XBOX One Reveal

Posted 10 years ago by myetvmedia

Microsoft has officially unveiled the mysterious project Durango. With the next gen so highly anticipated, and in many eyes critical to the survival of the industry, XBOX has finally provided the missing piece of the puzzle. Nintendo released the WiiU this year, offering the evolution of their philosophy with the original Wii. Sony, positioned as number 3, showed us over the course of the last generation the PS4 and its intended target: the gamer core in march at its own event. Falling in step Microsoft has completed the vision of the next generation with their new machine: Xbox One.

Nintendo attempts to climb the ladder with the WiiU; offering new control schemes and fully embracing the online and hd standards and Sony is focusing on the market that made the PS2 the greatest console of all time: the gamers. Microsoft is casting a much wider net. As far as the folks at Xbox are concerned, if you have a TV, you should have an Xbox.

Xbox One isn’t just a gaming machine. It is intended to be the front for the entirety of the television experience. Xbox One is in many ways built around the flexibility of Kinect, which now is included in the box. With the 360 we saw the gaming peripheral become a motion and voice controller for your 360’s dashboard. With varying levels of success, it further indoctrinated Kinect into the go-to methods of the average consumer. The Kinect was Microsoft’s testing ground for their future. The Xbox One is designed from the ground so that Mom or Dad never has to touch a controller. I’ve seen my parents fiddle around with gaming controllers trying to get a DVD to play and of course they can, but they don’t like it. They would much rather an experience tailored to the medium, and a gaming controller is first and foremost made for gaming. Now the controller has be eliminated. They just say “Xbox, watch TV” and they are watching TV. They didn’t have to move a muscle. This is what Xbox One is for.

Microsoft has at this point captured the general gamer market. Xbox 360 in many ways has become a standard, and Xbox live is still the powerhouse that it always was. Microsoft has a built in audience for the Xbox One. The Live user base has invested too much not to go forward. Your games won’t carry over (the only console that offers backwards compatibility next gen is WiiU) but all of your achievements and media will. They don’t need to convince the core; they want more than just a consumer that wants to buy and play games. Microsoft isn’t marketing this device to gamers or media consumers or the Apple TV crowd. Its marketing it to anyone with a television and an internet connection.

With the magic of Kinect being cursory at best (I’m part of the core of course, I dismiss it/don’t really care), what does Xbox One have that I would want? Live TV? I have cable; all I need to do to watch it is click the channel button on my remote. But what if I wanted to use the TV to internet search at the same time? Or have a guide generated for my non digital cable signal? Well Xbox One can do that and really its the hot new thing that Microsoft is bringing to the table.

Media giants are laughing at HDMI pass through (your cable feed will go through your xbox), “that isn’t the way to solve the smart TV issue”. The issue of course being that there is no standard and with all the “stupid TV’s” out there that still have 5 or 6 years left in them. They should be very wary of Xbox One. HDMI passthrough might not be the most high tech solution but for now it is the best. It offers something that the competitors can’t. Zero compromise. All the on demand and internet content of the competition: Google TV devices and Apple TV as well as integrated instant access to live TV. The only thing it doesn’t have, and its almost no surprise as everyone goes “cloud crazy”, is DVR functionality which also might compromise the digital store.

When Microsoft closed out the conference their stock took a dip. Speculators and hair brained journalists expected that Microsoft would fail in their competition with Apple and Apple TV. They won’t. Apple TV is a device that gives your TV access to iTunes for 99$. Xbox One will likely cost about 400$ and will give you access to everything that iTunes does and much much more. One is not necessarily better than another; they just aren’t in the same competition. Xbox 360 and Apple TV are closer and Microsoft has sold more Xboxes. Really if there is a reason for the stock to dip it is the rumored “used game lockouts” or damage done with Microsofts determination to avoid saying outright “Xbox One doesn’t need to be online always” because of course it doesn’t, but if its not then all the fancy front end for everything feature really will become like straight up running a TV signal through an Xbox. Microsoft very much wants you to have your Xbox One online all the time and just about every company on earth is trying to figure out how to monetize used games.

All bells and whistles aside this is what Xbox One brings to the table. Its the same thing we have seen from Microsoft with the 360 over the last 4 years integrated with live TV, and it was designed to be used that way from the ground up. Honestly I buy a gaming machine to be a gaming machine and the rumors and half truths that Xbox One features some sort of CD key feature for games has me worried, but when I think of all the cables and wires and bullshit that I go through on the daily to get my content to the TV or switch from A to B or D to C… I imagine that Xbox One is rather convenient and I can only imagine that as far as the super bowl crowd is concerned its the hottest thing next to the wings.

Stay tuned as we go in depth with the core of Xbox One: the games,gamers and why the bros don’t care if you can’t play used games or not.

XBOX One Reveal Highlights

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  • XBOX One Reveal
  • XBOX One Reveal
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  • XBOX One Reveal

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