Xbox One: Microsoft Files Patent For TV Achievements

Ever wanted to score achievements on your Xbox while sitting back on the couch and enjoying your favorite TV show? Well, Microsoft apparently thinks you do.

A patent application dug up by the gaming industry specialists over at GI International suggests that Microsoft is mulling over adding achievements to television-watching and/or for special video content over Xbox Live as part of their initiative to make your TV a more “interactive” experience with the help of the Xbox One.

“Television viewing tends to be a passive experience for a viewer, without many opportunities for the viewer to engage or have interactive experiences with the presented content,” the application reads. “To increase interactive viewing and encourage a user to watch one or more particular items of video content, awards and achievements may be tied to those items of video content.”

One appropriate example of how this could work is with NFL broadcasts, whom Microsoft just so happened to have announced a major partnership with during the Xbox One reveal. You could, for example, earn an achievement by simply watching the Super Bowl, or perhaps for watching your team’s entire season.

Details on how Xbox One’s highly-touted live TV and DVR functionality are still scarce nearly a week after Microsoft pulled back the curtains on its next-generation console. So far, Microsoft has only said that it will be partnering with Sky in the UK, and Canal+ in France.

Whether that means that Xbox One’s TV functionality will be exclusive to Sky in the UK and Canal+ in France isn’t certain.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it’s still too early to call the Xbox One a disappointment; most of the big reveal was spent talking about things that most gamers didn’t care about, but E3 is fast approaching and Microsoft may have an ace up their sleeves.

Or maybe we’re just optimists.