Dave Zatz's take on Xbox Live Marketplace
Our good friend Dave over at Zatsnotfunny.com has a good writeup about his impression of the Xbox Live Marketplace and more importantly their HD content. He doesn't cover the details of the picture quality, but does offer some great insight about the interface and the feasibility of HD downloads. Like many of us he doesn't like the points system and wonders where the big titles like Superman Returns are. The biggest question is will Microsoft control this space or someone else like Apple? Certainly something can be said for being the first and for having such a large install base, but any device that is that loud can't be that enjoyable to watch movies on. Like Dave and many others it has taken a few attempts to successfully download the 6GB files. We also find it hard to believe that a 6GB version could look as good as the 30GB version on HD DVD and at the rate of some of the download speeds it would be faster to rent it from Netflix or go down to Blockbuster, not to mention if you have HD VOD in your area. On top of that the first two don't require you to watch the movie in it's entirety in 24 hours. There is no doubt that in the long run distributed media is dead and we will live in an on demand world, but this is futher proof that we are still a few year off until the downloaded HD Movie experience can equal HD DVD or Blu-ray.
