The Xbox 360 has been compatible with IPTV systems around the world for a while now, but the new Verizon FiOS Live TV streaming app is the first time we can remember a US cable company allowing customers to jettison their set-top box and watch streaming HD content on their TVs. We just tried it out and it basically works as advertised: there's a decent selection of channels and the image quality was solid when the HD indicator clicked on, although our actual FiOS TV image still looked better. There's some definite lag in the program guide and changing channels wasn't terribly fast, but overall it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on and make it work. Perhaps most interestingly, we didn't have to do any setup at all: Verizon figured out our Xbox was connected to our FiOS internet connection and automatically configured the app for our channels without any intervention at all. Nice.

There's the same basic Kinect functionality as all the other new apps, where you can swipe to move between menus and "long-press" to select things, but as usual it's just faster and more precise to use the controller.

We just wish there was more than simple live TV streaming going on here — there aren't any DVR features, and it's tragic that Comcast is offering Xfinity on-demand and Verizon is offering live TV, since you simply can't sign up for both. Baby steps, we suppose.