IMS Research just posted their 2012 TV Innovation Awards for CES. I can't remember Microsoft winning an award for TV before, but "Microsoft won the On Demand Category for upgrades to its Xbox 360 console including partnerships with over 40 new TV and entertainment providers, as well as delivering entertainment voice search functionality with Bing on Xbox." Microsoft won the TV category "Innovator of the Year".
I have XBox Live Gold on 4 XBox's in my house, but the primary reason I have the XBox's in my house is to use them as Windows Media Center Extenders, not to watch streaming video content.
The category winners were:
• 3DTV - Samsung Electronics America - Plasma D8000 Series Smart TV
• Advanced User Interface - NDS - Snowflake
• Audio Experience – dbx-tv - Total Sonics + Total Cal
• Content Protection - Verimatrix - Verimatrix MultiRights
• Home Networking - Quantenna Communications, Inc.- Quantenna QHS710 802.11n 4x4 Four-Stream MIMO Chipset
• Immersive TV - LG Electronics - LG Electronics BH9420PW CINEMA 3D Sound Blu-ray Home Theater
• Interactive TV - Hillcrest Labs - Scoop Pointer
• Mobile TV - MobiTV - Television at your fingertips: TV on-the-go
• On Demand - Microsoft - Xbox 360 Teams Up With Entertainment Leaders to Transform TV
• Semiconductors - Quantenna Communications, Inc. - Quantenna QHS710 802.11n 4x4 Four-Stream MIMO Chipset
• Set Top Box - Ocean Blue Software - Talk@TV
• TV Design - Samsung Electronics America - LED D8000 Series Smart TV
• TV Performance - Samsung Electronics America - Plasma D8000 Series Smart TV
• Innovator of the Year - Microsoft - Xbox 360 Teams Up With Entertainment Leaders to Transform TV
Not taking any shots at you. I'm just kind of P.O'd at Samsung. The Samsung TV I have has worked fine....so far, but I have had to deal with their customer service twice already. Once over a pair of 3D glasses and again over a 4 month old Blu-ray player that had the component outputs go bad....everything turned green. In neither case did I get any satisfaction out of them. Their products may be perfectly fine, but these outfits never seem to figure out how much bad blood they create when they won't provide any satisfaction when their products go bad. The hassle I had to go through for what amounted to a 50 dollar blu-ray player just made me swear off of ever buying anything that starts with S, ends with G and has amsun in the middle, which is really too bad because their plasma set obviously must have been impressive and their OLED set looked good as well.
