The Social Contract

This is about us delivering on the promises we've been making. We promised that we'd bring a holistic entertainment experience and we're offering high-definition movie streaming now through the Zune service we’re launching tomorrow, and we're also offering a great music service through Last.fm. In terms of rounding out a lot of the entertainment experiences, we think this is just the next step in delivering on that promise.

And then obviously with Twitter and Facebook being integrated into the service, that's about delivering on our sharing and community promises. We have a great community on Xbox Live, they're very active, they love to share, and we think with Twitter and Facebook we're just giving them some more avenues to connect with friends and interact.

I think it's about choice, I think it's additive. A lot of people when we launch these services say: "Well, hang on, I use it on my PC, I use it on my phone." Yes, you do, and you're still going to use it on your PC, and you're still going to use it on your phone, but now you can do it when you're sat in front of your TV as well in your living room.

So it's just about giving people choice and giving them a slightly different experience. The Facebook and Twitter applications are bespoke to the service, they do have Xbox Live unique features, such as being able to see which Xbox Live friends are online, et cetera. And over time I'm sure that will evolve as well.

At the moment we're just looking at landing these services and ensuring they're great services. What the future holds, I honestly don't know. When we came into this business we said that software and services were going to be the defining elements of what a console or an entertainment hub in the home is going to be about.

To me, they are the magic pieces that bring this stuff to life, so in the future any of those connections could potentially happen, it's just a matter of evolving that software and evolving those services. We're an innovation company, we constantly want to innovate, so who knows what will come.

No, I think if people want to do those sort of things - uplink photos and so on - they can do that on the PC. What the Xbox Live service is trying to do is give you another avenue to connect and chat with your friends. It doesn't mean it's going to do exactly the same that you're doing on your PC, because I'm not sure that's going to be the right environment to do a lot of those things to be honest with you. So, no, I just see it as an additive service.

We have no plans for iPlayer on Xbox at this point.

I'm sure it would - I'm sure lots of services we could bring from a content point of view could complement all the services that we have. One of the things we focus on is which services are we bringing: How do we make them scalable; how do we make them deliver the quality experience that we have to deliver; and just through sheer bandwidth and capacity, we have to manage that very closely as to what we bring in.

But the other thing that we really want to do is ensure that when we do bring a service it has a unique element to it. One of the reasons we love the Sky service is that you can have unique Avatar party moments on sport and you can do that in the Zune Marketplace, where you can have an Avatar movie party.

That's what we would need to be doing in a lot of these other applications that we may bring onto the platform. With some it's easier to do that than others, and unless we can add that extra spice I'm not sure what we're bringing to the consumer that they probably aren't consuming in other places anyway.