Are You Experienced?
After taunting us for months, Microsoft finally released the New XBox Experience today all good and proper. Of course, I didn’t actually get to install it until this evening when I got home for work. So that’s what I did almost immediately after walking in the door; almost certainly to the annoyance of Bran.
Initial Impressions:
- It’s very shiny
- The UI, while slick, is somewhat unintuitive. Perhaps I’ll deal with it better after I get over the learning curve; but I’m not convinced that a box plugged into my TV should even have a learning curve.
- Netflix integration rocks.
This last one, though, is tinged with annoyance. Well, that’s not true: it’s smothered in annoyance really. It reeks of annoyance. I’m very annoyed.
Most of the movies that have been sitting in my Watch Instantly queue (I’ve got a Mac so watching instantly on Netflix involves virtual machines or Boot Camp and is generally not worth the bother) have big red noticed next to them now saying “Not available on Xbox” or “Until Dec 01, 2008″.
Which is really another way of saying “Hollywood studios and the MPAA kind of hate you and wish you would just fucking die already (and leave them all your money). kthxbi.”
If major movies and TV shows just weren’t so danged entertaining, I would just boycott the entire industry and be done with it. Unfortunately, with the likes of J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon in their feifdom, Hollywood manages to be one of the brightest points of entertainment around (then, of course, there’s dreck like Two and A Half Men; but that’s easily ignored if not actually boycotted).
I’m not sure what the solution is. As long as I keep feeding at their entertainment trough, Hollywood is going to keep screwing me. I guess I’m okay with that for now.
But I can definitely see myself reaching a tipping point where I just read a book instead. Maybe after Dollhouse gets canceled.