The elusive Zune Video Pass has been desired ever since the $15/month all-you-can-eat subscription for music debuted years ago — long before Microsoft made the deal practically irresistible by offering 10 songs per month to keep. So much so that our 2010 April Fools’ Day prank did not go over so well, either, when people realized it was just a joke.
The Daily, known as the iPad-only newspaper yes, is reporting (via LiveSide) that there is talk internally at Microsoft about bringing what we have essentially named a Zune Video Pass to the Xbox: the service would basically be a video subscription offering, allowing you to watch an unlimited amount of videos via streaming à la Netflix. And the most wildly unfound part is that they would do so under the Zune brand, which has been dead again, alive again for several weeks now.
But The Daily underscores that it’s unclear whether or not “this new video offering could be similar” to the current Zune Pass for music, or if it “could be folded into the existing Zune Pass itself.”
“Or it could be a premium feature for those with Xbox Live Gold memberships, likely as an add-on to recurring subscriptions already in place,” they state.
Microsoft’s new Xbox Dashboard, due out this Fall, is already coming with a video service codenamed Diamond and branded as Xbox Live TV (which does just that, feeds live television to the Xbox). It’s also not clear what this new service could bear to that one or any of the third-party apps already available on Live.
