The latest effort is a story in the New York Times that says Microsoft has drafted veteran Hollywood producer Peter Safran to produce original shows that will debut on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live online gaming service. Already, gamers can download movies and TV shows to their game consoles. Safran's work will be distributed first to the online service.
This is not to say there is no good entertainment on the Xbox Live gaming service. Gamers love the previews of games that Microsoft releases on the site. And there are short originals such as hilarious Red vs. Blue, which are animated films that use the Halo game characters and are part of a game film genre known as "machinima." I guess it's time to upgrade that little Xbox 360 20-gigabyte hard disk, which can only store a handful of films. Safran is probably going to up the ante on the entertainment values for videos available on Microsoft's online service.