From the sound of things, the Zune marketplace on Xbox Live might be competing with Netflix and Hulu soon.
Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace might be getting a pretty drastic revamp in the near future, if rumors out of Washington are to be believed. Reportedly, the service will still deliver media to people who are looking for it, but the entire business model might be completely different from its current incarnation in only a few months.
Anonymous sources out of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, have told The Daily that the Zune Marketplace is apparently scheduled to become a a new source of streaming media content, much like Netflix and Hulu Plus are at the moment for Xbox Live users. This doesn’t seem like a totally ridiculous rumor, since (at E3 last month) Microsoft did vaguely announce that it intends to bring its own form of streaming television to Xbox Live this Fall. Of course, the Zune Marketplace has been able to stream content for a while, but apparently the new rumor is based around users paying a subscription so they can have access to the content they want to stream.
Of course, when Joystiq asked Microsoft to confirm or deny this new claim, the company would only say that it “doesn’t comment on rumors or speculations.” Sounds like the public’s going to have to wait a while before anything official is announced.
