When Conan O'Brien was ousted from network TV, he looked at a lot of optionsfor how to proceed. Apparently one of those options was to bring original content to the Xbox 360, as revealed in a recent interview with O'Brien's producer, who called Microsoft's proposals "mind blowing."
"It was interesting to sit and look at it and say, 'it would be great to be involved in this,' but at the end of the day, we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the other," said Jeff Ross, who has been with O'Brien since his early days with NBC's Late Night.
Ross said Microsoft's plan was to launch "an original content channel" on Xbox, which would have been headlined by O'Brien.
"You meet with these guys and they show you all this stuff that they're developing and it's mind blowing. I think it's coming and it's big," revealed Ross.
For the Conan team, though, it wasn't quite the right time. Talking about why he didn't take the Microsoft proposal, Ross said, "It's just that we weren't in a position at that point to figure out what it was."
Microsoft has been talking about original content on the Xbox 360 for a while. It has even suggested letting users access their existing cable service from their game console. In other parts of the world, like the UK, content partnerships along these lines do actually exist.
[Source: Gamasutra]
Feb 7, 2011
