Microsoft beefs up Xbox 360's entertainment offerings with 1080p HD streaming

It hasn’t beat out the Wii, but Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is doing fine in second place in sales of the current generation of videogame consoles. It helps that it costs quite a bit less than the PlayStation 3, though a lot of that price difference comes in the form of the PS3’s Blu-ray drive. Today, Microsoft is answering its competitor’s 1080p video playback in the form of “instant-on” streaming of films and TV shows via the Xbox Live service.
While Xbox Live supports Netflix’s video-streaming service, the 5.1 channel, 1080p HD titles, available starting in the fall, will come from Microsoft’s Zune Store, which presumably will usurp many of the functions of the video section of the Xbox Live Marketplace. You can use the Xbox Live Parties feature with video streams, allowing you to watch the same movie with up to seven friends who are online Xbox Live subscribers and take turns talking back to the screen using voice chat.
The catch, of course, is that you need to be an Xbox Live Gold subscriber to get many of these enhancements—a $49.99 annual expense. No details were announced about how much additional cost the 1080p streaming titles would require to watch. Both the Wii and PS3 have the same connectivity as the Xbox 360, but haven’t offered as robust a set of entertainment features to date. As the E3 expo continues, we’ll see if Sony and Nintendo have a response to Microsoft’s latest developments.