Xbox, watch TV: inside Microsoft’s audacious plan to take over the living room — from by Nilay Patel
Can the Xbox One finally kickstart the TV revolution?
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Taking over your cable box also means the Xbox can overlay your TV signal with interesting information: a voice-activated channel guide, pop-up notifications when you get a Skype call and Xbox Live invites, a new NFL app that shows you real-time fantasy stats. You can even snap the TV window to the side of the screen while you play games. Your nasty cable interface is still there, but it allows the Xbox One to replace the cable box as the primary living-room entertainment device and go from gaming console to major new computing platform.
…
So the entire Xbox One is designed around what you might call a bold compromise: instead of directly integrating TV, the system hijacks it. Rather than plugging your cable box and Xbox into the TV separately, you first plug the cable box into the Xbox, and then the Xbox into the TV. Your cable box is still there, and still doing all the heavy lifting of providing TV, but now it’s doing it in service of the overall Xbox One experience. Smith describes it as “augmenting” the cable box experience in an effort to eliminate the friction of switching between games, apps, and TV.
From DSC:
The battle for the living room continues. I hope that we can eventually leverage these developments not just for entertainment, but for creating, contributing, sharing, absorbing, and discussing streams of content. The creative possibilities involving transmedia-based storytelling are exciting in this type of environment as well.