Microsoft to launch Xbox original TV shows in June, has six series lined up, with more than a dozen projects in development
Microsoft Goes Hollywood in Amazon-Like Programming Push — Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is going Hollywood with a cast including comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Green …
Context & Ripple Effects
The June slate is the payoff to a build-out that has been visible in the coverage for years: Microsoft's web series experiments date back to 2008, the company made a dedicated entertainment hire to bolster its Hollywood efforts in September 2012, and Variety reported in December 2013 that the first original shows would land in early 2014. Today's report firms up the timing — six series by June, with Sarah Silverman and Seth Green among the names attached — and frames the effort explicitly as an Amazon-style programming push.
The pickup pattern shows how far this story traveled beyond gaming press: alongside Xbox's own channel, Bloomberg's report ran with Mercury News, Variety, PC World, The Verge, Forbes, Wired, and TechnoBuffalo on or about April 7, 2014, signaling that the story is being read as a media-industry event rather than a console update.
First-order effects
- Microsoft shifts Xbox from a game console with apps toward a content owner, putting six original series in front of Xbox 360 and Xbox One owners by June and giving its entertainment division a shipped product after the 2012 Hollywood hire.
Second-order effects
- By explicitly benchmarking against Amazon's original-programming strategy, Microsoft forces the streaming incumbents to treat a console maker as a commissioning rival for talent and projects — the same pool of comedians and producers both sides are bidding for.
Third-order effects
- If the six-series slate sustains an audience, console makers become de facto premium-content commissioners, tying hardware install bases to exclusive programming the way cable operators once tied subscribers to channels.
The trend: Consumer-hardware companies are moving from distributing other studios' video to financing their own originals, with Microsoft's Xbox slate following the playbook Amazon established in streaming.