 17th 2006 11:12AM

I don't think your mole is very well informed. Either that or I'm missing something. From what I can tell, there's no way the 360 will be integrating with DirecTV without a tuner for your PC. At which point your PC is what's going to be doing all the tuning/storing of content. If this is the case, why on earth would the Xbox team attemmpt to reinvent the wheel when the Media Center team already has the capability for this?

I do agree that we'll see DirecTV integration with the Xbox 360, but I think we're more likely to see it integrated with the Media Center Extender functionality instead of a new blade.

Or is live TV not in the works here and only downloadable content? I'd much rather have Live DirecTV via my dish then have to download everything.

m3mnoch @ Feb 17th 2006 11:43AM

nah. it's called 'network attached storage.'

tho, the question this whole deal begs is what about drm?

m3mnoch.

Nossy @ Feb 17th 2006 12:53PM

What I really want to see is another blade titled Windows Media Player 10. See all the movies, musics previews/trailers available. Uses the CDDB service to look up ID tags and album picture when I insert a CD. Video/Audio codecs can be dled and updated frequently. Use a removable HDD as a media storage device.

Duscrom @ Feb 17th 2006 1:20PM

I Think Microsoft has something planned for video on the 360. Cause, there is the Video tab in the media section.. but after you delete all the video that comes with the console, what is it for? You can't upload Videos to the HDD, everything downloaded from the marketplace is dropped in trailers... and lastly it dosen't read from other devices.

Tom Tuttle from Tacoma @ Feb 17th 2006 1:54PM

Remeber how LIVE was actually on the Xbox when you first bought it, when it first came out and they waited to launch the LIVE service?

Hmmmm....

coyurtney @ Feb 17th 2006 5:27PM

yes price? and why couldn't they go with something better like Tivo?

jdavid @ Feb 17th 2006 7:13PM

this sounds like another Windows MCE integration. I bet you will need a Windows MCE to make use of this feature. It is a well know fact that MCE will be able to integrate with DirectTV and with CableCARD technology in the very near future. More than half of the security enhancements in Vista are related to CableCARD requirements.