Xbox adds live TV to its Halo

LIVE television and another installment of the Halo game are landing on Xbox 360.

Microsoft announced its plan for the video game console yesterday at the opening of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the industry’s annual convention.

The company said live TV would be offered by domestic and international broadcasters, but revealed no other details.

Xbox 360 and Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 already provide the ability to stream and download movies and shows.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hinted that Halo 4 would be the “dawn of a new trilogy” for the blockbuster, intergalactic shoot-em-up series. The previous game, Halo: Reach, earned about $200 million (€136.3m) on its first day and sold 3.3m copies in its first month on the market.

The company also announced that increased functionality with the Kinect camera system was coming to Xbox 360, including the ability to fully navigate menus with voice commands, search online and hard drive content with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and play games such as Mass Effect 3 in tandem in the traditional controller.

The feature was demonstrated with the finalinstallment of the sci-fi role-playing series, Mass Effect, as Kinect recognised vocal commands while a player used an analogue controller to navigate the virtual landscape and fire a blaster.