Amazon and Netflix are doing it, so why shouldn’t Xbox have series as well? Makes sense, right? And rumor has it, the first series could be Halo.
As we’ve reported in the console wars, Xbox One is striving to be a multi-purpose device, where the new PlayStation is for hardcore gamers. As Entertainment Weekly explains, there are indeed plans to have original shows on Xbox Live, and one of them could be a Halo adaptation with Steven Spielberg executive producing.
The plan is to launch series in early 2014, and Xbox’s president of entertainment and digital told Variety, “We’re hoping we will be able to put something up in the first quarter, at minimum second quarter. We aren’t Netflix, we aren’t Amazon, we’re a different animal.”
As Variety points out, there’s 48 million Xbox Live subscribers on 72 million Xbox consoles worldwide, and this is an enormous audience to hit with new content.
EW doesn’t think a Halo series could be ready this early, but they joked that “Maybe they’re pulling a Beyonce” and it will just appear out of nowhere after quietly being in the works under the radar. You’d think we would have heard something about this by now, but Lucas kept his Disney deal very quiet, so who knows?
And perhaps we can finally have the merging of gaming and movies / TV series that Hollywood has wanted for so long, because these shows could be interactive as well. As an Xbox exec told Variety, “We’re in this amazing time where these two worlds are coming together.”
