Xbox 360 Elite pricing set for UK

Microsoft today announced a price drop for the Pro and Core Xbox 360 systems and set the UK pricing for the Elite edition at £299.99 (it'll be 449.99 euros in Europe, apparently). They also held briefings for journalists in London to explain the price changes, run through the Elite edition and new peripherals, and explain some of the video-on-demand and messaging functionality on Live. (No date was set for the VOD service in the UK, so we were shown it on a US account.)

I went along to the very first briefing of the day and took this picture of the consoles all set out together. No, the bacon sandwiches aren't all for me!

We also got to look at some of the new peripherals, including the Halo-themed controller (which will be £34.99 and come out the week before Halo 3 as a limited edition - there's also a Halo-themed wireless headset), the blue and pink wireless controllers (I asked, and apparently there are no plans "at the moment" to launch a pink console) and the messaging keypad that slots into the controller. It looks a bit bulky, but worked really well during a demonstration of the 360's ability to have an instant messaging (via Windows Messenger) conversation with another user on a PC.

Another couple of peripherals on show were prototypes of the controller for Scene It, the upcoming quiz game. I was allowed to take a couple of photos:

We also got to take a look at the video-on-demand service (a US account was used as we don't have the service here in the UK yet, but it is coming, apparently). There are now over 250 movies available on the US service, as well as a lot of TV shows, so it is potentially interesting as a service. Looks like the terms of service will be similar (in the US you can keep the movie for 14 days, and it'll expire 24 hours after the 'play' button is pressed). Progressive downloading was introduced in May to try and speed up the download times, but it remains to be seen how fast it will really be.