[Jeff @ Nov 2nd 2006 11:40PM]

"1000+ hours of video" could mean a lot of things, and none of them are really world-beaters.

You've gotta figure that "1000+" means between 1,000 and 2,000 (otherwise it'd be "2000+") and probably under 1,500. That works out to somewhere around 500 films with no extras, assuming these are all feature movies, which they probably aren't. But even if they are, 500 films is nothing. Netflix carries 65,000 titles and they say more than 90% are rented on any given day - this is the reason for their success.

Now, let's assume instead that it's a mix of content - trailers, some feature films, some "behind-the-scenes" stuff on games, some user-created youtube-style videos, maybe some other game-related stuff. So then you're probably talking about something like 300 movies and then a bunch of other random stuff, whatever they could get the rights to. I think this is probably more likely. So then it's even less compelling if you're looking at it from the movie download perspective.

It sounds like it's probably a classic case of using the biggest number you can to talk about a relatively small amount of content. 1000+ hours of video is really not that much. It's not like you're going to be sitting there trying to watch all 1000+ hours sequentially. No, you're going to pick and choose, and maybe you only even want to watch 1 out of every 25 hours available. You're going to run out of stuff pretty quick at that rate.

You can argue that they can add stuff as they go along, but the same would be true of iTunes and Amazon Unbox and it hasn't worked real well for them so far. The problem is you know they all tried to get the rights to whatever they could right from the start. And whatever they couldn't get is not going to magically become available to them later. Copyright issues are the big bugaboo preventing downloadable movies right now, and if MS can only muster up 1000 hours of "video" (whatever that means), then it sounds like they're running up against the same problems as everybody else.