Channel Xbox 360

For people who want to use this new download service to build a collection of television shows to watch when they please, I would keep the champagne corked and consider a few of the snags.

HD content is notoriously large.  If Microsoft is using space age compression and fitting 20 HD episodes within 17GBs of space, you still end up with a pretty small collection.  You can’t even fit 2 full seasons of Farscape on there.

Microsoft denied the existence of a 100 GB hard drive less than a month ago.  The confirmation of a larger drive is not a nice marketing message while platinum bundles are still out there waiting to be snapped up for the holidays.  Who wants to buy a 20GB model now, if a 60GB or 100GB option is around the corner?  The hard drive for the 360 is not like a spare controller that can be used when a friend comes over (if you still have friends after calling a recent Microsoft rumor “ridiculous”).  A larger drive on the horizon means a 20GB harddrive sitting in the bottom of your underwear drawer, whether you’ve had it for a year (if you’re lucky and eager) or for a day, if your mom finally got around to buying you a 360.

The good news is that the rumored JUMBO HDD is probably on the way.  How big and for how much?  Who knows?  An option to plug in our own USB drives would be even better.  Piracy is the biggest obstacle here, but this week proves that Microsoft might have some ideas on how to make it work.

Until we know what our storage options will be we can’t fully know how well the new service will serve us.  This is still good news for Microsoft.  Even if it isn’t revealing the full plan, and leaves doubts about its 20GB drive, this announcement creates a lot of press around a major feature that appeals to a mass audience, just in time for the holidays.

We don’t know at this point how much Microsoft and its content partners plan to charge for television episodes, and that also leaves a big hanging “?” in the air.  Every dollar added to the per-episode cost starts to create a very expensive alternative to cable and satellite.  On the other hand, when you consider that some of the content - like MTV - lives outside of basic cable tiers in many markets, one guilty addiction to “Date My Mom” could still be cost-effective, even at $5 an episode.  All evidence points to a $3 cost per episode, which keeps the service competitive.

The other issue is how you will be allowed to use the video you “own”.  You can’t sell your movies off, of course, but unlike with games, people who buy movies usually expect to watch them through several times (even if they don’t always get around to it.)  Planning to sell your movies later is really the long way around renting, which Microsoft’s new offering is a good replacement for.  In fact, movies can only be rented on the Marketplace, according to the official press release, so that is a non-issue.  But supposedly TV shows can be owned.  When compared to physical copies, what rights will we have?  The biggest digital rights issue for “ownership” is how freely you can transfer files back and forth for your own use, or whether or not you can re-download a file you were forced to delete because of limited space.

Another question yet to be answered is: how wide will the selection be?  A handful of TV shows won’t do enough to kill the need for other subscription services.  Keeping your full cable package and buying extra copies of TV shows that can only be played on the console doesn’t make sense.  As long as there are shows not included on the Marketplace, we’ll all be forced to keep the TV pipe open.

These questions are all rhetorical at this point.  We will see, in the coming weeks, what the people in Redmond plan to do in terms of price, usage rights and hard drive options.  If responses to the articles are any indication, we are all very excited about the possibilities for the future.  Just remember, in your excitement or your cynicism, not to stumble and look too ridiculous.  It heals, but it hurts something awful.