E3 starts today with Microsoft keynote – Canadians left out in the cold again
Today Microsoft made many exciting Xbox 360 announcements, some of the highlights were release dates high anticipated games, Final Fantasy XIII coming to 360 and ‘Xbox Live Primetime’, an online game-show channel accessed through Live. They are also completely revamping the consoles interface, with a totally new dashboard and Nintendo Mii-like avatars, but as per usual there was a kick in the nuts to Canadian gamers, with the announcement that Xbox would now support Netflix Standard Definition on-demand programming (HD in the future). Netflix is only available in the USA, but there is a viable Canadian equivalent, zip.ca. Couldn’t Microsoft have figured out something with them too, or is this actually another case of Canada’s extremely protectionist media industry not wanting this kind of service to be available to the millions of Canadian Xbox users?
I wish that either Netflix or Amazon Unbox would come to Canada. Amazon Unbox is already compatible with the 360 natively when using the Windows Media Center Extender. There’s a Netflix plug-in available as well.
I guess we’ll just have to live with Bell for now.
Happens with MTV too. Bloody copyright law.. makes no sense.
I wonder if it’s got anything to do with local (canadian) policies of capping/throttling bandwidth? I personally wouldn’t pay to DL a movie when it might mean I’d wind up paying exorbitant over-use fees to my ISP.
[…] hey leave the house, and if the feature applies to the new NETFLIX partnership, not much use to anyone north of the 49th parallel. All in all, this news from Microsoft has left me somewhat wanting. While I don’t believe […]