Yeah, that last line pretty much sums up most of the recent Xbox360 news...

then the point of it all would be.......?????

/fail.

i'd been quite excited all week aswell :[

Disappointing news

What a waste!

YAY! i mean wait wah?

I don't understand the point of this. You already get a set top box with hard drive for free with the BT Vision service. I don't see the advantage to the consumer of using the Xbox over the provided equipment.

Dramatic Chipmunk!

(Damn I wish GIF posting was possible)

Guess what you can run it...wait sorry no...*sneaks off*

that announcement was as useful as an a$$hole on your elbow

So basically it ONLY gives you movie downloads and you have to buy it with a BT Broadband contract. No thanks.

Well IPTV generally requires specific protocol support on the ethernet adapter for live service. Something tells me that MS might not have the prper hardware support for it. I mean, realistically it'd be a no-brainer.

Can someone explain to me what the desire is to make a gaming console into a TV terminal is all about anyway? When I want to watch TV, I just hit my TV/Video button.

Simple enough.

Well people have been saying its supposed to be a gaming system only. This only further proves that fact.

Duh. 360s dont all ship with hdd! Remember that they must cater to the lowest common denominator - Arcade. This is why we will supposedly never see HDDVD games, or much required HDD support in games.

I hear that next year, they're going to announce that you can stream games to your windows mobile phone.

Let's get this rumor going strong, so we can bash the hell out of Microsoft when it isn't true.

Hopefully these guys are capable of taking the obvious next step: enable streaming and storage to a local Windows PC or Windows Home Server. True, that means that you're going to have one more box running 24/7, but storing everything on one centralized box and streaming from the one centralized box to wherever you have your Xbox makes a lot more sense than storing stuff locally on the Xbox anyway.

/wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

:/

Wow... That does suck. A lot.

@Moonshadow101: You can already do that. Its especially easy with something like a Slingbox

@MrBionic: Imagine a world where instead of hitting one button, you had to sign into a profile and connect to the service via XBL. You must hate the future.

Disclaimer: I dont know if all that would actually be required.

Microsoft: We thank you all for coming to CES! And now we would like to introduce...HALF AN ASS! (other half TBA)

[insert price is right fail music here]

@Terrorsaur:
[youtube.com]
I just had to do it.

The what is the point of even bringing this thing out?

I love the "or enough hard drive for practical downloading of content" part. Not that I'm a PS3 fanboy or anything.. But I wish I was.

It's because it doesn't have an antennae. It just can't do live TV. It can do IPTV.

Hmmm.

You could probably get away with changing the title of the post to: Set-Top Xbox Completely Sucks, Is Useless

Less subtle, but effective.

Pointless, completely and utterly pointless.

Umm... it's a STB not a PVR. You use it for watching movies / tv / sport, not recording it.

This is very smart of MS! Combine all their crappy news in a single week instead of over time! $50 a year live problems? Check! HD-DVD declared a failure? Check! A useless and disappointing take on IPTV? Check and Check!

I've always had faith Sony would come back to form and eventually on top of the market...thanks MS for making that extra clear to the masses! I still love my 360, but my PS3 just that much more.....

So, here's my question. Is this a BT limitation or an IPTV technology limitation? From what they say, the IPTV protocol works just fine. So if they can't encode live feeds and send it over IPTV protocol, it leaves me wondering what's going on here.

HAHAHAHA Lame! I love my xbox but microsoft takes out the dummest crap, the 360 is an excellent gaming console (one of the best) but its defective! 2nd, the HD-DVD is dying! 3rd xbox live is been dead for like 19 days now? im paying 50bucks? then this..FAIL FAIL FAIL!

Man, if you think about it. Xbox Live being riddles for 20 days deserves more than just one free download.

@okenny :): As for hard drive space, isn't that the point of IPTV... getting rid of the need local media storage? I'm not sure what's going on here but it really sounds strange. They are saying 20GB isn't enough to store paused live TV... or even 120 GB which is 2x more then most Motorola HD-DVR boxes. Strange news. This statement is in complete contradiction to what Microsoft said last CES and it isn't coming from Microsoft which leaves me worried.

Some PR guy is gonna shit on this dude:

"The reason for streaming only on the Xbox is because currently the console does not have the capability for live TV or enough hard drive for practical downloading of content"

That's the sort of brutal honesty you just don't see in the industry. You would never hear any of the console manufacturers admit so candidly that their console "does not have the capability" to do something. Hell, if you pressed Microsoft to tell you whether or not the Xbox 360 cures cancer, they'd probably still give you a no comment.

That must have been a mistake. I expect we'll be hearing some sort of a rebuttal or retraction from Microsoft quite soon.

Wow. Did not see that coming.
This CES was in a bizzarro universe. Sony triumphant and Star Wars in Soulcalibur.

News said IPTV, not PVR. Get your brains out of your asses and stop expecting something that wasn't promised.

@scottyboy218: Hehehe...they meant watching live streaming TV and not VOD.

@okenny :): IPTV supports live broadcasts.

@WatershipDown: Eff off. Get with the times. If you want to become a "Media Center", which is what M$oft wants of the X360, then having TiVo like capabilities is a must. It's expected because anything less than is retarded, ESPECIALLY when you consider the competition.

Epic fail.

Despite all the problems associated with using the 360 as a set top box (RRoD, absurdly noisy optical drive, disc destroying laser), I thought that the idea was pretty cool. Especially if they could roll out the capability to all users via a firmware update and then partner with one or more of the telcos to make the system plug and play. Yeah, maybe it wasn't the best device suited for the job, but it was a really cool feature to add onto the checklist and neat in a "and look what else it can do too!" sort of way.

Totally not feeling any of that excitement now :\

Yeah, this just went from "huh, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where I would use my Xbox for IPTV to replace my current provider" to "no interest whatsoever". Not that I'm in the current market, but one assumes they're testing there and aiming at the states if it works.

on the other hand the ps3 can view content live..

Is this the year we see the PS3 take the number two spot?

That's actually kind of embarrassing when the PS3 was shown pulling a Tivo in the UK.

While there's no doubt the 360 has a great collection of games it's trying to position itself as a media center. Too bad it has the network but not the equipment to support their vision. And with the hole already dug for HD DVD's coffin the vision is even more out of focus.

And for all you digital distribution fans consider that there are people that are still using VHS tapes. If you think DD is going put an end to physical media you're kidding yourself. I don't know about you but housing my entire movie collection on a HDD scares the living crap out of me.

I just dropped my external HDD (onto carpet from a 2' coffee table) this weekend and it's toast. That's 250GB gone. If that was the Matrix Trilogy and the first two seasons of Family Guy in high-def on there I'd be looking for a clock tower waiting to cap J. Allard.

OUCH, that should hurt. Well, come on, this IS NOT the year of the 360. The only thing that could save the 360 this year is... well GOW2, and i don't thing it is coming soon. Sorry Guys.

@incredibilistic: I agree, I get nervous housing everything on HDDs, thats why this HD format war has sucked so much, if they had just gotten all behind one we would have cheaper HD-DVD and/or BluRay Burners by now, and it wouldn't be so damn troublesome to back stuff up to discs in huge quantities.

@qbanboi: Ninja Gaiden 2 is coming out this year. That alone would be reason to own a 360 for me, even if MS closed their games division the month after it came out ;)

I didn't think so...with 20 gig you can't even put a couple of hidef movies on there.

It burns

Cool, the on demand service means you can download as many tv shows and movies as yoou want for a fixed monthly fee.

Much better than live marketplace :)

As somebody from the UK who follows TV very closely I can explain exactly what's up here.

BT doesn't use IPTV for its Live TV. It uses Digital Terrestrial and it has the ability to record it.

All that comes through the IPTV portion is the VOD stuff.

As Microsoft is launching an IPTV product, it has no interest in adding DTT to the console as well for BT's service to work how it does when used with their STB.

It obviously raises the question "why bother?" - that is up to you.

But the Xbox 360 will support recording of IPTV (including a live buffer). Microsoft's demonstrations show it and there are the screenshots (not fake) of the beta software explaining what size HDD you need to do certain recording tasks.

@nxp3: Hidef films are usually about 6 gig. So theoretically you could get two or maybe three on the 360's 20gb hard drive.
Of course anyone seriously wanting to record hidef would get the 120gb drive.

If you have Windows Media Center, you can already do this. Media Center streams it to the X-Box if you have a video capture card installed on your computer.

The only real problem is that it bones people who have satellite service instead of cable.

My old PCI capture card doesn't work with Vista so I haven't gotten to try it yet. My next step is to install XP w/ media center on a seperate HDD and try that same PCI card.

I just don't see why they'd have to re-invent the wheel to do this. All you would really need is a USB capture device, a HDD upgrade to the 360, and a software update. All of which I'm sure they will combine into 1 USB device for about $150 more than you could purchase a Tivo for.

I live in the midwest and most people around here are about as techno-savvy as wet-papertowel and they still already have DVR set up with either their satellite service for Digi-Cable. So what's teh f'n point?