Download Monkey

Who's it from?

Microsoft.

Where can I find it?

It's available to all owners of Xbox 360 Games consoles for an annual subscription of £35.

What does it offer?

Xbox Live turns your solo gaming experience into a worldwide networked gaming platform. Once connected and signed up it also allows you to download movies (in both standard and high definition) and TV programmes on a pay per view basis.

So?

The service offers what appears to be a large chunk of the Warners back catalalogue and some upto date titles that are currently available on most UK pay per view services. Navigation using the let/right - up/down "xbox blades" menu system isn't necessarily intuitive but is easy enough once you've picked it up which only takes a couple of minutes. Miscrosoft update the console every few months and improvemtns continute to arrive. Movies are paid for using Microsoft "points" a sort of online Disney dollars and the current exchage rate is 500msp for £4.25 which by my reckoning means their worth about 8.5p each. Microsoft say the reason for using this system is it is international and allows micropayments. Around the world credit card transactions often have a minimum amount and/or carry a charge. You can buy MSPs using your credit card either through the console or online - gift tokens are also available.

Speed and Quality

The delivery speed will depend mainly on the speed of your broadband connection, but also on the traffic at Microsoft's end. Quality of the HD movies downloaded has so far proved quite poor and we are runing more tests just to make sure that we've not made some sort of set up stupid error on our system or TV. At the moment it seems that the HD movies are ovecompressed causing them to look over contrasty. We'll bring you more as we have it. If we're wrong we'll offer up a full apology and give this service the bananas it deserves. If we're right, the service has a key flaw. Charging users a subscription and then a pay per view few ontop only works if you're offering top quality content.

Download Monkey's conclusion...

The idea is nice and HD movies are a great extension to the Xbox platform but the jury is still out over the contrast/quality issues.

8th April 2008

Updated Review

Ok - so here's the deal. I'm really not sure why, but I've just spent a sunny afternoon indoor shooting pictures of Sky HD's and Xbox Live's 720p versions of The Matrix. Both inputs are HDMI. This is what I did:

• Darkened the room
• Set up a Canon 40D on a tripod
• Set the Sony Bravia 32V2000 to default on each input (Xbox and Sky HD)
• Set the camera to the same shutter speeds and apertures
• Tried to line both movies up at the same frame
• Photographed both films
  

The results couldn't have been more different. But I deliberately haven't published them here in a head to head comparison because the differences just don't seem to show up online (I guess once the RAW files are converted to JPG, resized and then compressed for the web) and don't really add anything. But here are my personal (and totally open to ripping apart and revising by someone who knows that they are doing) findings. The Xbox pictures seem over contrasty with big colour casting in the lowlights/blacks. the Sky HD seemed (by comparison) softer and less defined but easier to watch. But having shown the results to a few people the skintones seem more lifelike in the Sky HD. These films should be pretty much the same but, I guess, show up the differences in source material and encoding settings by different service providers.

Download Monkey's updated conclusion...

Personally - and it is only personal - I found the Xbox version far too contasty. Like any service, to get the best out of it you're going to have to tweak your TV inputs and maybe even set up different viewing profiles for playing games and viewing TV/movies. I've had a good trawl thorugh the Xbox live site and some of the fan sites and can't find any kind of guide. Maybe it's time to wander over to the AVForums? Either way, if you're charging a subscription AND then charging PPV for movies you've got to deliver the very best qaulity content. Whether you think this is as good as it gets is probably a matter of taste.

Review update by mjt

Updated April 20th 2008