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With the arrival of Xbox 360 and PS3, console manufacturers realised that games consoles could be so much more - they could be the media player that takes centre-stage in your living room, able to deliver movies and TV shows streamed from the internet as well as traditional disc-based entertainment. With the arrival of next-gen console, the potential is there to bring media integration to a whole new level - indeed, that's the core proposition of Xbox One, with PS4 also featuring a rich array of movie and TV services. So the question is, just why do the next-gen consoles appear to perform less capably than their predecessors? Our tests produced some disappointing results, with the PlayStation 3 in particular providing a clearly superior experience overall.On the face of it, besides the ability to pump live TV through Microsoft's system (a feature that currently lacks the potentially game-changing One Guide functionality found in the US), both machines feature very similar features, such as the ability to play back Blu-ray and DVD discs, along with dedicated apps covering a range of streaming video services, including those exclusive to both Sony and Microsoft.
However, alarm bells start ringing straight away when you realise that neither console offers users the means to play their own media files - either from attached storage or from network shares. These are functions common to the last-gen consoles, but are mysteriously absent in their successors - although Xbox One can receive "stream to" content from Windows 8 PCs. In terms of other user-generated video, it's worth pointing out that the Microsoft console plays burned DVDs but stubbornly refuses to process BD-Rs, while PlayStation 4 happily runs both.
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