While the whole world is sporting ubiquitous iPods (dare I call them "the uniform?"), the more intrepid among us have adopted Zune as our media player of choice. (Case in point, OC's Bear has a pretty kickass Zune of his that has been the secret envy of his colleagues for almost a year now.)

I myself have indulged in the luxury of the Generation-2 80G Zune (dubbed StealthZuneZero in case you're ever within range of my wireless). My Zune has become not only my personal music library (an increasingly respectable one at that), but also a convenient home for my photographic portfolio. Great for traveling, driving around town, and generally feeling cool and hip and all... but the lack of a convenient way to use my Zune to watch video was starting to become a nagging issue with me.

I mean... here I am, on flight after flight to Seattle or San Francisco or LA, and every time, an aisle neighbor pulls out an ipod and watches some kind of movie or TV show on it while I am stuck listening to music. (I could have been watching videos this whole time, but the process of converting DVDs to portable format was too daunting for an OCD pup like me to even consider tackling.

Sigh.

Well, those days are over. The Social has finally caught up with the rest of the world. From Cnet news.com:

A year and a half after debuting its first Zune, Microsoft is finally offering some content that makes use of that big color screen.

The software maker is releasing an update Tuesday to its Zune service that adds a video store with about 800 TV show episodes from NBC Universal, MTV, and a couple of other producers. For the moment, though, the store is far smaller than the TV options from iTunes or even from Microsoft's own Xbox Live Marketplace and offers no feature films.

"We feel it is more important and--customers tell us--to focus on short programming first," said Julio Estrada, general manager of Microsoft's Zune Social unit.

Read the entire article here.

Microsoft still has some ways to go before I am 100% happy with what is arguably a very convoluted and limited video uploading situation, but this announcement makes me happy. Very happy... because it means it won't be long now before this little speedbump is way, waaaaaay behind us.

The wife and kids (also Zunauts) will be excited to hear about this as well to be sure.

"Think Different" is cool and all, but go ahead and BE different: Get yourself a Zune.

Labels: microsoft, the social, zune, zune video