Microsoft XBox 360 delivers voice-controlled TV and success from the start

Voice-controlled television may have been one of Steve Jobs' big Ah-ha! moments, but it's Apple rival Microsoft that's bringing one to market today, in the form of an Xbox 360 update. Using the gaming system's Kinect component — which has until now let users treat their bodies like controllers and use their voices to play games and entertainment — users will become the remote control as well, speaking their commands to the system.

"With this update, Xbox 360 system owners will experience Kinect voice control integrated with Bing search, making your TV and entertainment experiences more social and personal than ever,” said Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, in a statement.

In October, nearly 40 TV and entertainment providers said they'd bring voice-controlled experiences to the Xbox 360, and a number of these will roll out around the world over the next month and year. As soon as Dec. 6, the feature will be available for, among others, Hulu Plus in the United States, Netflix, the Today show and ESPN.

Apple, which has succeeded in thoroughly infiltrating Microsoft strongholds, is rumored to be working on combining Siri, the iPhone 4S's voice-activated assistant, with Apple TV (Unfiltered: Siri's career plans include TV (and cars?)). According to analyst Gene Munster, such a device could be on sale by the 2012 holiday season, and for twice the price of a current average HDTV. How to motivate consumers to move first on the Microsoft effort? As Forrester analyst James McQuivey points out in a Dec. 4 blog post, Microsoft doesn't need to — tens of millions of people already have the necessary hardware in their living rooms, and after the free update this week, they'll have the new capability as well.

The strategy reminds one of Amazon entering the tablet business, and not needing to make a dime on the actual hardware (CP: Amazon Kindle Fire causing chaos in Android tablet market, says report).

"With more than 57 million people worldwide already sitting on a box that’s about to be upgraded for free — and with what I estimate to be 15 million Kinect cameras in some of those homes — Microsoft has not only built the right experience, it has ensured that it will spread quickly and with devastating effect," wrote McQuivey.

He continued:

This does to the TV product experience what Apple did to phones and then to computing generally with the iPad — it expands a product experience to create a platform on which industry-altering digital disruption can occur. But the Xbox 360 has the potential to do it even more swiftly, connecting a box people already have to content they already value and subscribe to. And it's that rapid adoption of such a simple yet powerful platform that will allow the TV experience to finally become and even surpass what we previously imagined interactive TV could achieve.

However, in order to accomplish this — TV fulfilling its true potential — McQuivey explains, Microsoft will need to deliver three things: cross-platform utility, a robust developer community and still more TV experiences. With Microsoft's Windows Phone market share still in the low single digits, that first requirement will be a big one.

On Dec. 6 Microsoft is launching a free Xbox Companion app for the Windows Phone OS that will allow the smartphone running it to also act as a controller, among other cool perks. But as McQuivey plainly puts it, "The world is now dominated by Android phones, and Microsoft would be wise to take its services to the platforms that people already use."

From there, the developer community will follow — and ideally so will the ability for devs to put not just games but custom apps into the Xbox, creating capabilities such as clicking on an item in a show to easily order it.

From there, says McQuivey, we can expect "digital disruption" on the level of changes to advertising, content co-creation and social engagement, and making TV something we only could have imagined. Not to mention, he adds, "doing it faster and cheaper than any industry initiative heretofore envisioned."