By now you should be familiar with Spotlight in Media Center, and it's ability to delivery radio, games, TV episodes and movies right to your media center PC ... and from there to your big screen TV when you want it.

You're didn't know about Spotlight? Well find a Windows PC with Media Center Edition and check out what's on offer in your region. In Aus the answer was "not much" but here in the US the choice is pretty amazing.

Well, the Xbox team didn't want to feel left out. Sure they can act as an extender to a Media Center, but there are some folks who've got one and not the other. For the Xbox only crowd there are now movies and TV episodes available for download and rental in the Marketplace.

The price of the new Xbox offerings are really good (especially considering you can select HD, or choose SD for a discount) and the range has stuff for me, my wife and my daughter (actually we're all fans of Avatar - the last Airbender)

They both use different purchase models and rules - Spotlight links to a number of alternative third party providers, whereas the Xbox Marketplace uses Microsoft Points (a familiar currency for Zune users as well)

Now in an ideal world the content on both Spotlight and the Xbox Marketplace would be common, content could be selected on the Media Center and viewed on the Xbox, Content could be bought or rented or kept on a subscription basis and shared between MCE, Xbox and Zune... but like the disconnect between Zune and PlaysForSure they're different (and as yet pretty much unknown) markets so time will tell what's a practical direction for these to go.

The Xbox service seems to be doing really well so far... getting good reports from users.