Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast http://tinyurl.com/3yj6lsn
Microsoft has sold more than 42 million game consoles worldwide, but the more impressive stat is that its Xbox Live subscription service now has more than 25 million users. That’s more subscribers than Comcast, which earlier this week reported that its subscriber count had actually decreased by 275,000 over the most recent quarter, ending at less than 23 million for the first time in years. And while many Xbox Live subscribers are clearly international, with the service available in 26 countries, Microsoft clearly has some scale and a huge audience that it could leverage.
Of course, Xbox Live is mostly about inter-person game play over the network, but Xbox Live users also watch live and on-demand video an average of 40 hours a week on the service, of which an hour a day is for media watching: 7 hrs watching media; 33 playing games.
…over the past year, the amount of time those users have spent watching TV and movie content has grown 157 percent. Not just that, but Xbox already makes more money from media sales than through its Xbox Live subscription revenues.
The console currently has video content from its Zune marketplace, Netflix and ESPN3, and early next year will also have video content from Hulu’s Plus subscription service. That range of content has 42 percent of Xbox Live subscribers watching an hour of TV and movie content on average per day, or 30 hours of video per month.