'Heroes' Satisfaction And Near-Instant Gratification

My wife and I hadn’t yet experienced the Heroes television show phenomenon first-hand, so last night I took advantage of the free-first-episode offer currently running on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The standard-definition version is a 599 MByte payload, whereas the high-def version is 2.4 GBytes in size; of course I went with the HD option. As I’ve mentioned before, the Xbox 360’s media player supports progressive downloads, which means that playback can begin before the entire file finishes downloading (i.e. at the point where the player determines that the incoming bandwidth is sufficient such that the remaining percentage of the file will complete downloading before your playback of that file gets to the endpoint, assuming you don’t fast-forward through the file).

I clicked on the download confirmation button. Less than 30 seconds later the 2.4 GByte download was 5% complete, and playback was ready to begin. Gotta love that 50 Mbps SureWest broadband! The first episode was pretty darn good, by the way. The entirety of Heroes Season 1 is now available in DVD and HD DVD formats, if you didn’t catch it the first time around or want to re-watch a few favourite episodes.

Followup: If you experience a lengthy ‘loading’ on-screen message delay when you first put Heroes Season 1 disc 2 into your player, just be patient. Microsoft’s Kevin Collins just confirmed what I suspected after experiencing it first-hand the other night:

Disc 2 has networking features on it. When the disc first starts, new files are downloaded to the persistent storage. Depending on the server and network speeds this can take some time.

Even though I’m on a 50 Mbps symmetrical fiber WAN ‘pipe’, the ‘loading’ delay was still around 10 minutes, suggesting that the bottleneck is on the Universal server side of the connection. Why Universal didn’t author the disc such that you experienced the delay only if you accessed the web-enabled features on it is beyond me. Minimally, a clearer explanation of what was going on would have been helpful. I wasn’t the only one baffled. And if a degreed engineer like me wasn’t sure what was going on, I doubt my sister will figure it out (or, in this era of ‘instant gratification’, tolerate it).