Who controls the TV in your living room?
The battle for the remote is a staple of family life. Throw a games console into the mix and older family members can find themselves consigned to the spare room. But because the living-room TV is the gateway to the digital home, today's 'gaming device' is tomorrow's gesture- and voice-controlled media centre.
Right now, tech-savvy people such as you and I find our information on the web and, along with a little iPlayer, catch our entertainment from the tellybox. We access the services of Google, via the technology of BT and Virgin. In the mobile world, Apple has its share of technophiles consuming media via iTunes, while Sky is the big beast of pay-for TV. Microsoft has fingers in most of these pies, but is master of only the window by which you access the web from your PC.
But Microsoft no longer targets only techies - as Android and iOS eat into the mobile-computing soace, it can't afford to. In its keynote speech at the Consumer Elactronics Show in January, Microsoft made little of PCs and a lot of the Xbox - in particular Kinect and Xbox Live. It's big business - Microsoft has sold more than eight million Kinect sensors, while 30 million people use Xbox Live.
With a web-connected Xbox 360, Microsoft users will soon be able to experience thousands of movies and TV shows, as well as music, websites and even I've sport (in the US). They can watch on demand, in the living room, on the biggest screen in the home. And they can chat to and see other Xbox Live users as they do so - which makes browsing the web on a PC seem quaint, and consigns the humble TV remote to the dustbin.
I'm no Microsoft fanboy, and I'm no gamer, but the shift in focus is interesting. At a recent fancy dress party, two friends (BA Baracus and a wizard) who live many miles apart seamlessly carried on the banter they nightly indulge in over Xbox Live. No surprise there, but both have in the past asked me for basic tech support and neither spends time on what they would call a 'PC'. The idea of calling a mate over VoIP would never occur -but they are doing it every evening.
Plenty of other options exist for accessing this content, along with myriad ways to communicate. But Microsoft has the potential to marry these together and, as we've seen with iTunes, it you control access to content, you squeeze out your rivals.
Xbox Live users weren't looking for an entertainment hub, they wanted to chat to their mates whilst gaming. But If Microsoft can convert these and similar people to accessing TV and movies through their games console, it will add the living room to the office it already dominates.
Source: PC World
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