Gamertell

Like many of you, I have finally had the chance to check out the “New Xbox Experience” (NXE). It functions, looks nice, and even though it tries to throw advertisement after advertisement in my face. I don’t mind. That’s what it’s supposed to do.

But one of the biggest things I was most looking forward to most was the ability to stream my Netflix instant queue straight to my Xbox 360 without having to hook up my laptop every time I wanted to watch movies on my T.V. Unfortunately, it seems that Sony Pictures Entertainment is having a small licensing spat with Netflix over its (few hundred) titles being streamed on the rival console.

Joystiq first reported this earlier on but the story has since gained steam when MTV Multiplayer discovered this on the Netflix Official Blog:

As watching instantly becomes a more prominent part of the Netflix service, our goal is to have all of our streaming content licensed for all of our partner devices. We’re doing well in this area, but it will take some time before we fully achieve that goal. Today, titles regularly come in and out of license and there is a natural ebb and flow to what we have on license at any given point in time. In the case of Xbox 360, a few hundred titles are temporarily unavailable to be streamed via the Xbox game console. Those titles are still available to be watched on subscribers’ computers and on TVs via other partner devices, and we hope they’ll be licensed for Xbox 360 shortly.

Did some cosmic timing just happen to choose the eve of NXE’s launch to end the licensing of those titles or, more likely, did Sony Pictures Entertainment effectively end the license on its own? I’ll leave it up to you readers to speculate cause because right now it really doesn’t matter, titles are missing from the Xbox 360 branch of the service and now I’m that much more less inclined to use the service over the weekend. That doesn’t mean I’m skipping the service wholeheartedly but now maybe I can finish that book I started earlier this week.

But as the quote from the Netflix blog says, the titles are still available elsewhere, though the Xbox 360 is the first to bring streaming in high definition while others should be getting it before the year’s end and this most likely will be a temporary issue.

In reality, Sony Pictures Entertainment is probably trying to up the price per stream for its competitor, because hey, why fund the enemy?

Read [Joystiq] Also Read [MTV Multiplayer] Also Read [Engadget] Also Read [Gadgettell] Site [Netflix Blog]

Image courtesy of Joystiq