Xbox Dad:

Family Content on Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace

One of the things that makes Xbox LIVE® so cool is the fact that you can access so many new and interesting things on it. As you may know, you can get games, game updates, videos, and even feature-length movies on Xbox LIVE. One of the things the kids and I do when my wife goes off to work on the weekends is fire up our Xbox 360™ and find some new things to entertain ourselves with. This became especially important because of the recent poor weather we've had here in Redmond.

So what's out there on Xbox LIVE for a family that's looking for a little entertainment? In this article, I'll just talk about what you can find on Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace. In a future article, I'll cover the games on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Navigate to the Video Marketplace page from the Media blade on your Xbox 360. The Video Marketplace is broken down by categories, starting with Movies, then TV Shows, Music Videos, Game Videos, and finally a section called Clips. Press the Y button to get an extremely helpful page of tips on how Xbox LIVE Marketplace works. The topics are short and it can be helpful to go over them as a refresher to remind you what is available.

As far as cost goes, there are three types of video content available on Video Marketplace. Some content is available for a rental period, some content is available for purchase (meaning you can keep it as it doesn't expire), and there is also a ton of free stuff that you can watch from Video Marketplace.

So what exactly is out there? Let's take a look.

Movies
If you're looking for a pure family movie on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, your options are currently a little limited, but more will be available soon. We rented The Ant Bully, opting for the regular definition version, as the animation style seemed very crisp, and it still looked great on our HDTV. The kids loved it.

Movies can take a while to download depending on your Internet connection speed, so if you have a specific time in mind, such as movie night, download the movie ahead of time. Remember that hi-def movies are going to be even larger files, so give yourself plenty of time to download them before you watch them. Once you have them though, you have 14 days to watch the movie. However, once you start the movie, you start a 24 hour countdown, and you need to watch the movie inside that window.

TV Shows
Video Marketplace has a surprising amount of television content now available. You can explore the TV shows available by New Arrivals, Networks, Clips (short television segments), Genres, and All TV Shows.

If you navigate to Genres, you'll find a section called Kids and Families. Here we were able to find some of our favorite cartoons, including Avatar: The Last Airbender, seasons 1 and 2, Invader Zim season 1, and 4 seasons of Spongebob Squarepants. Airbender episodes cost 160 points each, so we bought one of those and watched it.

If you navigate away from the purchase blade, you can check the status of your content by clicking the X button on the Video Marketplace page. This will allow you to check on your Active Downloads. You can start to watch some content before it is completely downloaded, so if you want to play your show right away, check back on the status regularly. We got the "OK to play" option at only 20% progress, but this may differ depending on your connection speed and file size.

Avatar: The Last Airbender looked great on the HDTV, but this content was created for television, so there were black bars on the sides of our widescreen television. The animation was crisp and beautiful and the quality was much higher than you would find on non-HDTV channels.

Controls
The controls for video content are quite simple. On your Xbox 360 controller, you can simply navigate by bringing up the onscreen controls by pressing the Y button. With these controls you can pause, skip, rewind, and fast forward. There is a display mode option that will let you switch between Letterbox Zoom and default settings. There is also an Info Pane that will let you see how much time your video has left. If you are still downloading a video when you start to watch it, not all of these options will be available until the video is completely downloaded.

If you end up watching a lot of video from Xbox LIVE Marketplace, or if you use your Xbox 360 as your DVD player, you should pick up the Xbox 360 Universal Remote. It has buttons for all the basic video functions and it makes it much easier to play videos and control your Windows Media Center PC through your Xbox 360.

Family Settings
What would an Xbox Dad column be without a little discussion about Family Settings? You can control what can be played on your Xbox 360 console by navigating to the Family Settings page from the System blade. From there, click Console Settings and enter your passcode to get to the console controls. To set ratings on video content, select the Video Ratings option and press A. From here you can change settings by Movie Rating, TV Rating, Explicit Video, and Unrated Video.

To change Movie settings, for example, open the Movie Ratings page and then choose what level you want to allow on your Xbox 360. If you later want to watch content that exceeds the allowed level, you just need to enter your passcode. TV ratings work the same way. Note that this lock will not only block Xbox 360 content, it will block DVD movies that are encoded with the video rating.

There are two options that you may have not seen before that are important. There's an Explicit Video option which allows you to block content marked specifically as explicit, and there's an option to block all unrated video. This is a useful setting because not all DVDs encode their ratings, so this setting acts as a catch-all for stuff your console doesn't know about.

In all, I would say that our Xbox 360 Video Marketplace experience was very satisfying. We're looking forward to more new content on the future, but what we saw gave us a real taste for more. Next time, we'll probably opt for an action movie that can watch in high definition!

Article by Xbox Dad