Xbox Karma
Last night though, Carol and I booted up the xbox, ready for another episode of Dr. Who, when were greeted with a message saying that the console had been banned from xbox live for violations of the terms of service. Destroying any hopes of fixing the problem the last sentence of the message clearly stated “there is no recourse for a banned console” meaning – enjoy your brick, thanks for playing, have a nice day, oh and by the way why don’t you hop on down to the store and purchase a new one. Needless to say the discovery was frustrating. Talking to a friend about the ban it looks like I wasn’t alone. Other friends have had the same luck, others have not, but are waiting patiently for their turn at exile.
I have had my xbox about 3 years now. In that time I have played only a few games, my favorite being Call of Duty 4. With that exception it is even rarer that I have ever played games on xbox live. What I do use xbox live for though is access to Netflix streaming services.
An interesting bit here is that I still have an xbox live account – and will until it expires next April. I am uncertain what I can actually do with it barring purchasing another xbox to use it with. I don’t even want to play games with my console, I just want access to Netflix – why can’t the Microsoft gods understand this and kindly re-enable my console. There certainly is no one to blame for this but myself. I guess insisting that I had backup copies of my games wasn’t worth the price after all. 
Until we figure out what to do the Tivo will be our interface to movie heaven. Purchasing another xbox is one option but it would have to be new from Microsoft to ensure that we weren’t buying a xbox that had been banned just like ours had. Unfortunately the Tivo interface is significantly subpar to that of the xbox when it comes to Netflix streaming. I am curious why though. Microsoft certainly went the extra mile in their design providing access to the top 100 lists for each of the primary movie categories, access to the queue and the ability to setup movie parties. Tivo offers only a vanilla connection to the current queue with no ability to actually manage the queue. Hopefully the Tivo developers get off their rears and deliver an interface at least as useful as the xbox version.
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