Robbie Bach Confirms Video Content for the Zune Marketplace

For the first time today, David Laurent joins Cliczune as a guest blogger.(Stephane)

Well, yesterday the president of Entertainment and Devices, Robbie Bach, spoke at the 2007 Financial Analyst Meeting. Some Interesting things came up at this meeting, about both the Zune and Xbox. Some of the things Bach talked about are “Media Room”, the new name for IPTV, and Zune video content. Yes, video content for the Zune Marketplace is in the work but no release date has been announced yet. What else can we expect from the Zune team? According to Bach, new software, new features and new devices. Microsoft also wants to broaden the Zune brand.

Bach said, “In the case of Zune, we have the Zune Marketplace. You're going to see more work from us in Zune Community and other types of services; likewise in video. You should think of "live" as being sort of the capstone for connected entertainment. It's the services that are going to connect these different experiences and enable consumers to have that breadth of experience that I talked about.”

Robbie also restated that the Zune is a 3 to 4 year investment and will stay so. The Zune is here to stay for the long hall, but you probably already knew that...

Bach also talked about the Xbox failure problem and said, “Finally as we go through each of these areas, I want to talk about gaming. I talked earlier about the warranty reserve and the challenges we had there. I'll just talk briefly about that. Certainly a key focus for us right now is quality. Since somebody will ask in the audience, I'll just answer the question, you know, "Tell me about the specific component that failed that caused you to have to do the warranty reserve." And I will tell you that it would have been easier for me from a questioning perspective to tell you that it was a specific component, but it's not. It's a design challenge that we've had to work around and create a new design to solve that problem, and for the interaction of a variety of different components. And so that's a Microsoft design question, not some component manufacturer's problem or our manufacturing partner's problems. It's something we've had to work on. We know we have a much better design in the market now. We verified that. We feel very good about the quality going forward, and we think we're going to be able to deliver on our goals for the year.”

At least they don’t blame the hardware for their problems. I always thought that the design was the cause, but with a 3 year warranty now, we know they stand behind the product.

Comments

[The Zune Geek]

Yay! Videos at last!!!!

[JohnCz]

I hope they are offering the same content library that exists on XBox.

[cesar]

Before this spins crazy out of control: we haven't actually made any official announcements about this. This post is actually taking remarks out of context and speculating on top of them.

- Cesar, www.zuneinsider.com

[MadBrown]

Long hall?

[Keith Messingerr]

I am glad to see more content coming. If you want some military type content go to www.savethecolors.com/videos.html

If those don't interest you, scroll down for links to more videos and check out just for fun.

Most of these have been sized for a Zune and compressed for faster downloads.

No registration, no money, no plug for my site. Just doing my thing for Zune.

Regards,
Keith
(Microsoft Spouse)