Microsoft announced at a financial conference yesterday that it plans to offer live TV on the Xbox in time for the holiday season. It’s like deja vu all over again. It was in January of 2007 that Microsoft first made this promise, and the company has dangled the possible integration at every Consumer Electronics Show since.
Once again, the would-be TV provider isn’t naming any partners, but does say it will have “dozens or hundreds of additional video content suppliers,” and that it will bring this service to market through the network operator channel (i.e. your cable provider). This follows last year’s launch of Xbox-as-a-set-top for AT&T’s U-verse service, which includes an unfortunate $99 fee to cover the necessary hardware upgrade. It also comes on the heels of Jinni’s recent announcement that Microsoft is licensing its “semantic discovery technology for personalized, holistic discovery of video entertainment.” Perhaps this reference guide Jinni touted earlier in the month is the basis for Microsoft’s new Xbox TV interface?
We’ll wait and see what Microsoft actually brings to the table, but in the meantime, here’s a timeline of the company’s efforts to make the Xbox a Trojan horse in consumer living rooms. Note, this doesn’t take into account various other Microsoft TV attempts including the ill-fated Microsoft TV Foundation Edition program guide. Yeah, Microsoft’s been at this for a while.
