Recently, there has been a lot of chatter amongst my Modern Warfare 3 co-horts to dive into the Netflix Party feature to watch maybe some wrestling or movies socially. This is sort of a big deal since most of us are scattered across the city of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, or all the way in San Antonio, and we already use Skype for our podcasting discussions and Google Hangout for our RAW watching on Mondays.
But, as the attached link informs, the update this past week to Xbox 360 kills the feature. No longer can I throw popcorn at my friends’ avatars.
So what’s an online socialite to do?
Hack it.
Not Really.
It’s a little more of a work around, and not nearly as interactive and synced, but we simply loaded a party so we could chat, and attempt to sync up our times on the Netflix stream as we watched WWE’s Greatest Cage Matches of All Time. For the most part, it worked.
And it brings up some other options…
Microsoft is introducing such features as UFC (supposedly including Pay Per Views) MLB (if you still watch baseball) and other video features over the next few months. The idea to drop into a voice chat with your Xbox friends, if you already have that community established, is promising, and gives another way to do with without sitting a laptop between you and the television.