Zune vs IPod No comments yet

I posed the question of “Why do you still use an IPod and not a Zune” over lunch a few days ago.

Personally given my music habits I cannot justify the insane costing of iTunes. The Zune Pass is WAY too much of a cost opportunity. I can listen to all the songs I want for $14/month.

Anyway… nice dialog on this post by Jeff. He is posing the same question!

Netflix on XBOX: Good start! No comments yet

Last Friday Microsoft released the update to the XBOX dashboard software. It was a fairly big one as they completely upgraded the experience.

The big one for me was the launch of Netflix for XBOX. The premise was that you could waatch movies from the Netflix “Instant Watch” repository directly from the XBOX.

They delivered.

Here’s a short summary:

• To enabled the application on the XBOX you just need to enter a simple code on the netflix website. As soon as you do that you will be able to see your Netflix “Instant Watch” queue directly from your XBOX.
• You can go through any of the movies in the queue, get more info, watch it or remove it from the queue.
• You can start watching multiple movies. If you stop you will be able to get back to it and start from where you stopped.
• The quality was good in my tests. Not as good as DVDs, but comparable to other on demand services.

One of the things that is fairly evident is that you cannot browse or search movies directly from the XBOX app. You will have to build your list on a computer. Some reviewers are complaining about it. I tend to disagree. I like how they focused on delivering a good experience on a key scenario. Anybody that has ever used Netflix knows the drill and this is not an issue. Sure, it’d be great to open and browse movies, but (1) typing is still a pain from any console (2) they can always add it later.

The other point of contentious is how big the library of movies is. It’s not too big and you won’t find all the new releases. If I were paying for a download service I’d be upset, but this is a free “companion” offer to the standard DVD delivery subscription. As such it delivers a lot of value anyways. If there is that one evening when you feel like watching a movie - besides from what you have in your mailbox already - you’re going to find something interesting. Worst case there are a ton of documentaries and TV shows.

Also, the library could have been better, but Sony pulled the movies from the Netflix download service. Very bad move by Sony (and definitely not consumer friendly). They mention “licensing issues”, but we all know that it’s because XBOX is a competitor to Sony PlayStation.

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Slingbox, Orb and watching TV on the run… No comments yet

So, you want to watch the TV on the go. It might be a game, a special Oprah show, or whatever you may like. What do you do?

There are couple of good options: Slingbox and Orb.

	Slingbox The slingbox is an hardware based solution. In other words you plugin the Slingbox device to your TV like you would your cable box or digital receiver. Once you’ve done that you can watch your TV from anywhere using the free PC (or Mac) software.
	Orb Orb is a complete software solution. It requires you to install the Orb software on your computer (which of course needs to have a video receiver if your goal is to watch TV). Once the software is installed you can watch TV from your browser anywhere. One thing to highlight is that Orb allows you access also pictures, documents and pretty much everything else on your home computer.

So what should you get? The bottom line is that Orb is still fundamentally a “geeky” type of solution that lacks any of the simplicity that a consumer might expect. It’s definitely more powerful and it is also free, but it’s not trivial to get the complete thing up and running.

Slingbox gets the “TV streaming everywhere” job done beautifully. It is easy to install and works as expected. There are different versions - SOLO or HD-Pro. The biggest difference is that the PRO can stream HD. It’s in theory appealing, but for now there are some doubts about having (1) a good connectivity that can actually stream HD and (2) a good powerful computer to handle hi-def (3) Pro is about $100 more expensive.

One thing to keep in mind with the Slingbox is that you need to have Internet connectivity close to your TV. If not you will need to buy the dedicated “wifi connector” add for the Slingbox. It’s called “SlingBox Turbo”. It’s essentially a wifi little device.

For this Holidays I am definitely adding the Slingbox Solo and the Sling Turbo to my wishlist!