Last week during Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, company CEO Steve Ballmer said that the upcoming Xbox TV platform will launch this holiday season. He indicated its release while previewing the service in front of a captive audience, but refrained from offering specifics like the actual release date, content partners, pricing and the available content at launch.

Instead, Ballmer told the audience that Microsoft would be working alongside “dozens of hundreds of additional video content providers.” And in addition to video on-demand, the new platform will also provide live TV spanning news, sports, and numerous popular channels. The service will be similar what Microsoft has already done overseas with Sky TV in the United Kingdom, Canal Plus in France, and FoxTel in Australia.

But the key factor in making Xbox TV succeed where other attempts have failed will be Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-sensing device. “Having all of that content is right on, it’s fantastic, but it brings a new challenge with it,” Ballmer said. “Certainly we all know the frustrations of using guides and menus and controllers, and we think a better way to do all of this is simply to bring Bing and voice to Xbox. You say it, Xbox finds it.”

CNN reports that a Microsoft employee demonstrated Xbox TV using Kinect by shouting “Xbox, Bing ‘The Office.’” The TV immediately pulled up all available seasons of NBC’s hit comedy TV show for on-demand viewing. The employee then announced an additional voice search that was supposed to allow users to navigate to a particular season or episode. That particular command failed.

“It’s a good thing that’s shipping for Christmas,” Ballmer mused.

SOURCE via CNN