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Shu Manwill
Xbox Live Home Gold lets you set one Xbox One as your home Xbox, so that anybody logged into it, whether or not they have Gold themselves, can have your Gold privileges. Is it possible to set my One as the home machine, log in two non-Gold users, then log in on another Xbox with my Gold account, so that all three of us get Gold privileges with only my account? What if the second (non-home) Xbox is a 360?
The Home Gold counts as you being logged in to that console. Note they can use netflix and you can use multiplayer. But even then i have to be signed for any gold stuff to work for my wife. She has her own account that has apps but signs in as me and then continues to sign in as her. When i play defiance i have to resign in to the ONe after i finish to play Titanfall.
According to Xbox Support, the scenario you describe should work. Any account logged in to your home Xbox One (whether you are logged in or not) will have access to anything that requires a Gold account, and as long as you have an active Gold subscription any Xbox One you log in to will allow you to use Gold features as well.
Xbox Live Gold sharing doesn't exist on the 360, so that should work the same as it always has - any account that has a Gold subscription will be able to use Gold features, and all other accounts won't.
Thanks to the folks at Microsoft and Netflix, I've gotten the new Xbox 360 console upgrade and have started watching Netflix movies on my Xbox this morning. A couple gaming sites have been doing some reviews as well and have raised a bunch of questions, some of which I have already asked Microsoft and Netflix and will update this post if I get answers.
The new Xbox 360 console update, which will be release to the public on November 19th, includes the highly anticipated ability to stream Netflix content to the Xbox 360 console as long as you are a Microsoft Live Gold customer and a Netflix customer.
After downloading the new console update and then downloading a small Netflix update, you active the streaming functionality by entering a code from your Xbox 360 into your Netflix account via the computer. From there, you can add Netflix videos into your watch now queue and they instantly show up on your Xbox 360. Navigating through your movies is done by going to the Netlfix box in the "Video Marketplace" channel which takes you to an app that allows you to very cleanly and very quickly flip through the movies in your queue. The movies are represented by cover artwork of each movie and even when you have a hundred or so titles in the queue, the app is super fast. I would compare the experience to being almost identical to flipping through albums in iTunes using Cover Flow. The only major downside here is that movies still have be added via the computer first, before they can be played back on the Xbox 360.
Once you select a movie, you get a screen with details about the video and the ability to rate the content as well as the ability to start, resume or remove the video. When you select play, the app checks your connection speed and buffers the video. For me, the videos buffered very fast and I never waited more than about ten seconds for any video to start. That may not be the startup time for the average consumer though as I am on a 20MB FiOS connection. While most movies are in SD, Netflix has to date made about 300 videos available in HD, many of which are TV series and not actual movies. Watching the SD movies on a 50" plasma screen looked amazing and HD is really incredible. The quality of the stream is all based on your connection speed and I am waiting on Netflix to hopefully give me details on the encoding bitrates being used. But the bottom line, the video quality is really, really good and in my eyes, is DVD quality with no frame rate issues.
Netflix and Microsoft have clearly thought about the experience, the ease of use and the quality of the videos being delivered and overall, I expect users will be very happy. That being said, this hands on review leaves me with three main questions that will dictate how successful the offering will be.
For starters, what is the business relationship and model behind the new service? With three parties involved, Microsoft, Netflix and content owners, whom is paying whom to make all this happen and how will money be made? I know this is a new service to start and hence, a clear business model has not yet been established. But over time, one will have to emerge.
Second, does the availability of getting movies on the Xbox 360 now mean that more content owners and in particular, major movie studios, will start giving Netflix the rights to encode and deliver more first-run movies? Hopefully so, but they still control the content and have a big say in the success that the Netflix service will have.
Xbox Live has recently celebrated its 10th birthday, and there is no doubt that the service has come a long way since it was unleashed on the gaming masses in more primitive times. The ground-breaking service offered console owners an opportunity to live the worldwide multiplayer dream, but at the cost of the infamous annual subscription that seemed like a fair trade-off at the time.
For example, take a quick look over at the PlayStation Plus deal. For around the same price, you will find that subscribers are rewarded with free games, 1-hour free access to full games and 50% discounts.
If I moved to America, then my Xbox Live Gold subscription would entitle me to view ESPN and Netflix, but over here in the UK, everything offered to you requires further subscription payments to third parties. So let me get this straight, I pay 40 a year for the opportunity to buy more stuff and be bombarded with adverts at every opportunity?
The Xbox Live Metro dashboard has turned into one massive advertising billboard, where you are bombarded with constant streams of advertising. Anything that may be of use has now been buried and replaced by boxes containing more adverts.
Although you can pin your favourite apps, the option to pin the System Media Player is suspiciously absent and ironically the most used app of all for many gamers. So why am I now paying so much money to have so much advertising rammed down my throat?
The world has rapidly moved on and changed since 2002, and customers are a much more sophisticated/savvy bunch where they are used to paying a fee to avoid advertising. To charge people a fee for a premium service only to then offer nothing but advertisement is considered bad form for even the most laid-back gamer.
Possibly one of the biggest reasons we all have such fond memories of the Blade system is down to the fact it was a time of minimal advertising. Gamers switched on their Xbox and were offered episodes of Sent U a Message or Inside Xbox, which gave the service a community vibe that now appears to have been killed for good.
What followed as we all know was a poorly designed dashboard , which caused the Inside Xbox videos to be buried behind a user-unfriendly menu system which were soon to be cancelled and replaced by, you guessed it, more of those pesky advert boxes.
Sure there is Bing voice search, but there is always the risk of looking like a mad man repeating yourself loudly at your Xbox as it struggles to understand your regional accent, making you feel like Alan Partridge using voice recognition.
Whatever your thoughts on the subject, we all use our console differently. So maybe we should be able to fully customise our dashboard to make the Xbox experience better suited to our individual needs, to create a unique experience. This is now what customers across the board expect from any service, and Microsoft have missed a quick win here.
From MSFT's side, I think it's more about adding value to their already excellent Xbox Live Gold service, and if they attract more customers to subscribe to Gold because of the features they're adding, great.
On the other hand, I've been a cord cutter for years. Why pay for a ton of content I don't care about when I can get most of the content I want for free? The rest of the content I want can either be watched via my quite cheap streaming-only Netflix account or by purchasing DVDs.
This Verizon FiOS deal doesn't do much for me. It's much the same as the Hulu deal with MSFT where you can only access the Hulu content on XBL Gold if you subscribe to Hulu Plus (which I have no reason or desire to do). Because the cable companies refuse to change, they're becoming irrelevant.
Yeah, well, it might not do a lot of that. I picked up an xbox at a garage sale with the intention of using it solely for streaming netflix. I didn't know that you had to subscribe to MS's service to be able to do that. It angered me, as Netflix doesn't (or shouldn't) actually use the xbox live service, doesn't add any value to the netflix service, almost doubles the cost of the service, and I'd get to give yet more money to Microsoft in exchange for exactly nothing.
The xbox went to the goodwill, and I've warned a few other people who were thinking of doing the same thing to avoid using the xbox for it. If Microsoft was a little less greedy, they may have actually sold me some games and made some money from me, instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
I think you vastly underestimate how much you'd pay on an a la carte basis for the niche channels you list. AMC Networks has operating expenses of about $750 million. They obviously get revenue from ad sales, but the bulk of their revenue comes from cable operators. If instead of receiving payments from the 96 million US households that get AMC programming, they had to be paid by the households that actually want AMC programming (their highest-rated program, The Walking Dead, drew 6.6 million viewers Sunday night), the costs would be very high.
Cable providers just don't git it. All there off brand channels are only financially successful because of bundling channels. If you AMC's viewership is 96 Million, just think how few other really off brand cable channels reach.
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