As part of the launch of the service, Microsoft are offering some exclusive footage from Avatar to download (or stream) for free up until Saturday. Of course, free is a subjective term here, as it doesn’t count your bandwidth.

The footage wasn’t up when I left for work this morning, but If you have a fetish for blue people, it should go live at some point today.

[Zune Marketplace on Giz]

Geekologie reader Brian loves himself some Cisco. Lucky for him the design kind of resembles a post-Apocalyptic barcode brand-like symbol or something, so it could have the legs to last a lifetime. Unlike, you know, Zune guy. [Geekologie]

Anyone with Zune HD 4.3 should be able to mosey on over to the Zune Marketplace where they’ll find a few new surprises. Or what would have been surprises, if I wasn’t about to totally ruin them right here:

• PGR: Ferrari Edition
• Lucky Lane Bowling
• Vans Sk8
• Piano (it’s a piano toy, not strictly a game)
• Audio Surf: Tilt
• Checkers

It’s not quite the same as having an open marketplace with a full SDK — presumably Microsoft’s actively helping push these things along to keep Zune HD users interested — but it’s a start. [HelloFromEurope — Thanks Korneel!]

What surprises me about these facts and figures — apart from iTunes skyrocketing again after the introduction of variable pricing — is the fact that CDs are not completely dead yet. They are clearly going down, but I had this mental image in which all of those round mirrors were destroyed, melting like Dali clocks in a desert of indifference. [Mint]

That’s just a short list of what’s available. Download and see for yourself, then report back with anything else new/better you find. [GDGT]

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer defended notorious products like Windows Vista and Windows Mobile throughout our interview, but when it came to Zune, he did seem to admit that Zune HD nailed what previous Zunes simply couldn’t.

When I asked if he gave an order to make Zune better, he replied:

Sometimes you get it the first time you cook the soup, sometimes it takes till the second time you cook the soup…You get better every time.

However you interpret that, it’s the closest Ballmer comes to saying that product improvement was needed, that it wasn’t just revision for the sake of the sales cycle.

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: “It Doesn’t Matter What the Critics Say”
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?

When the US reviewed the beta yesterday, they were a bit harsh on the Zune marketplace. They said: “Not a whole lot to write home about yet besides 1080p streams”. But they come from a country where VOD is commonplace and easy to get — Netflix, Hulu, Roku, Amazon, TiVo… all let you watch your entertainment whenever you want. Here in Australia, we have iTunes, we have TiVo and we have Foxtel, but the truth is that the Zune Video Marketplace is a much easier and superior experience to both of those.

The beta service that I’ve been playing around with isn’t quite the finished product most of you will get to experience next month. For a start, at the moment there are only 102 movies available, a number that MS reckon will grow exponentially when it launches. Secondly, everything I can watch is being streamed or downloaded from the US, so there’s the inherent delays involved with transmitting data over distance. Thirdly, there are a few quirky bugs with the menus and launching the service that will almost definitely be ironed out before launch.

But forgetting all of that for a moment, you quickly realise just how fantastic a service this is. You launch the Zune marketplace from the Video Downloads option on the NXE, and after about five seconds or so, you’re given a screen with the most popular movies available. You can browse through the movie collection in any number of ways, including genre, alphabetical and popularity, plus new releases.

Movie rentals range between the equivalent of $4 for an SD film and $7 for an HD one. You’ve got 14 days to start watching, and 24 hours once you start to finish, which is all pretty standard online movie rental terms.

Where Zune really excels in its versatility. When you select a movie, you’re given the option of downloading the film or streaming it in real time. If you select to stream the film, it will start within moments — it starts off quite pixelated and blocky, and your first thought is to question the quality. But as the movie buffers, the quality ramps up to 1080p HD with 5.1 surround sound.

If however, your connection is like mine and pretty damn dodgy (at least from the router up the back of the house to the TV at the front) the Zune streaming solution will adjust quality on the fly so you don’t end up with the film stopping every time it catches up to the buffer. That means that you’re able to watch the movie from start to finish, with the Xbox automatically adjusting the quality. In my admittedly limited testing of the service overnight, after it got past the initial blockiness, the video quality didn’t drop to unwatchable at any point.

Streaming also means you can start watching a film straight away, without having to wait for it to download. Microsoft have told us that in order to get an HD picture, you need a 3mbps connection, and 4mbps for Full HD.

The one BIG catch with this is the bandwidth though. A two-hour HD movie could be up to 6GB in size. That’s a pretty big chunk of anyone’s download limit, right there. That’s where the download rental option comes in though, so you can download during your off-peak period and watch it when you’re ready within the next 14 days.

But more appealing is switching ISPs. iiNet are still offering unmetered Xbox downloads though, which should incorporate the new movie service. Turns out that movies aren’t part of the iiNet Freezone (Thanks Michael). So you might just have to bump up your download limit…

Even though it’s still in beta, the Zune marketplace has already, one day in, become my preferred video rental option.

Tweet Tweet Twitter actually makes the most natural jump to the Xbox. It’s a really basic app, with your timeline, search, and trending topics, but it works, largely because the vertical stream is preserved, even if you can only see four (very legible) tweets at a time, so you won’t be power-browsing, TweetDeck style, by any means. It’s slow, and typing’s reeeeeeeally frustrating, like having your eyeballs poked out one pinprick at a time, if you don’t have the chatpad (part of me thinks this entire update is all a giant conspiracy to sell more Xbox 360 chatpads). Updates can sometimes take forever to hit your Twitter stream, too. Still, it’s pretty, and works the best of the new apps.

Facebookin’ Facebook uses the standard Xbox tile UI instead of rolling its interface, like Twitter did. Which is disorienting (and disappointing), since you’re browsing through a stream horizontally, one choppily-animated tile at a time. Why is the tile-sliding animation so terrible on a monster console like the Xbox 360? We don’t know. Like Twitter, it’s basic—focused on Newsfeeds. Your groups are ported over, so you can browse their newsfeeds individually, but you literally have to browse one post at a time, which is agonising, making you far less inclined to comment on updates. The interface works much better, and feels way more natural, with photo albums. What’s interesting is that, at least in the preview, your friends have to link their Xbox Live and Facebook accounts together themselves in order to show up in the “Xbox Live Friends on Facebook” (and vice versa) pages—you can’t manually go in and link Jason Chen’s accounts so you’ll see them together in your app.

Last.fm This would be would be way better if it could play in the background. It can’t. Meaning once you link your accounts and all of you stations are nicely and automatically ported over, to listen to Last.fm, you just have to sit there and leave it running, with band pictures floating up to your screen every once in a while. Lame.

Zune Video Marketplace Not a whole lot to write home about yet besides 1080p streams—it’s a video store on Xbox, with movies for rent or purchase, TV shows, trailers—but Zune Video is here and it, um, works. You browse through the standard Xbox interface, like Netflix. We didn’t get a chance to use the possible killer feature—Party mode, where you can watch stuff with your friends—yet, but if anything makes the Zune video store really stand out, that could be it. Previews, alas, didn’t come in at 1080p, even over FiOS, which clearly has the bandwidth to deliver.

All in all, the new apps, they’re interesting, they add something, but with the exception of Zune Video Marketplace, aren’t critical. At least for now.

But before I get all bossy about it, it’s worth figuring out what this would mean, exactly. Foley goes straight for the most exciting, and by far least likely scenario, in which the gloriously unlimited Zune Pass would be compatible with iPods and iPhones:

[The Microsoft rep] noted that with the addition of the ability to stream music from a browser that is part of the new Zune 4.0 experience, Mac and Linux users already can stream music to their systems if they have a Zune Pass subscription. The streaming capability isn’t limited to Internet Explorer; it works with any browser, he said.

So what would it mean to take the Zune experience to Apple users? simply make it easier for iPods/iTouch devices to connect to Zune Pass and to run the Zune software? I didn’t get any more specifics from Pinero.

Something seems like it’s lost in translation here, since getting Zune Pass DRM content onto iPods would entail drastic action on Apple’s part as well as Microsoft’s. Not likely.

What this probably means—and this is still a pretty big deal—is that Microsoft is open to porting their Zune software over to Mac, meaning that the Zune HD might one day (one day!) be able to natively sync with OS X, and that Mac users will get to use the visually spectacular, surprisingly useful Zune desktop software. But as far as further device support goes, all is not lost:

Zune is a music and video service from Microsoft. Period… Our next step is mobile phones, but we haven’t talked about a timeline for when that will happen

Ballmer’s been harping on about Zune on other devices, namely mobile for a while, but it’s good to know that the dream, such as it is, isn’t dead. [ZDNet]