Microsoft Announces Bing for Xbox Entertainment Search, BBC Content Soon
Written by Alan Monday, 5 December 2011 06:32
Microsoft’s much anticipated Xbox 360 Dashboard rollout, with features announced way back at CES 2011 in January, is coming tomorrow, along with the new Windows Phone Xbox app. The new entertainment options coming to the Xbox are expected to give Microsoft serious leverage in their battle to win the living room, something we once expected them to try with Media Center. In all of today’s hype over this news a couple of things have been largely overlooked. One is that Microsoft is leveraging Bing as the entertainment search engine for Xbox going forward. The other is that they also confirmed that BBC would be coming in early 2012.
The new Bing for Xbox will search through all of your entertainment content, including movies, games, TV shows, apps and music, all by voice (if you don’t have a Kinect you will have to use good, old-fashioned text). In addition, it will also search across services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity on Demand, HBO Go, Zune, and more. Microsoft compare this new development of search across entertainment sources to the addition of search engines on the internet. “Bing on Xbox opens up living room entertainment the same way search engines opened up the web. When you think about the state of entertainment, there isn’t a lack of selection, the challenge is finding what you want in a timely manner.”
Don’t extect all of this search functionality to appear tomorrow with the Dashboard update. It will be rolled out gradually beginning tomorrow and it may take several weeks before some users see it.
Microsoft also confirmed that BBC content would become available to Xbox customers beginning in early 2012. It will join other content providers such as ESPN, Hulu Plus, Netflix, YouTube, and Today (MSNBC). Entertainment providers will begin rolling out their offerings tomorrow and it will continue over the next few week. There is no set date for the BBC content as of yet.
The addition of Bing is potentially huge for Microsoft, as it will allow them to push Bing to the forefront in a what will likely prove a key market in the future. The success of Xbox will put Bing far ahead of Google with their flagging Google TV offering. The addition of BBC content, along with Sky, for the U.K. crowd will also prove a potential game-changer.
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- Bing Search Comes To Firefox
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- Bing Search Update Adds Real-Time Twitter
