It was Friday night, I had nothing to do and a load of Xbox Live Marketplace points to burn, so what better opportunity to try out Microsoft’s much flaunted Video Marketplace on Xbox Live.
Given that Paramount Pictures had recently signed up to the service, choosing a movie was never going to be a problem for me, after all I had never seen Transformers and I knew that this was one of the movies that was available. Before downloading Transformers I decided to have a look at the other movies to see if anything there appealed to me and of the 47 movies such as Oceans Thirteen, Harry Potter, TMNT and Wild Wild West, the choice was certainly diverse. While 47 movies may not seem like many the service is still quite young and with new movie studios signing up all the time, this will certainly grow.
Anyway, having decided that I would still like to watch Transformers I scrolled down the list until I found it, once I selected the movie from the list I was then presented with two choices, the standard definition version and the superior High Definition version. Coming in at 360 marketplace point the Standard Definition 420p version is 1.6gb in size and comes in standard stereo, with the High Definition 720 p version costing 540 marketplace points and being a hefty 6.5gb in size and coming complete with 5.1 stereo, the choice to me was obvious, after all I like my movies in HD.
Purchasing a movie is as simple as purchasing an Arcade game, simply click and download, the terms advise you that the movie will expire 24 hours after you press play or after 14 days without pressing play, so having agreed to this I then proceeded and immediately ran into a problem, you see it seems I didn’t have enough room on my hard drive, which lead me to wonder if Microsoft had though of this issue before introducing the service. I mean after all how many people are out there (with a premium console and a 20gb drive) actually have 6.5gb free on their drive? So feeling a bit disheartened and unable to free up enough space, I decided to go for the Standard Definition version of the movie and I have to say I was still fairly impressed, the download speed was very impressive, I left the room for 15 minutes and bam, there it was waiting to be watched.
During the playback of the movie I experienced no problems whatsoever, everything ran as smoothly as you would expect, the only problem I had was when the blades popped up I kept thinking I had received an achievement, only to remember I was watching a movie and it was just my friends coming online (sorry, trying to be funny).
Overall I think the Video Marketplace is a very good idea and as I say I’m sure the choice will improve over time, my only issue is the problem of hard drive space, with the cost of the 120gb hard drive being what it is, maybe people may still bypass this service for now. However if this problem can be resolve then I for one will be happy to download movies direct from my 360, now all I need is the Popcorn Marketplace to accompany them.
