If you live in the United Kingdom, you have got to hope that Chris Lewis, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Europe's vice president, is lobbying Internet service providers to get their acts together and deliver some real bandwidth. If he's not, then we're not going to benefit from his view.
What is his view? Well, as stated to
MCV, it's the following:
"My own view is very clear and I know it’s shared by other people in Microsoft is that the future’s digital downloads now. The broadband proliferation is amazing – people’s appetite to download movies through Video Marketplace is testament to that. The future is about people taking their digital content on an online rather than physical media."
You'll notice here that Lewis manages to rebrand the
Xbox LIVE Marketplace Video Store into plain old, Video Marketplace. Now, this could simply have been a piece of shorthand. However, high-profile executives are usually better at media control than to let something like that slip through unmanaged. We'll wait and see.
He also put the nail is the most over-nailed coffin we've seen since
Manhunt 2's UK release buried due to the BBFC's refusal to classify.
* Will there be Blu-ray for Xbox?
“We have no plans to do anything at all in terms of further or additional movie playback peripherals.”
See the
interview here.
* We'd like to point out that unlike everybody else, we never said the game would be banned.