Filed under: Audio/Video, Video Games, TV, Back to School Guide 2008

Oddly enough, one might argue that the biggest news of this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) had less to do with video games, and more to do with other forms of digital media — namely, movies and television. Essentially, the long-promised set-top box that does everything in addition to playing games, is well on its way into existence, with Microsoft, Sony, and even third-party publishers, getting in on the “downloadable media” thing,

While Nintendo has stayed out of the “console as media player” race with thus far (due, at least partially, to the Wii’s lack of a hard drive — required for storing and streaming movies), both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be getting quite a bit of downloadable content. On 360, Microsoft announced that Netflix’s on-demand programming will be available on the console later this year. What does this mean? Xbox Live subscribers that already have Netflix memberships can enjoy Netflix on their 360 at no additional cost (note: this is not the entire Netflix library, but only the movies that are available for download on PC).

Sony, meanwhile, used its press conference as an opportunity to announce that it will be carrying (or are at least willing to carry) all movie studios’ video content on its PlayStaiton Network (PSN) video delivery service. As of Tuesday night, movies and TV shows are available for both sale and rental, and are even portable as well — you can actually buy somehting on your PS3, download it to your PSP, and have it live on both devices at the same time. Prices will be $2.99 for an SD rental, and $5.99 for an HD download, while it’ll cost you $14.99 to purchase SD movies, and HD content will be available for purchase at an as-yet-unspecified price. The service goes live tonight.

And that’s not all. There’s even more, like Sony’s inclusion of free and paid “gearhead” video content in ‘Gran Turismo 5: Prologue‘ (essentially, car-related videos that you download directly into the game’s front-end), and persisting rumors that Activision will be launching its own iTunes-Store-like music download shop for Guitar Hero.

Stay tuned — the new media frontier seems to be changing by the minute. How about you, do you use your video game console to watch TV and/or movies?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 9:56 pm and is filed under World news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.