For the past couple of days, a few of us G4 staffers have been discussing the pros and cons of Microsoft and Sony’s approaches to their respective online content offerings. Stephen “Stephen” Johnson regaled us all with tales about his non-gaming friends finding themselves gravitating towards the Xbox 360 thanks to its accessible Marketplace interface and features like being able to stream Netflix without having to use a disc, among other things.

 

Anyway, the general consensus has consistently been that Microsoft really got its act together (eventually) in terms of Xbox Live, and thanks to Microsoft’s social media lead for Live, TriXie, we now have some rather staggering statistics to quantify just how popular the service has been since it launched back in 2002. Get this:

 

"In 7 years, Xbox LIVE members have spent more than 17 BILLION hours on Xbox LIVE. That’s more than 2 hours for every person on the planet,” TriXie posted on Twitter today.

 

That’s also almost 2 million years, or around 850 hours for every one of the current 20 million-plus Live subscribers. If for some reason those stats aren’t doing it for you, TriXie goes on to say that the Xbox Live Marketplace has seen “more than 1.2 billion downloads of gaming and entertainment content,” which equates to about “100 [downloads] per second!”

 

Clearly, Microsoft got more than a little right with Xbox Live. Of course, the big question now is: Where will it go from here?

 

Another important question: How many of those 17 billion hours/1.2 billion downloads do you think you’ve been responsible for?

 

Source: g4tv.com