Eric Johnson

Recent Posts by Eric Johnson

First Xbox One TV Ad Shows Off TV Integration, Not Games. But Will It Click?

Are you ready for some football? If you aren’t, but you buy an Xbox One in November, this might be a preview of how your house will use it:

Notably, the first 30-second spot for Microsoft’s next-gen gaming console does not include any mention of games. Rather, it showcases — in the same vein as those memorable iPhone ads — some of the other stuff the Xbox One can do. That includes: Voice control, live TV access, apps that integrate with and react to that live TV, and Skype.

It touches on all of that in the first 13 seconds, and shows those features in real-looking settings. (Check out, for example, how cluttered some of those coffee tables are.)

Gamers raked Microsoft over the coals after it devoted nearly half of its unveiling event for the console in May to these broadly consumer-friendly (although not cord-cutter-friendly) media features. But they’re a key point of distinction between Microsoft’s next-gen console strategy and Sony’s, which is focused mainly on the gamer audience.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald