Microsoft has updated their Xbox 360 services today, adding the long hyped Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and Zune Video apps.
“It’s the community that drives us forward, and it’s the community that allows us to pioneer new ways of connecting people through the entertainment they love,” says Neil Thompson, senior director of Microsoft’s Entertainment Division in UK & Ireland. “Tonight we’re celebrating the transformation of the TV as tomorrow everyone will be able to enjoy some truly exciting interactive entertainment experiences which continues to deliver on our vision of connected entertainment for everyone.”
Users will need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to access the services and the full features are as follows (via GI.biz):
Facebook: Update your status to share the movie, game or entertainment you’re enjoying, connect with friends and view their Facebook stream, status updates and photos on the big screen - as well as compare your Xbox Live and Facebook friends lists.
Twitter: Discover, post, and reply to Tweets on your Xbox 360. You can view friend profiles, trends and conversations, or search Twitter content.
Last.fm: Set up personalised radio stations with Last.fm on Xbox 360. Skip, ‘ban’ or ‘love’ songs to create your perfect mix, with built-in “Gamer Stations” featuring music selected specifically for the gaming community (available in the US and UK).
Zune: A premium high fidelity video experience with instant-on HD in 1080p and 5.1 channel surround sound for Xbox Live, with no waiting for downloads or buffering. The experience can also be shared with up to seven friends through voice chat and Avatar integration on the TV screen.
Result for: video experience
YouTube, in their latest blog post, has made a list of the new updates made to the extremely popular video sharing site.
The new features, or updated features in the new release are as follows:
* Upload Progress Bar: A new Flash uploader is up for all supported browsers and it comes with a long-awaited (and much-requested) feature: an upload progress bar that lets you know the status of your upload. Our next step will be providing the estimated video processing time for your upload.
* Simpler HD Parameter: We want to give you more control over how your video looks, including the option of it being eye-blazingly clear (HD), so we’ve now added an official URL parameter (hd=1) for sharing HD links.
* Tweet Tweet: Everyone’s on The Twitter these days, so we’ve added a “share to Twitter” button under the Share options so you can easily send a video into your Twitterstream. (Feel free to change the prefilled text, if you like.) This was a big internal request, but we know many of you asked for it, too. We don’t currently shorten the Video URL automagically but hope to get to it down the road.
* Do You EDU? Educational Hub Launches: Using YouTube as a vehicle to democratize learning is one of the coolest, unintended outcomes of its existence. YouTube EDU is a volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. We’ll feature some of these videos on the home page on Friday and elaborate further in a separate post on that day.
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Result for: video experience
Last week we reported that NBCU-backed online video service Hulu had removed its content from Boxee and TV.com, prompting outrage from many users.
Within a week however, a workaround was found, using public RSS feeds. Hulu crushed that “hack” however yesterday, by blocking all Boxee users from accessing any Hulu RSS feeds.
According to a Boxee blog post: “we just found out that Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing the Hulu site. this is a disappointing development since their RSS feeds are publicly available, and our browser, while optimized for a great 10 ft video experience, is no different in how it accesses this content than Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Opera or any of the other browsers out there.
to our users: if you choose to use boxee as your media browser to view legal and publicly available content on the internet, we will do everything we can to ensure that you can access it, no matter what the source.”
It appears that the boys and girls over at Boxee are working overtime, as a blog update, timestamped at two hours ago says that added tweaking has made Hulu available again for Boxee users.
“Hulu is back working. over the weekend we will make an update to the user interface that will show a status message indicating whether Hulu is currently working or not,” reads the post.
Ball back in your court Hulu…
