Xbox Video Marketplace; Initial Observations

The Movies-and-TV portion of the Xbox Live Marketplace launched this morning, as I previously reported, and V for Vandetta is downloading as I type this. It's offered in both standard- and high-def versions; here are the relevant stats:

*80 Points = $1. 1,000 Marketplace Points go for $12.50 when directly purchased from Microsoft via the Xbox 360 user interface. 1,600 Marketplace Points typically sell at retail for $20; the 1,600-Point cards have codes printed on the back that you enter via the Xbox 360 user interface (USB keyboard highly recommended). Digg has full pricing information on both movies and TV shows, both old and new.

I had to delete all of my previously-downloaded game demos in order to clear out enough room for the 720p version of V for Vandetta. Microsoft really needs to offer higher-capacity HDD peripherals for this console! The movie offerings seem to be a subset of the content available through services such as CinemaNow and Movielink. DRM restrictions include the fact that the content is only accessible for 14 days after download, for 24 hours after beginning to view it, and that if you delete it you have to re-purchase it.

I'll let you know, after the download completes, how long it took and how it looks. Ironically, I just received Nacho Libre two days ago on HD DVD, so after I watch (and delete) V for Vandetta, I'll also download Nacho Libre (I presume the Xbox Live Marketplace version is bitrate-limited compared to what's on the HD DVD) and compare the two versions' quality.

Oh, and by the way, I did get confirmation from Microsoft PR that, as my earlier experimentation suggested, streaming of DRM'd video material to the Xbox 360 still requires a Media Center Edition PC as the source, even though the documentation doesn't specifically call this out. Near-term they plan to rev the documentation, and long-term they'll look at removing this limitation.

Followup: it's been 3 hours, and over a 1.2 Mbps downstream DSL connection the V for Vandetta download is only 10% completed, even though if I do the best-case math it seems that 11.3 hours is all it should take to download the whole HD flick. Oh dear….granted, this may just be a reflection of first-day Microsoft server overload.