Anyone who’s ever been yelled at by 12-year olds on Xbox LIVE has probably realised that sort of muffled rasping over your headset isn’t the sound of interesting new hairs breaching skin on some significant bit of the kid’s anatomy, but rather a consequence of massive audio compression and low bit-rate codecs.
That’s partly because Xbox LIVE hasn’t updated any of that since starting up in 2002.
“We launched and we said we required broadband. We required a 64k connection, which not many people think of as broadband any longer. But that was the minimum requirement to run the service at the time,” Xbox Live Studios boss guy Jerry Johnson told people over at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival yesterday. “It’s time for us to move on. Especially if we want to think about broadening – a crackly headset on the top of your head – not what people think of when they talk about popular entertainment.”
The service is set to move on, then, when an Xbox Dashboard update rolls out to support the Kinect launch in November. Of course, it’s somewhat bittersweet news for anyone in a country where “broadband” might still mean “64k” (cough). Higher bit-rates mean increased bandwidth consumption, which means in turn that this could potentially have a negative impact on locals using 384k or maybe even 512k connections.
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