Now you can download films and TV shows on Xbox 360
Robert Levine: Owners of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console will soon be able to watch sci-fi epics as well as play them. Microsoft said it would offer movies and episodes of television shows for downloading through its Xbox Live online service in the US from November 22. With the new offerings, Microsoft is joining cable giants and Internet start-ups on the long list of companies hoping to profit from video downloading. But Internetbased services have had trouble getting traction because it can be complex to send a downloaded film to a television screen and frustrating to watch it on the small screen of a computer. Owners of the Xbox have already connected it to a TV and, in most cases, the Net. “What makes this big is that there’s no PC in the middle,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. Microsoft has negotiated the rights to rent or sell more than 1,000 hours of material from CBS, MTV, Paramount, Warner Bros and Turner Broadcasting. The video store will work much li