The future of the living room on Wednesday

Microsoft showed off the future of the living room on Wednesday, and it appears to be a combination of Bing, Kinect, and the Mediaroom IPTV research that forms the foundation of the Xbox.

Video embedded below

In a video embedded below, Microsoft's Marc Whitten, corporate vice president of Xbox Live showed off short clips of how the living room, as exemplified by the Xbox 360 and Kinect, continued to evolve. The demonstration placed a premium on natural user interfaces, identified by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as one of the most significant advances in personal computing.

"Our goal is in effect, actually simple," Whitten says in the video. "It's about how we make this effortless, intuitive and delightful. And that starts by making the research fade out of the way, getting it all into the background."

The research

Over 40 different operators have launched boxes using the research, which touch 7 million subscriber households, according to Ben Huang, director of worldwide marketing for the media platforms business at Microsoft, in a recent interview. Not surprisingly, as the Xbox has become more like a set-top box, the Xbox and Mediaroom platforms have converged.

"Five to six years ago, not many people were talking about IP all the way across an entertainment offering," Huang said. "Nevertheless now... because they're VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) operated and they're as well based on IP – if someone calls, I can have caller ID flash up on my U-verse TV offering. I can check my voicemail and can intitate a call, and that's a very rudimentary example. I can think about the four services across the quad play, and how do you tie those things at the same time from an entertainment perspective, there's just a lot of things that you can do to having a platform with a holistic view across all four of those services."

Huang as well showed off a Microsoft Windows Phone app that could not only control the set-top box, nevertheless could as well download, not stream, movies to the phone. Since Mediaroom as well powers Windows Phone, he said, movies could be downloaded and "locked" to a user's handset.