Microsoft Updates Xbox To Cement Hold On Living Room

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Microsofts new Smartglass technology, due Friday, combined with a new update to the Xbox, puts the company clearly in the drivers seat to control the evolution of the living room.

Microsoft said Tuesday that its Smartglass technology, which makes tablets and phones a second screen to complement the Xbox game console, will be available on Friday, the same day the company plans to release Windows 8. At the same time, a scheduled Xbox update adds Windows Explorer to the TV screen - along with a key addition: recommended content.

We are bringing the Web to the TV like never before with Internet Explorer, launching a brand new music service, and making it even easier to find the entertainment you love using Kinect and Bing voice search, said Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing officer for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Division, in a blog post. This release is the next step in our journey to transform Xbox 360 from a games console to an all-in-one entertainment system.

According to Nielsens first-quarter Cross-Platform Report, (PDF), Americans spend 1 hour 38

minutes per week on gaming devices. But consoles with the power to stream video (now, virtually all of them), the average time spent is 2 hours and 48 minutes a week. The conclusion? Game consoles arent just a console, theyre a set-top box, a front-end gateway to entertainment content that the traditional cable or satellite box just doesnt provide.

The same report also notes that DVR viewing continues to increase. With the exception of live sports, viewers are caring less about watching live TV as it happens, instead time-shifting it to when its most convenient. That, in turn, blurs the line between the recorded shows available on Netflix, Hulu and other sources of content and the linear streams of content presented on network and cable TV that we can dip into with our DVRs.

One of the most important additions to the Xbox update, then, is the release of recommendations. Recommendations will allow you to discover new movies, TV shows and games, generated based on a number of variables including the content you previously viewed, what your friends are consuming and what is most relevant and popular with our Xbox community, said Larry Hyrb, Microsofts Xbox community spokesman, in a related blog post. You can now rate content yourself and also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

According to ABI Research, the number of videos and TV shows available to watch numbers somewhere north of 100,000, although the total varies widely according to how theyre defined. (Amazon and Google, for example, are suspected to equate a single episode of a TV show as equivalent to a movie, putting South Park on the scale of Captain America.) However you count, though, theres an overwhelming amount of content out there, and recommendations help narrow it down based on your preferences and what your friends like.

There are essentially three methods of rating content:

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Microsoft Updates Xbox To Cement Hold On Living Room