MG Siegler at Parislemon has an interesting take on the current state of movie rentals on the XBox 360, suggesting that it’s not ready for prime time:
Last night I sat down to download The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I figured it would take 5-10 minutes to get enough information to start playing and then go. Wrong.
2 hours later I was still waiting as the download pushed past 40%. Fucking ridiculous. I shut it off and went to bed.
How exactly Microsoft plans to use any service called “Watch Instantly” with wait times like this is entirely unclear to me. Why can you rent a movie on Apple TV and have it start playing within a few minutes, but on the 360 it takes several hours?
To me, waiting several hours before you can start watching a digital movie is utterly ridiculous. I mean, I may as well have gone to Blockbuster. It would have been MUCH quicker.
For Internet TV devices to take off, companies will need:
- technology in place to deliver streaming video effectively;
- easy to use interfaces;
- current content; and
- deep libraries of long-tail content.
None of the solutions currently available do all these things. The technology is moving forward so quickly, though, that it’s likely that by this time next year, devices like the XBox 360, Apple TV or the Roku Player will do it all.