Video Games

Microsoft has talked for years about its plan to transform the Xbox 360 into more than just a game platform: a multimedia jukebox with movies, TV shows and downloadable games available 24/7 via the Internet.

Some of that vision has come to pass, thanks to the Xbox Live Marketplace.

You can now rent a handful of movies and shows and download some games.

But Microsoft upped the ante considerably last year when it unveiled its plan to mesh a technology called IPTV (Internet protocol television) with the Xbox 360.

Essentially your 360 becomes a sort of super cable box, but instead of passively watching shows as the networks broadcast them, you could watch the shows whenever you want.

Everything is on-demand, basically.

You don't have to set your DVR to record Lost on Thursday nights, for example, because you can watch Lost anytime you want just by hitting a button on your remote.

Or you could do an online search for movies or shows with relevant tags (say, "Arnold Schwarzenegger," "pregnancy," "cinematic travesty") and, boom, up pops the movie Junior.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last year, Microsoft suggested that IPTV on the Xbox 360 was right around the corner, and the expectation was that AT&T would soon roll out the service for its U-verse cable TV subscribers.

Well, here we are in 2008 and there's still no sign of IPTV on the 360.

British gamers could get their IPTV freak on this year courtesy of British Telecom. But when I interviewed Christine Heckart, general manager of marketing for Microsoft's Media Room division, this past week, she acknowledged that it will be a while before all the technology is in place and, more importantly, all the television and movie studios are comfortable with killing off the old broadcast model for TV.

AT&T has rolled out the first steps toward full IPTV with U-verse, she noted.

"If you sit down in front of that system today, already it's breaking through barriers that even five years ago were considered pretty tall barriers to hurdle over," she said.

"I would think in five years from now, many of the technical and content-oriented hurdles that today prevent us from delivering a true on-demand system in five years will not be preventing us."

Will it really be half a decade before we finally get the glorious always-online, on-demand television paradise we've been promised?

Well, if it does take that long, you can bet we won't be experiencing it on the Xbox 360, since that console will long since have been replaced by a successor system.

But I bet it won't take that long.

The technology makes too much sense, and the television and movie studios and networks seem to be a little savvier about embracing the Internet than their Cro-Magnon counterparts in the music biz.

Here's hoping.

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