As part of Microsoft’s mass layoffs, they are abandoning their plan to produce TV-esque video content exclusively for XBox. Some of the announced or rumored shows included a Halo TV series (with Steven Spielberg as an Executive Producer) and a reboot of Heroes (which is ultimately going to air on NBC sometime in 2015). In 2010, there were even reports of Microsoft making a bid to Conan O’Brien to host a late night talk show on XBox, before he ultimately went to TBS.
My opinion is that this was a great move by Microsoft to kill this plan. The ownership of XBoxes (the new XBox One and the previous generation XBox 360) is too small an audience for exclusive content.
Imagine if, say, Orange is the New Black played exclusively on XBox. It would not be the buzzworthy hit that it is today. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon instant video are available on a number of devices. The platform is the software and not the hardware.
This is not to say that a show can’t launch on XBox (or Playstation). Microsoft could take a page from DirecTV’s playbook, and have an exclusive window to a show for a while, before it airing elsewhere. DirecTV did this with the final seasons of Friday Night Lights and Damages. Damages, which originally was on FX, was actually a DirecTV exclusive in its final years, before going to DVD and Netflix.