LOS ANGELES – There was something revolutionary on display at Microsoft’s pre-E3 media briefing on Monday.
Not the games: They were a familiar mix of stealth/action, action/adventure, wave-your-arms-around motion control, shooters, shooters, and shooters. The most interesting stuff was what was happening around the games. Microsoft’s decade-long plot to take over your living room is finally coming to fruition.
At the time, it was hard to grasp the potential of the device to be a connected multimedia hub. The initial version of the Xbox rolled out without an online service, and you even had to pay extra if you wanted to watch DVDs on it.
But the successor machine Xbox 360 shipped in 2005 with broadband support through Microsoft’s Xbox Live service. And over the last seven years, it has steadily added features as it has sold almost 70 million copies.
The metaphorical Trojan horse is now in position, and the symbolic Greek soldiers are poised to leap out and conquer your Blu-ray player and your stereo receiver. Or something. The point is, this game console has already supplanted my cable box, and now it’s about to convert my tablet and my smartphone to its cause.
The metaphorical Trojan horse is now in position, and the symbolic Greek soldiers are poised to leap out and conquer your Blu-ray player and your stereo receiver. Or something.Microsoft has had some false starts in its move to win the multimedia wars. The Windows Media Center failed to make make much headway against Tivo and set-top box DVRs, and the Zune was initially an abject failure as an iPod killer. But they stuck with it, and it finally seems to be paying off. The company’s multimedia plan lacks the clean simplicity of iTunes and Apple devices. But it has succeeded where Apple TV has failed because it didn’t set out to control the entire ecosystem. Microsoft used the flexibility of the app model to become a conduit between your TV, your subscription services, and your devices.
The Xbox 360 already offered on-demand video apps like YouTube, HBO Go, Hulu, Netflix, Xfinity, and Amazon Prime movies. On Monday, Microsoft announced new on-demand services from partners like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount movies, and Univision. They added NBA, NHL, and ESPN to on-demand MLB programming. And they supplemented Last.fm with Rhapsody and a music store that they claim has 30 million tracks.
These services have become my go-to way to consume media. I just switched cable service providers, and haven’t bothered to set up my new cable box to record many shows because it’s so much easier to just watch them through my Xbox. But these partnerships aren’t revolutionary in themselves. The PlayStation 3 also has several of these on-demand and subscription services. Many TVs ship with similar functionality built in. Even Nintendo’s lo-def Wii console supports Netflix streaming.
The real breakthrough was the announcement of Microsoft’s SmartGlass initiative. It’s essentially an app that will turn any iOS, Android, or Windows 8 tablet or phone into a second screen that works in tandem with your Xbox.
With it, your smartphone or iPad can browse HBO Go’s offerings and cue up an episode of Game of Thrones, then as you watch on TV, your device will display helpful info, like a map of where characters are in the fictional land of Westeros, or a chart explaining the genealogy of the various characters.
You can use SmartGlass in conjunction with a karaoke game to let other players pick the songs they want to perform while someone else is singing. Up to four devices can connect to the Xbox simultaneously.
Now for the caveats. SmartGlass won’t ship until later this year. Microsoft will have to rely on its content partners to build this second-screen functionality into all of their programming and services. Maps of TV-show worlds aren't going to create themselves.
SmartGlass and its promise of a ménage a trois between your mobile devices and your TV and your console are the most sophisticated offering yet.Furthermore, the idea of using an iPhone or Android tablet as a remote sounds like it could be more cumbersome than simply using the controller. That certainly turned out to be the case with Microsoft’s Kinect device. Shouting “Xbox, pause!” seems cool at first, but I soon realized that it was far quicker to just hit the green button on my controller to pause.
But this is the one genuinely new and exciting thing I’ve seen at the E3 trade show so far. And it has very little to do with games. Double screen viewing is clearly on the rise. There’s nothing new about absentmindedly watching TV while you surf the web on a laptop. But we’re seeing more and more shows and products that try to exploit the fact that we multitask while we watch. Reality shows like American Idol now helpfully suggest hashtags you should use for your live tweeting, and an array of apps like Shazam and SoundPrint are designed to supplement live-viewing experiences.
But Microsoft’s SmartGlass and its promise of a ménage a trois between your mobile devices and your TV and your console are the most sophisticated offering yet. Like many big innovations, it seems kind of cool … and kind of terrifying.