Microsoft planning seamless ecosystem, Xbox Live is "the pervasive media service across devices"

In an interview with Seattle Times, Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business group Vice President of Global Marketing brought along a lot more than just his lofty job title. Mike Delman was primarily being quizzed about Xbox Live's big moves to become a content service thanks to those E3 announcements, but we also got a few tidbits about multimedia on Windows Phone and Windows 8, and how Microsoft plans to stitch all of it together:

Live has been successful on the Windows Phone. Live will be built into the PC. It will be the service where you get your entertainment. We were talking about it — you will not just see consoles and handhelds at this show next year, this show's going to morph into other devices.

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If we have that and the PCs to leverage, that will be a big Live base. It's our job to make "buy a movie in one place and play it everywhere, buy a game in one place and play it everywhere." Making things portable will be a big focus of ours.

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There will be a lot of similarities [for Windows 8] in design and service philosophy. Whether it's us or Apple or anybody else, people want to be able to navigate through multiple devices in a certain ecosystem very seamlessly so we're committed to that.

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Xbox Live will the pervasive media service across devices.

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We have a ton of assets. Unifying the assets will be good for us and good for consumers.

We're hearing quite a lot of ecosystem talk in those excerpts which isn't surprising. When you look at Windows 8 and the new Xbox 360 UI, both of them are ready to join Windows Phone in some Metro-y goodness soon. That itself was a big hint that Microsoft is taking some bold steps to redefine themselves. But it also appears we got a major hint that the Xbox Live name is going to be present in Windows 8 and may encompass much more than just gaming--it also appears to be swallowing up multimedia like music and movies. This could add some credibility to the rumors of Zune being broken down into Xbox Live and other services too.

What do we know for certain? This is exactly the reason why we (and probably many of you) jumped on the Windows Phone bandwagon: the seamless ecosystem. Microsoft's back, baby.

Via: WMPoweruser
Source: Seattle Times