As usual, Engadget's Ryan Block has blogged the Micrososft press conference at the E3 games trade show in as Angeles. Peter Molyneux from Lionhead says "Fable II is finished!" Cliff Bleszinski demos Gears of War 2. Square Enix says Final Fantasy XIII is coming to Xbox. NBC Universal has started supplying video (Heroes etc) via Xbox Live, plus Netflix will stream more than 10,000 movies to Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers at no additional cost. In other words, it's just like Roku's Netflix Player but you don't have to spend $100 on a Roku. Microsoft has a press release about the deal. (Also, our Gamesblog has much more detail, but didn't when I posted.)
The Nintendo and Sony press conferences are on tomorrow (Tuesday). More details and trailers: http://www.e3expo.com/
Update: Among the interesting responses, some sites are asking, like Venture Beat, Did Microsoft just destroy the Apple TV?
I've long thought the Xbox 360 was superior to the Apple TV as a living room digital entertainment device -- and not just because of the gaming factor. Apple TV changed my perception a bit with the ability to rent movies, but now the 360 is back with a vengence.
The Xbox 360 does pretty much everything that Apple TV does, except connect to Apple's proprietary iTunes not-a-website. Unlike Apple TV, it also plays pretty much any kind of video, including DivX and Xvid, it plays DVDs with upscaling, it plays games (doh), and it connects to the Xbox Live service. On the other hand, it's bigger, much noisier, and costs more, especially if you include the Netflix and Xbox Live subscriptions. And being able to play games is not much of a selling point if you don't actually want to play games....
In the end, then, I think it comes down to different products for different purposes. And from Microsoft's point of view, it probably doesn't care about the Apple TV, which is a tiny market. It certainly does care about having Xbox 360 features to sell against Sony's PlayStation 3.
