Xbox 360 mugs punters

EARLIER THIS WEEK Microsoft released the Xbox Live Video Marketplace to US customers of the Xbox 360.

Reported by the INQ sometime ago, the service was meant to allow the download of standard definition and high definition television shows and movies.

Unfortunately, immediately after the service went live on Wednesday, users experienced multiple different problems.

Apparently a huge level of demand has placed considerable strain on the Xbox Live servers dedicated to distributing the videos and users are reportedly suffering repeated failed downloads.

A number of people simply can't download any of the movies, with downloads seemingly sticking to some arbitrary percentage and never completing.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if users were allowed to retry their downloads multiple times - except the service doesn't allow this, it will only allow two retries before the download is flagged as a failure and the customer must phone Xbox Live support to retrieve their spent Microsoft points.

Presumably due to the wealth of complaints and calls from disgruntled gamers, the support lines are clogged and people are having to wait around half an hour before points are refunded.

Some customers are reporting other problems with the downloads.

Forum postings suggest that even movies flagged with the finished download status aren't behaving correctly.

Apparently some of these allegedly finished downloads aren't allowing the fast forward functions (which are disabled on a non-finished movie) to work, or simply aren't playing.

Microsoft technical support said they have been working on the problems since Wednesday afternoon and are still hard at work. µ

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