Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Sky Player for Xbox and Media Centre

28th October, 2009

Sky have now announced that Sky Player is available for the Xbox 360, and soon Windows Media Centre.

As I recently blogged about (#930), the capabilities of Windows Media Centre and Windows 7 are being greatly extended by Microsoft, and this represents the first mainstream integration of streaming media services with a Media Centre dashboard.

The first reviews of the new interface sing its praises for how well it works and how easy it is to use. I’m much more interested in the pricing though: you can buy a seperate subscription to the service for £15/month, and purchase individual programmes for varying prices. Not only that, but it’s not a long-term contract - just pay £15 to get one months’ access to the service. If you ask me, that’s pretty awesome. (If you’re doing this on the Xbox though, you’ll need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to access the full features of Sky Player).

One of the cool things about Sky Player is the ability to watch in “Avatar” mode - your avatar and a group of your friend’s avatars are shown on a virtual sofa, enjoying the TV. Nice touch!

Let’s hope Sky Player is available for Media Centre soon.