CES 2009: Joystiq's interview with Xbox's Aaron Greenberg

Xbox director Aaron Greenberg was nice enough to sit down with us at CES this week, where we talked about everything from NXE to to You Don't Know Jack and Xbox Live clubs. Here are the highlights:

Were you surprised how successful the NXE has been, especially in regards to the 33 percent increase in the average size of friends' lists?

I think the increased friends was a surprise, I think the increase in downloads was a big surprise. A lot of people said "Wow, you guys added all this new content to the service," and we're like "Actually, it's been there the whole time," with the exception of maybe Netflix. We just made what was there easier to find.

Has the success of Avatars prompted you to think about other applications for them more?

So games is absolutely the right place to start. But people have been asking us for more accessories, unlockable content from games, there's lots of stuff that has to be done. But right now it's primarily focused on game integration.

Considering how successful Avatars are, talking to some of your third-parties, are you starting to get more interest in integrating them?

They're beating down our doors, absolutely. They want to integrate them into all these different experiences, and they're starting to do that. It's just going to take them some time to get all that work done. But there's been tremendous interest.

We've joked about the New Xbox Experience giving the 360 that "new console smell." Do you feel like NXE and upgrades like it is a way of extending the life of the box?

Absolutely. We treated it as if we were launching an entirely new console. So we said "What if we just completely wiped the slate clean and rebuilt the entire experience from the ground up?" It's a pretty ambitious thing to do, but that was the approach we took. We don't feel any limits on the hardware today; we have high-definition games entertainment, we have storage, we have connectivity, so we're really not limited by the power of the hardware. Now it's about how do we innovate throught software and online?

PlayStation Home has introduced clubs that members can join, have you thought about integrating something like that into Live?

I think we've seen with Live Party, that's how people are meeting friends of friends. Groups is defintiely something that's of interest and something we've thought about.

Will we have to pay for Xbox Live Primetime and 1 vs. 100?

I don't think we've given the details of that, yet. There's a lot of flexibility in that model, there's opportunities to ad-based stuff, free stuff, paid stuff, I think we're still figuring out the business model for that.

Do us a favor and call Jellyvision and get You Don't Know Jack on there.

[Laughs] It's a very good idea. [Pauses] We've talked to those guys.

Is Primetime going to launch with just 1 vs. 100?

I think the plan is to launch with just 1 vs. 100. We're spending most of our time making -- you know, making a 1 vs. 100 game show trivia game? Not that hard to do. We've spent most of our time building the infrastructure and the platform and the ability to have this massively concurrent experience.

Since this is CES, we have to ask you about IPTV integration into the 360. Is that still in the works?

The technology has actually been completed for a while now. We don't sell it directly to consumers, it's a business to business thing. There's a handful of folks that have announced that they're planning on using the Xbox 360 as the set top box to deliver IPTV. But the software itself works, now it's just a matter of those providers deciding if they want to offer it.

Thanks again for your time, Aaron.