After much hype and many delays, Microsoft’s new dashboard software for their Xbox 360 is now available for download. It’s the most significant change made to the video game system since 2008 and one that aims to make it more of a digital entertainment system, where watching online movies, TV shows, and music is just as important as playing video games.

 

Here in Canada a number of services are waiting to be added. Rogers On Demand, RealSports, Disney XD, UFC, and TMZ are channels that will join online content from YouTube, DailyMotion, and VEVO. Waiting is the key word as they aren’t arriving with the new Dashboard, instead it merely paves the way for their inclusion in a new App section later on. With the number of delays and glitches the Microsoft team has been battling in this latest download (an update had to be released for the update), it could take a month or two before everything is live.

For now there’s an updated version of the Netflix app offered previously and Microsoft’s own Zune movie and music services. Added to the Xbox 360’s native ability to stream video, photos, and music from computers in the home and Microsoft hopes to compete against the growing market of digital living room boxes and services such as Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box, and Roku 2.

Since its introduction, the Xbox 360 has fared well as a system to play content from your computer onto a television, handling a wide range of file formats with satisfying streaming quality, but only time will tell if they can’t partner with the right selection of services to make it the dominant entertainment hub in the home.

For gamers the new dashboard brings a number of immediate benefits. A menu grid makes it easier to use by voice of gesture through a Kinect device, a Bing-powered universal search lets you quickly move to wanted content, and new connections with Facebook and Twitter allow you to post achievements with social comments. A new feature called “Beacon” hopes to help players advertise their intention to play a game online so that others can join. Microsoft has gone through several failed efforts to get gamers to connect with each other, photo and movie “parties” that didn’t catch on, hopefully “Beacon” won’t be the next.

The best fix? Gone are the promotional blades that you had to flip through just to play a game. Much like the previews and promos some DVDs force you to watch before the movie, the old Xbox system forced you to face their promo sections before you could actually get to the game itself. That’s gone, and the option to play a game is now the first thing you see when you power the system on. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.