It had to happen sooner or later, but Canadian company TELUS seems to have gotten the jump on everybody. We’ve said that game consoles were taking over living rooms all over America, and it seems TELUS is taking it one step further – Microsoft Xbox 360 game consoles as replacements for IPTV set top boxes. Note that they’re the first to do this in North America.
TELUS, with the Mediaroom software, uses Xbox 360s for IPTV
Engadget says:
After years of waiting it’s no surprise to see the Xbox 360 finally sliding into the role of IPTV set-top box, but we couldn’t have seen Canada’s Telus being the first in North America to offer the option. It only switched customers over to the Microsoft Mediaroom platform powering its Optik TV package — currently only available in Alberta and B.C. — earlier this year, enabling this new multiroom setup. Of course, that means the Xbox 360 can’t be the only set-top box in the house — it just acts as a client to the main DVR for live TV watching, or to schedule and watch previously recorded programming.
Read the full post at Engadget.com.
This move is going to be a hallmark of things to come — game consoles are just that much more versatile than set-top boxes. Add to the mix, Microsoft’s Project Natal, and this could be a very interesting proposition indeed.
Better beef up your Xbox 360 system, then — if you already own one. A little more storage will go a long way — downloading high definition episodes and TV shows from IPTV is a very addicting process — take it from us. There are 500GB portable hard drives for Xbox 360 that can easily be connected via USB. This is a significant boost to your Xbox 360 storage.
DIGISTOR’s Xbox 360 USB Hard Drive, in particular, is compatible with PC systems as well, so you can offload HD episodes and if possible, burn them to Blu-ray discs. Hey, if you check out our past article for Blu-ray authoring, you can also use Adobe Premiere CS5 to author professional-looking HD outputs in Blu-ray (using a Blu-ray burner, of course).
