This week Microsoft revealed a partial official list of the partners for their new TV service. Until now, honestly, I sort of figured the service would never happen, especially at this point in the Xbox life cycle. But here it is!
Content providers like Comcast, Verizon, and HBO are on board for the service and Comcast even has a blog post up talking about the partnership. The whole idea of the service is appealing for a lot of reasons. My Xbox has a much more responsive – and appealing – interface than my cable box. My remote works just as well with my Xbox as it does with my television. If there’s enough content up, something like this could easily make my cable box unnecessary.
The tentative launch date of Holiday 2011 means this isn’t far off. A problem occurs to me, though, that’s going to be an issue with more and more ISPs as time goes on.
When a subscriber watches on-demand television through their cable box, it goes through their cable tv signal. On the other hand, when someone watches a show on Xbox Live, it’ll go through their internet connection. Internet connections are more than fast enough to support this, but what kind of bandwidth will Xbox TV – or whatever they call it – take to run? Those of us who already do a lot of streaming and online gaming find ourselves worrying about that bandwidth cap set by our ISP of choice.
With more and more streaming services available as appealing as Xbox TV and Netflix, the bandwidth caps get more and more frustrating. While some ISPs are more “generous” with 250GB transfer caps, AT&T has a much lower 150GB transfer cap, and others are even lower. For a while Time Warner was testing 40GB transfer caps. In Canada, Netflix actually has to offer lower-quality streaming plans to fit into the much lower caps that the largest ISPs keep there.
So my question isn’t “can the internet handle it?” It certainly can. I’m also not concerned about whether the service itself will be good. As a Microsoft fanboy, I feel safe saying that Microsoft almost always makes excellent software, especially when it comes to Xbox functionality. The real problem is whether the ISPs of the world are willing to let people watch live TV on their Xboxes without throttling connections or causing consumers to unknowingly bump up against that transfer caps.
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