Zune.net Goes International
So two week ago Microsoft brought the Zune brand to the world in the way of a Movie streaming service on their Xbox consoles, I was meaning to check Zune.net to see if the site had been internationalised but I forgot all about it. Today I was reminded by @arnehess to check out the Zune.net site and it turns out there are international versions of the site for quite a list of countries.
On your first time of using the service, I guess whether on Zune.net or via the Xbox you will need to create your Zune tag (if you want a get your vanity tag you might want to act quick) which for the time being seems a redundant feature; it doesn’t seem possible to view users specific social pages. After signing in you are redirected to the Social page which, currently, only lists the Movies.
The Learning Center has lots of information about what Zune is and how to access the Zune Marketplace on an Xbox.
I did a bit of digging around to see if I could glean any more information from the site (you never know there might be some info on the Zune HD buried away somewhere) and when trying to find the generic Social page came across this. You’ll notice that the title of this page is “Zune MP3 players, software and music community” unfortunately I think this page has just been copied from the US site and doesn’t mean that we can expect devices and support for the Zune software in the UK any time soon.
Bearing in mind that MSN UK recently launched its own beta music service which is virtually a different name for Zune.net I guess its fairly safe to assume Microsoft does plan to roll out the Zune music service to the rest of the world, they just seem to be doing a lot of testing.
Personally I don’t the Zune brand can go international quickly enough, sure build up brand awareness through the Xbox and test things out before launching it but the longer it takes the more iPods are sold the harder it will be for Microsoft to make an impact on the MP3 devices market. Maybe when the next version of Windows Mobile comes out, 6.5.1 or 6.7, we wont only see Zune software on Windows Phones but also a wider rollout of the brand.
Comments
RoguePlanetoid (Nov 23, 2009)
Interesting, those are all the locales where Zune Video on Xbox 360 is available and the website focuses on just that, where available.
Also worth noting that the colour schemes and styles within MSN Music Store UK are from Zune and also powered by Musiwave content – which is the same as Zune Music Marketplace on Zune
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