• The New York Times, Tuesday, November 7, 2006 12:16 PM

Just ahead of the widely anticipated launch later this month of Sony and Nintendo's next-generation consoles, rival Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 has been available for about a year now, is announcing movie and TV downloads via its Xbox Live online marketplace.

For now, consumers have shown that they prefer to watch movies on TV screens rather than their PC or laptop. It's not straightforward to send a film downloaded from the Web to a TV, which is what Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on: Xbox owners are already connected to the TV--and in most cases, the Internet, too.

So far, Microsoft has gained the rights to rent or sell more than 1,000 hours of material from CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Turner Broadcasting. The Xbox Live store is similar to Apple's iTunes, but with one important difference: You can also rent these videos for a limited period of time. Videos you buy can't be played on other devices and can't be burned to CDs, but users have the ability to sign in from any console, enabling them to watch their videos on a friend's Xbox.

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