With little announcement Microsoft plans on bringing their popular cloud storage service to the Xbox 360 today. At around 10AM PST there will be a Skydrive app available under the Productivity heading when browsing the app section on your Xbox. Microsoft wants more cohesion across all their platforms and which the recent inclusion of Internet Explorer in the last update for Xbox, this brings it one step closer to having Windows on a gaming console.
What this means for most gamers is very little. But for families it will be a more frequented feature. Initially you will be able to share pictures and videos saved your Skydrive account. This is done in a multitude of ways. First, you can upload files from your desktop either via the website or the desktop application available for Windows 7 and 8. Next, the more exciting way to share pictures in your living room, you can take a picture with a Windows Phone and have that picture automatically uploaded to Skydrive, so long as you are using the same Live ID for both the Xbox and phone, and have that picture view-able on the big screen right away. Of course no picture viewing experience would be complete with a slideshow option, to allow you to cycle through entire folders of a recent trip perhaps.
You will be able to also use Kinect to navigate the cloud using both hand a voice gestures, so you can swipe and yell in front of your screen while surrounded by all your friends. You will need and Xbox Live Gold account to use this service as with any Internet connected service on the Xbox. I can’t personally think of any other use for this service other than to share music as well, as games and saves are already in the cloud in some respects.
If you have any ideas as to how else you could use the XBox Skydrive integration let us know!
