Xbox Video Marketplace – mixed first impressions

December 18, 2007

One of the things I was most looking forward to from the Xbox Fall Dashboard update was the opening up of movie downloads from Video Marketplace to the UK market (among others).

Here’s how it works; you download a movie of your choice for cost somewhere between £2 (for a standard def movie) and £3.20 (for a high def movie). After downloading, you have 14 days in which to watch your movie before it expires gets deleted; as soon as you start to play the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching it before it expires.

The initial movie offerings are a bit hit-and-miss (thanks to Engadget for the list), but on Friday evening I opted for The Fugitive, in standard def. The movie was listed as 1.8gb download, so I was a little surprised to see the download confirmation message appear after only a couple of minutes.

Knowing that the movie expires 24 hours after you hit play, I didn’t do anything with it until Saturday evening, when Mrs T and I curled up on the sofa for a little Oscar-winning action. I hit play and got the following screen:

This confirmed my suspicion that there was no way a 1.8gb file could been sucked down that quickly. I hit Play anyway, thinking that if the Xbox knows it’s only got a partial download and I’ve just hit play, it would go out and download the rest of the movie in the background. Not so; about 40 minutes into the film, we got kicked back out to the video blade.

The section of the movie we were able to watch was pretty good – there was a bit of pixelation at the start, but after that it was fullscreen DVD quality with 5.1 surround – and that was streamed to the Xbox over my wireless LAN, too.

I went back into Video Marketplace and tried to download the movie again, but then got this screen:

Well, I thought, at least I’m not going to be charged twice! I tried again several times during the evening with no joy, and didn’t have any more success on Sunday either. I  ended up taking a quick look on Xbox.com to find that there were indeed some technical issues with Video Marketplace. The problem for me was that my 24 hour countdown was now running:

Strangely, when I tried to play the section I’d already downloaded, I was unable to – and this was well within the 24 hour window:

So, today I called Microsoft and after spending only a couple of minutes in a queue, got through to an operator. I explained what had happened and read back the error codes I’d seen, and within 5 minutes had the 250 points refunded back to my account (after going through the now-obligatory security questions).

Despite the problem I had, the service deserves at least a second chance, so I will be using Video Marketplace again. Perhaps a way for Microsoft to improve the customer experience is to not deduct the points until the movie has fully downloaded, so that if glitches with the download do happen, the customer isn’t the one having to chase for a refund.

As far as the UK is concerned, this a new service offering so there are bound to be a few hiccoughs early on, but if you’ve used Video Marketplace too, I’d be interested to hear what your experiences have been like.

Posted in xbox