If they were really really serious about the TV angle, it would have had DVR functionality and a cable tuner card, in a way all this TV stuff without those two features seems kind of pointless.
Gedd
2868
Has MS ever offered any justification for why they put 3rd party streaming video apps behind XBL Gold? Do the apps require some amount of support and/or resources from MS to operate? I can’t imagine, other than hosting the app files themselves, that they do.
Aleck
2869
Such an incredible missed opportunity here. If Microsoft had built in a tuner and DVR, it would be a no-brainer day one purchase for me (as a gadget weenie). Instead they made it Kinect mandatory, which does nothing for me.
“However, with near-final production silicon, Microsoft techs have found that the hardware is capable of reading and writing simultaneously”
How the eff do you miss that?
Zerot
2871
I think Microsoft makes the apps themselves, not the 3rd parties. At least that was the case for Netflix, Twitter and Facebook if I remember correctly.
stusser
2872
If so, that’s because they insisted on doing it. Time-warner makes its own apps for all those other platforms.
MS simply won’t let you do anything other than play single-player games unless you kick in for XBL gold. That is particularly crazy with the xbone, since they’re making such a big deal out of its media and online capabilities.
JeffL
2873
I never figured out why I would want to control my Dish DVR through my XBox instead of directly through my Dish DVR.
Moore
2874
/Huell Howser voice
JUST ANOTHER FINE EXAMPLE, OF XBOX GOLD
/Huell Howser voice
stusser
2875
MS thinks you’ll want to watch sports with friends on skype in the corner of your screen, or scroll tweets about the show you happen to be watching, or browse the web on your couch with a show on… like I said, it’s all bullshit, even if it worked.
Zylon
2876
Remember wayyy back when TV manufacturers were touting their awesome new picture-in-picture technology? That nobody ever actually used? Here we go again.
They don’t. They like to perpetuate the perception that they do, but they don’t. They let everyone believe they made the Netflix app until everyone hated the new UI and then they were swift to point out that Netflix creates their own apps, not MS.
JeffL
2878
Yeah, I have pic in pic capability and have had it for a few years, and the only time I’ve used it is when my wife accidentally turned it on and we had to figure out how to turn it off. I think a lot of people have the capability and very few use it.
Its offered in my cable box too, I think. Pretty sure I can force it to do picture-in-picture-in-picture.
Totally useless though. One wonders what the supposed use case was.
Switching to another channel while a commercial was on, or keeping the score of the big game in view while watching something else.
Yep. But really it existed so they could put another bullet point on the box. It worked, but nobody used that crap. The xbone TV integration is live TV only, but even if it worked with your DVR, you wouldn’t use it either.
Hugin
2882
I agree PIP was mostly useless, but it did have one usage case I liked: If you had some major news event going on, and different networks had different coverage and you were constantly jockeying around trying to find the best camera feed or the best current interview or whatever, PIP was pretty useful. But events that big happen…once a year? Once every two years?
Gedd
2883
I used the PIP in my cable box for flipping between sports stuff (which I generally watch live) during commercials, but it annoyed me because it could only sit in one of four predetermined spots, and they were all based on 4:3 TV positioning so you couldn’t move it off to the corner in an HD resolution.
Canuck
2884
I’ve never used ours. Mainly because I don’t know how. I think the idea of using it while you’re flipping channels during a commercial makes a lot of sense though.
Rarely used PIP. And I doubt I will ever use the snap-to-the-side feature of the Xbox One ever. But I think that’s there because the Xbox One OS is partially built on the Windows 8.1 OS and that’s a standard feature.
The most useful feature of the Xbox One OS (other than it let’s you play games of course) is the ability to instantly and seamlessly switch between stuff. That said, it would not surprise if Sony figures out how to ever something like this on the PS4.
Jazar
2886
PS4 has an instant suspend / resume feature.
“PS4 radically reduces the lag time between players and their content. PS4 features “suspend mode” which keeps the system in a low power state while preserving the game session. The time it takes today to boot a console and load a saved game will be a thing of the past. With PS4, gamers just hit the power button again and are promptly back playing the game at the exact point where they left off. Additionally, users can boot a variety of applications including a web browser when playing a game on PS4.”
