The Marketplace is absolutely getting hammered. My take is they didn't think the demand would be this high. I imagine it will be 2-7 days before the increase the overall bandwith.
Second, I am rather impressed. The sheer amount of selections of TV series purchases is rather impressive. I got a few HD episodes and they are stunning in 720p.
While the movie rental selection is rather limited at this point, it will only increase in time.
What a value add this feature is. Also to note, while the downloads from marketplace seem very slow at this time, I have experienced no lag or any other issues playing any Live games.
Yep. I called it
..seriously, I thought this was gonna be a big, cool deal. The future really..
I started V for Vendetta probably an hour ago and it's still at 0%. Ridiculous. I figured these could be decent 4-5 hour downloads at one point, but not like this.
It's sort of cool that they have somewhere to see the top movie downloads..basically a sales chart. Guess #1? V for Vendetta...
Thinking about prices, $6 is a chunk for a HD movie. Probably cheaper than the ever gouging BB though, then again many BB's still have essentially no late fees, meaning you can keep it 15-30 days without worry. The price could definitly use to be lower, though. Something like 4.50 would have been real sweet. $3 a dream.
Going forward, improvements need to be: bigger selection (of course, that will come in time).
24 hours is too limiting. A increase to 48 hours is absoluely needed, if not various longer options as well, perhaps priced accordingly. But no less than 48-72 hours imo. 72 hour baseline would be nice.
Bigger HD. 60-80-100GB..but that just delays the problem. There's going to need to be some way to "permanently" own these one day. Maybe they could even sell a USB DVD burner or something..I dont know..also extending out to use your PC HDD as storage might help. If broadband connections get fast enough, it might get to the point where "owning" is simply knowing that it's tied to your gamertag, and you could redownload what's not on your HDD quickly (and most stuff you'd need would be kept there, especially in the 100GB HDD future).
Anyways, I cannot comment on visual quality of the 720P yet, but I'm expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Given these file sizes, at 4-6GB for full movies, it almost makes one wonder why HD on DVD wasn't tried more..
This is also cool because, since I got my HDTV (for my 360) I've been struggling for hi-def content. Getting digital cable is an extra cost I decided I'm not willing to pay at this time. I dont have an HD DVD player. And my set doesn't even have a HD tuner for over the air HD reception. So in practice, I am very pleased that this is a new way to get 720P video content, pretty much my only way.
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LusieR
