Currently in the early phases of rolling out its xCloud streaming service on mobile devices, Microsoft isn’t going to be ‘doing a Quibi’ and plan to stick to mobile only at first.
In an interview with The Verge, Xbox chief Phil Spencer says we’ll likely see an Xbox app appear on smart TVs over the next year: “I think you’re going to see that in the next 12 months. I don’t think anything is going to stop us from doing that.”
Spencer previously hinted at TV streaming sticks for Microsoft’s xCloud service last month. Microsoft is currently working on bringing xCloud to the web to enable it on iOS devices, thus naturally allowing xCloud to also expand to TVs, browsers, and elsewhere.
The company has made it clear in recent months that while it’s still has no plans to abandon consoles or hardware, it’s priority is in both service and software with the Xbox Game Pass becoming an essential for not just Xbox users but PC as well.
xCloud is Microsoft’s attempt to succeed in game streaming, an arena where Google’s Stadia has failed to ignite. However Microsoft has some major advantages and familiarity with game streaming that Stadia doesn’t, and also sees the future as a hybrid of local hardware and cloud hardware: “When we think about xCloud, which is our version of Stadia or Luna, I think what it needs to evolve to are games that actually run between a hybrid environment of the cloud and the local compute capability. It’s really a hybrid between both of those.”
Cloud streaming allows devices from phones to small handhelds to play games from servers with far more powerful hardware than the device itself. The issue there though has always been one of latency and bandwidth, something that having the game at least partly downloaded to the device could help solve.
Xbox Series S and X consoles are also likely to get access to xCloud – this would likely allow for high quality playable demos of games to let players try a game before they fully download it from Game Pass.