Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers 255
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the everybody-needs-a-second-job-these-days dept.
from the everybody-needs-a-second-job-these-days dept.
MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."
Wii.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply play older games.
A lot of "old" stuff is still perfectly playable and better than a lot of newer stuff.
Classics tend to be like that.
wii is an awesome netflix appliance (Score:5, Interesting)
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
Re:Yes, I can (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, gaming is all old PCs are good for. The Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 800, all over 30 years old. I can't imagine doing productivity work on them but the games they play are as much fun today as they were 30 years ago.
Re:It taken six years for x86 pc to catch to Power (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what? (Score:2, Interesting)
I haven't had a "wipe/reinstall" issue with my Windows PCs since probably '02 or '03...
That's not to say that I haven't done a full wipe/reinstall of my own volition in the intervening years...but it hasn't been due to a serious issue since soon after XP came out.
The whole "Windows is so broken you have to reinstall it every 3 months because ZOMG VIRUSSESSSS AND SPYYYYYYWARE" meme is getting retarded at this point. I use a ton of cracked and hacked shit on my Windows 7 system and I haven't had a problem yet. I really don't know what all the people that are having these problems are doing (if they aren't just full of crap in the first place). I suspect it is mostly PEBKAC errors. [wikipedia.org]
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, alas, not all of us can upgrade from our still working computers to newer ones just for the sake of gaming.
Hell, how many PC games nowadays are just shitty console ports in the first place?
I haven't played a game that really taxes a system since the original Crysis, and my circa-2008 Q6600 gaming rig with a couple Radeon 4670's in it has been able to play anything that's come out at perfectly reasonable medium/high settings to this day.
The era of needing to upgrade every 6 months to play new computer games is dead, and it's been dead for a while now.