The greatest change to hit our living room since HDTV arrived came last month in the form of the November Xbox 360 system update — known as the New Xbox Experience — which included the much-anticipated Netflix Watch Instantly feature. The whole idea of this on-demand streaming service is that you don’t have to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail — you just pick the movies on the web site, then fire up your Watch Instantly device. Throughout 2008, Netflix has been rolling out Watch Instantly to various platforms — first to PCs, then through a $99 dedicated box you attach to your TV, and then to the Xbox. The past two weeks have seen the service added to two more devices — Samsung Blu-Ray players and the TiVo HD. I have both the TiVo HD and an Xbox 360, and have tried out Watch Instantly on both.

I haven’t done extensive testing, so I’ll make this quick: it’s better on the Xbox. Movies seem to be a notch lower on the quality scale when viewed through the TiVo, as if my internet connection is slower than it really is. Even my wife noticed the lesser quality immediately, and she’s not nearly as much of a HD nut as I am. In addition to being so obviously pixelated, the TiVo variant of the Netflix software stretches 4:3 aspect movies for some reason; I checked Eraser the other night, and the TiVo stretched it while the Xbox’s Netflix program played it in its proper ratio (with black bars on the sides — I hate stretchovision, I’d rather have the bars than fat faces).

Finally, I found the Netflix interface on the Xbox more pleasant to use — the new sliding panel interface of the NXE plays well with browsing movies, while the TiVo’s Netflix interface — like the rest of the TiVo interface — seems dated and clunky. I love my TiVo, but they really need to get moving on that rumored interface overhaul.

The long-awaited (for Xbox fans, anyway) system overhaul for the Xbox 360, known as the New Xbox Experience, was rolled out this morning. The NXE is a completely new interface for the 360, and along with the eye candy brings some cool new features to Microsoft’s venerable gaming platform. More significant than the changes themselves, I think, is the fact that such a complete system upgrade is possible — it’s almost like getting a new system without paying a dime or lifting a finger. No one has ever done such a complete revamp of a large installed base of “set top boxes”, which are generally considered static devices once they roll off the factory.

Let’s take a look at the major improvements in the NXE.

Interface

I’ve always felt that the previous Xbox 360 “blade” interface, while visually interesting in certain respects, lacked quite a bit in the user interface department. It was kind of clunky feeling, and there were times I wasn’t sure what I could click on (or how to get the cursor there) and what I couldn’t. So the first and most obvious improvement in the NXE is the look and feel. It’s slicker, more open feeling, and more modern, bringing it in line with the PS3 interface. It also seems a bit snappier when transitioning from screen to screen — although some interface niggles remain. For example, it takes way too many clicks to delete a game (and I download a lot of trial games, so I am frequently deleting things). However, on the whole it is a very welcome improvement, and makes navigating the dashboard a much more pleasant experience.
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During a London event pimping the upcoming military/monster/undead bloodbath game Gears of War 2, developer Rod Fergusson from Epic made a remark about the Xbox 360 having reached its graphical limit. Some thought he meant that nothing else could be done with the platform, but what he was really referring to (as clarified later by Epic colleague Cliff Bleszinski) was that developers had to find creative new ways of taking advantage of what the 360 provides, because they’re not going to get any more processing power or memory. Bleszinski cited the Super Nintendo’s life cycle, during which game graphics continually improved despite a series of apparent plateaus.

The point is that a fixed platform, like the Super Nintendo, Xbox 360, and every other console, forces developers to work within their hardware restrictions with no expectation of any flexibility or improvement. While this may be obvious, the contrast between development for game platforms and PCs makes for some interesting observations.
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