What Xbox One Does More
The Xbox One goes much further in home entertainment value with its television integration. The system has an HDMI pass-through and infrared blaster that you can connect to your cable or satellite box to integrate TV watching into the Xbox One. The process and features are explained in more detail in How to Watch TV on Your Microsoft Xbox One, but it basically lets the Xbox One take control of your cable or satellite box so you can browse programming alongside online media services in the Xbox One OneGuide and change channels using your voice and the Kinect. The Xbox One also lets you use apps and services while watching television; apps can be snapped to the side of the screen so they don’t obscure the television signal.
We’ll have to play with the Xbox One and Kinect ourselves to see how well this feature works, but the idea of switching between your favorite channels and shows with your voice and watching TV alongside the different apps and features of the Xbox One dashboard sound very useful. This could turn the Xbox One into the real killer in non-gaming applications, and makes it stand above the PS4 as a pure home entertainment hub.
These features come at a price, though. The Xbox One already retails for $100 more than the PS4, and using online media services requires a subscription to Xbox Live Gold, which costs $60 per year. You can use all of the PS4’s media features without subscribing to PlayStation Plus, and the system itself retails for $399 to the Xbox One’s $499. If you watch a lot of television, and perhaps watch TV far more than you’d even care about playing games, the Xbox One is a better bet.
Article Appeared @http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2426907,00.asp