Like many of you out there, I got bent over by Microsoft's recently launched Video store.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, Poseidon was taking forever for me to download, something that has nothing to do with my high-speed connection and everything to do with an overtaxed service on Microsoft's end.

Yesterday, with Poseidon still only 30 percent downloaded I tried canceling it, which essentially puts the download on hold. Then I tried downloading V for Vendetta, but was out of harddrive space. Apparently, when you start a download the service immediately marks the size of the file as used, to ensure you'll be able to get it. Of course, I had nowhere near enough space on my harddrive for two 6 gig plus movies. So I went in and physically deleted both, marked as incomplete files, thinking they had frozen and I could just start over. But when I went to redownload them, the service tried to charge me again.

OK, that was user error, though you'd think it could track whether you had watched or even finished downloading the movies before trying to double charge you.

So I went back in and bought V for Vendetta a second time. Again the movie started downloading at a snail's pace. By the time I had give up on it, and all of my visiting family had gone to sleep, the movie had downloaded 3 percent.

Microsoft late Thursday night acknowledged that they are having issues with the launch.

I just hung up on a conference call on this issue, and I wanted to post an update. As you know, we have been experiencing technical difficulties associated with the extremely high number of downloads from the Video Marketplace service over the past 24 hours. We understand these technical issues have resulted in a very unpleasant experience for our members, including extremely slow downloads or not receiving the content they purchased. We've made progress over the past 24-hours, and the team is dedicated to fixing the issues and continues to work as fast as they can around the clock to get the service running as seamlessly as you have come to expect. We strongly encourage all folks who have experienced an error message or did not receive a download they purchased to call customer support at 1-800-4MYXBOX. 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.

If you are having problems or have questions, you may want to head over to the Video Markeplace forum on Xbox.com. Members of the Video Marketplace team are over there answering questions and providing status updates on issues.

I think they need to take the service down until they can get it up to snuff. This is not the type of first Live experience they want new 360 owners to have and it certainly doesn't live up to their otherwise perfect service.

On the other hand, the TV service seems to be working fine for me. I purchased an episode of Robot Chicken around the same time as my Poseidon rental and sometime between all of the movie screw-ups the show downloaded.

So maybe they just need to take Movies down for a bit. Brian Crecente

Video Marketplace Status [Major Nelson]

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