Xbox Live Challenges Cable Box

The old-fashioned cable television set-top box — long the hub of living-room entertainment for most people — is about to become less relevant. Beginning on Dec 6 and continuing through the month, Microsoft will give a face-lift to its Xbox Live online entertainment service that will allow subscribers to watch a wide array of mainstream television programming from the Xbox 360 console.

In addition, rather than fumbling with traditional remote controls and the primitive program guides of cable boxes, Xbox Live users will be able to search for shows using voice commands and hand gestures, if they also have the popular Kinect peripheral for the Xbox. Later this month, Microsoft will begin adding dozens of other sources of programming to the service, including Verizon FiOS, Comcast’s Xfinity and HBO. On Dec 6, the few online video services that have been on Xbox Live for some time, including Netflix and Hulu Plus, will be able to be retrieved using voice searching and other methods. Microsoft’s deal with cable and content providers stops short of making it possible for people to ditch their traditional pay-television packages; people will still need to pay the cable providers to get channels through the Xbox. They will also have to pay the roughly $60 a year Microsoft typically charges for a premier membership to Xbox Live. And the Xbox won’t be a true substitute for everything viewers can get through their cable boxes because content rights will have to be negotiated for some shows before they can be watched through the console. But the agreement is nonetheless significant because there are more than 35 million worldwide subscribers to Xbox Live, making the Xbox one of the most common Internet-connected boxes in living rooms. And it is part of a growing effort by media companies to bring some 21st-century pizazz to the experience of navigating and watching television, a medium that is largely watched using traditional remote controls and set-top boxes that have changed little in the past 10 years.