June 1st 2009 4:44 pm PT

Great news. Now maybe all the whining little B@stards in other countries will stop crying about what we get and they don’t.

Yawn

I don’t understand what it means. Yeah, dumb me.

Does this mean Video rentals, or TV shows too?

Hopefully this is in addition to the option to download it, for folks who don’t have the bandwidth to support full streaming of 1080p content. If this is *replacing* downloading, well, that’s not really a good thing.

Can someone confirm what new countries we’re talking about?

is Mexico included on this 18 countries ?

all movies are offered in 1080p with no wait on download… look out blu-ray…… no disc or player needed

remember in last weeks podcast when Major said something like “you were there when they announced X at E3 09″? seriously? these are those announcements? just slightly disappointing…

Any chance we can get a list of the countries and an ETA (per country/region)?

Fingers crossed for Austria. Not that I will buy any movie, but it is a step in the right direction.

How does it work? there isn’t any streaming involved. Curiouser and curiouser

1080p movies, instant HD streaming, all of Europe invited (except Portugal, sorry guys) – BOOM!
about 1 hour ago from web

http://twitter.com/AceyBongos

Wow, finally is Sweden getting something!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder how they’re going to do all that without downloads.

That’s nice. Now then, does this mean 1080p Netflix?

my money is on youtube style streaming….. movie starts instantly…. yet all of the movie isnt on your system….

“Microsoft announced it will more than double the number of markets where Xbox LIVE offers its TV shows and movies, growing from eight to 18, by adding Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. Xbox LIVE members in these markets will have access to instant on 1080p video.”

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/e3/centerstage.htm

CyberSkull: Netflix is not the same as the video market place…. 1080p Netflix would be up to Netflix to provide…. This sounds more like market place content…. ie video rentals…. Makes it a competitor of Blu-ray….

We will have to see if it works… but blu-rays big competition now is digital download…. microsoft just fired the first shot…..

great to see that this feature is coming to Norway.

Unless they start a subscription service like Netflix I’m not interested. I’m not wasting alot of money on mass downloads/charges when I can just do a subscription service. Make a $20/month unlimited instant plan with release date availability and I’m in.

18?
WOW!

is…..Bahrain in there?

Thanks Kebabkongen for the link and list of countries. Can’t wait to see what kind of pricing they’ll come up with, though I won’t get my hopes up it’ll be interesting to use regularly.

Does 1080p look just as good over a component only 360 as it does a HDMI 360?

Damn… As you can see from my gamercard’s country I’m pissed. No marketplace, no TV commercials, very few games at stores, no Community Games channel (i’m finishing a degree of computer science and I’m toying around with XNA 3.0…), no nothing. I like this system a lot, but I can’t help but feeling that here in Portugal we have half of the experience that we should have. No wonder Sony got almost 90% of market share in here… But hey, who cares about a small country?… =]

@Fletch955

if your TV can support 1080p over component, it will look pretty much the same.

This all sounds great and everything in theory, but until they can get this to actually work in full 1080P with millions of people accessing the servers at once, THEN I’ll be impressed.

Again, I don’t care. I don’t buy videos from VM because – in my country – it’s too damn expensive for a single-view event. Then there’s the thin selection, the complete lack of TV shows, no multilingual options (becasue frankly, german dubs usually suck). In short, it’s as unattractive as it can get.

This is great news!

Anyone who thinks 1080p streaming is going to come even close to Blu-ray quality is going to be disappointed.

Blu-ray use around 25Mbit and its going to be a LONG time until enough people have broadband that fast. Even then, it would cost a LOT in bandwidth costs to stream that high bitrate so it will likely never get that high.

On a good day I get 5Mbit on my ADSL, the average speed in the UK is supposed to be 3Mbit with the UK government only promising to have 2Mbit access to EVERYONE by 2012.

So simply put, there is no benefit to Microsoft streaming more than around 3Mbit as it costs them more bandwidth and disk space to do that with very little to gain in return. Even in the US I doubt if you worked it out that the most common bitrate was greater than that. Theres a few people with super-fast connections, but a lot with very slow ones too.

Alex: but to the average person whom doesnt own a blu-ray player…. will it not be good enough?

I for one own a blu-ray player and prefer to own discs with content on them… but this is an interesting option for those that own a 360 and dont own a blu-ray player also…..

In the link provided earlier it states that you will need 8 mbit constant for the streaming, so no streaming for me as I am happy if I get my max of 6 mbit for a few minutes.

wooooooooooooooooooooo 1080p instant for usa only ? lol

Guys put it this way as good as this sounds , and your all speculating still about bandwidth in the UK..seriously do yo think its a coincidence that SKY have jumped on board..with there already 16 meg lines, and yes I do get very close to that constantly.

Believe me sky is tied to this is some way..you see.
Take my advice..go get sky broadband NOW if you want to be in on all this xbox stuff, and before you all moan, I’m a normal customer with 16 meg sky, who has I think in 2 years been DC 3 times, because of problems, so for me the perfect match, or should I rephrase that, its going to be your best option for your xbox content.

Finally! Now I won’t have to cringe every time the no Blu-Ray excuse is given. Of course it’s still only an excuse because even presuming these are using the VC-1 codec they obviously aren’t the 20+Mbit/s of Blu-Ray.

Now if they are reasonably priced, and if you add scheduled downloading so I can download them using my off-peak (3am to 10am) bandwidth, I may actually use it. The 8Mbps requirement means I could probably stream them on a good day, but it would chew through my 40GB peak quota pretty quick too.

To the question above, 1080p instant on will be in 18 countries as linked in an earlier comment. See http://tinyurl.com/luph3c

@ tozOL … true, sky’s 16mb would be sufficient I suppose… although the 50mb I get from Virgin would be better

Wonder how much rentals of 1080p movies are gonna cost us?

Glad this is coming to the Netherlands!

while this sounds like a cool idea for those who don’t have a Blu-Ray player, its not something that i would use. I like having a physical copy of a movie so I don’t need to deal with the stupid DRM policy of Live. also I don’t have to worry if Live is down, or if my internet connection craps out or suddenly experiences slowdown.

Fantastic news! I quit buying movies because it was a waste of money, never watch them twice unless its a kids movie and the kids will watch it over and over. In which case a dvd is fine, wouldn’t buy a bd anyway. Instant on 1080p sounds sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet and definitely puts the pressure on the market. Especially if they tie this into the same services available for media center and what not to make sure there is a large customer base.

Yeah, sounds nice, but I live in the middle of nowhere and I’m lucky to get 768k downloading. I have netflix and it looks like old VHS movies because of my download speed. What do you bet that I still have to download and wait?