It’s rare I deal with any kind of MS product. On occaision, when I develop a UI one of the last steps I take is to “debug” it in IE, or work around the general IE idiocy issues. That’s about it. My Xbox 360 has worked well for the last several years but I don’t really do anything to exciting with it. I know the folks over at MS aren’t too sharp in the software design area, but they still never cease to astound me.
Today I signed up for Netflix again after a long hiatus. One of the things I was looking forward to was live streaming. I figured I’d just use my 360 to stream. So here’s how the process went:
- Start my Xbox, which auto-signs me into my current Silver membership
- Navigate to the netflix icon, which prompts me to download the netflix streaming app
- Download the netflix streaming app and start it
- I’m informed that I need to upgrade to a gold membership to stream netflix
- I try to upgrade my account from the xbox and I get a “8015d080″ error, which leads me here. Turns out the Windows Live ID’s expire after a period of inactivity. Evidently, logging into your xbox live account does not count as “activity.”
- I find out that you can sign up for a new Windows Live account, then transfer your gamertag to the new account via the Xbox Live dashboard. Great!
- Sign up for the new Windows Live account, navigate to the “Change my Windows Live ID” option and I’m greeted with “Can’t connect to Xbox Live. Please retry later.” I’m already signed in mind you.
- Google a bit to find out others have this problem and they had to go through MS Support to resolve it.
- Send an email to support (the form on the xbox support page doesn’t work correctly either – maybe just in firefox, or firefox on Linux – the dropdowns don’t update when you change topics from “hardware issue” to “Xbox Live issue”. I’d guess the chances of my email getting to the proper support place are roughly 1/1,364).
If I had the choice of taking a job programming in .NET, Silverlight, etc or eating out of the garbage, I’d be dumpster diving in no time.
Update: Spoke with MS support over the weekend and as I suspected I had to create a new gamertag with my new Live account in order to upgrade to the Gold membership.
[...] got around to trying contacting Microsoft to verify I made the wrong choice of gaming consoles (which they confirmed). Once I did get my Netflix account streaming over my XBOX 360 though, I was pleased. The audio [...]