Xbox Live

Major Nelson announced on his blog that Microsoft’s E3 press briefing, titled Xbox: Entertainment Evolved, can be seen live on Xbox Live for the first time ever. It will air Monday, June …
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Earlier this week, we reported on Microsoft’s plans to further monetize its already quite profitable Xbox LIVE service. At that time, it was anyone’s guess as to what that …
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A LinkedIn profile page for Praveen Rutnam, group product planner at Microsoft, has outed the publisher’s plan to roll out a new strategy for generating revenue through Xbox Live starting this a holiday season. The experience section of Rutnam’s profile explicitly states that he created a “strategy to further monetize [the] Xbox LIVE subscriber base.” It mentions this holiday season as the target date for the new monetization efforts to go into effect.

Although no specific details as to what the strategy will entail are laid out in the listing, Joystiq has gone ahead and done some speculating. One possibility is the implementation of an online pass of some sort, not unlike those utilized by publishers EA, Ubisoft, THQ, Sony and Warner. The publishing houses using them have seen a strong backlash from gamers over online passes, but the consumer resistance has done little to stop their growing ubiquity.

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Xbox 360 owners now more frequently use their consoles for viewing movies and TV shows and listening to music than they do for playing online games, Microsoft told the L.A. Times yesterday. All told, Xbox-equipped households are now devoting 84 hours monthly to all of those activities, with a smidgen over 50 percent of that time being spent taking in non-gaming media, said Xbox marketing and strategy boss, Yusuf Mehdi. The total usage figure represents a 30 percent jump from one year ago.

“What we’re seeing is that people are turning on the Xbox to play games and then keeping it on afterwards to get other types of entertainment,” Mehdi said. Entertainment features on the console falling under the broad “other” umbrella have increased drastically since the console’s November 2005 launch. Today alone Microsoft rolled out MLB.TV, Xfinity On Demand and HBO Go applications. As the Times noted, their inclusion brought the current tally of entertainment media services available on the platform up to 36.

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The BBC iPlayer app launches on Xbox today in the UK, allowing gamers access to catch-up on popular T.V. shows such as Top Gear and Doctor Who through their …
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The internet is awash with reports of Xbox 360 achievements being zeroed as well as records of Xbox activity being erased. Concerned gamers have bombarded the official Microsoft support Twitter account since …
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If you’ve been holding out on renewing that Xbox Live Gold subscription, now might just be the time to strike, as  Gold cards are on sale at at [easyazon-link …
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Gamers can get their hands on one-year subscriptions to Xbox Live Gold for a reduced price right now over on Amazon and Newegg. Prices have been marked down …
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If you go on Xbox Live today you’ll receive a notification for a mandatory system update. This update will increase performance and bring noticeable color fixes to the dashboard. Partners of Xbox Live are also …
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Alex Garden, the General Manager of Xbox Live, responded to the bevy of Live account security issues that have arisen these past months largely thanks to an exploit in FIFA 12. “While we here at Xbox have no evidence of a security breach in the Xbox LIVE service,” said Garden, “that is of little comfort to our members whose accounts have been compromised by malicious and illegal attacks.” By directly addressing the problem Garden took a decidedly different approach than Microsoft employed when they silently updated XBL security last month.

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