One of my biggest issues with Xbox Live and the Xbox360 is that you need to be a gold subscriber to use premium streaming services such as Netflix and Lovefilm. Is that all about to change with the XboxOne? Possibly maybe.
As reported by The Verge during the //Build conference Microsoft is telling devs that if they want to write apps for the XboxOne they should start writing apps for Windows 8. As Microsoft have previously announced the XboxOne has an Xbox OS and a completely separate OS based on the Windows 8 kernel that runs non-gaming apps which seems to suggest that the XboxOne will run either Win8 apps or slightly modified Win8 apps. Now Windows 8 already has streaming apps such as the Netflix app that do not require an Xbox Live Gold account to use. If and its a big if, the Win8 kernel is not governed by Xbox Live restrictions then we could be seeing existing streaming apps like Netflix and the VLC kickstarter ported over to the XboxOne and completely bypassing the requirement for a Gold account.
If not then serious questions have to be asked why the same app written for the same kernel requires no premium online account for one platform but does on the other.
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