No, Xbox Still Can't Replace Your Cable Box

The future of television? Not quite yet. While the brings some cool new TV powers to Microsoft's entertainment system, it still has a huge gap that should stop you from cutting your cable or taking down your TV antenna.

I'm a cord-cutter myself. I for three years, and my wife and I love TV. We watch a combination of over-the-air network TV with an antenna, Netflix, and Amazon Instant Video shows.  (Neither of us is into sports, which helps us avoid cable.)

The new Xbox update has a bunch of TV services and promises others. Netflix, Hulu, Epix, and Microsoft's own store offer movies and TV shows. ESPN has live sports games, as long as you get your Internet from one of its approved ISPs. MLB.tv is coming for baseball, along with Vudu and Crackle movies and HBO Go programming (that last one only if you have cable TV, though.)

But here's the flaw: except for some sports, you can't watch what's on TV tonight.

This isn't just a flaw with the Xbox—it's true of every one of our 6 top ways to watch TV and movies on your TV, through the Internet.

Follow The Money ... Into Your TV

TV broadcasters and cable channels have a very entrenched business model, and they don't want it disrupted by the Internet. Cable systems pay channels fixed fees per subscriber, over and above what they make through advertising. Those huge fixed fees give channels the blocks of cash they need to buy or produce programming, and they won't give up that money easily.

Broadcast networks, meanwhile, still can't seem to work online viewing into how they set their ad rates. They want eyeballs on cable and the airwaves. They're protected because the live experience is extremely difficult to pirate; while almost every show on TV shows up on BitTorrent eventually, it shows up hours after it's been broadcast.

So when you look for popular shows on Xbox, you'll find them warmed over. The Xbox video page prominently advertises "last night's TV," sold by the episode, because tonight's TV is just too precious to the content owners to let leak out over the Net.

Why Not Support OTA?

There's a way around this, a way to fill the gap, and I'm sad and sorry the Xbox doesn't include it: support for over-the-air, digital TV. Many people can get free, crystal-clear network programming with a TV antenna. Combined with an OTA-capable DVR like a TiVo (which is what I have), that gives you a lot of popular shows for free, either at the moment they're broadcast or any time later.

Microsoft has supported OTA DVR functionality in Windows for a decade, and I'm not sure why the company hasn't brought that functionality over to the Xbox. Maybe the multitasking video compression needed to run a DVR routine in the background would interrupt gaming; maybe Microsoft just isn't ready to tell people to leave their Xboxen on all the time. (I doubt the idea is to drive media center PC sales; that's always been a niche market because they're far from easy to set up.)

Yes, TV is changing. It isn't changing quite as fast as we'd like, but it's changing, and the live TV features on the Xbox (especially the sports) will hasten the change. But if you really love TV, the Xbox doesn't offer enough of a reason to throw out your antenna or cable box just yet.