Gold Requirement for Netflix Being Removed from Xbox One/360

One of the biggest problems with Xbox Live Gold was that not subscribing to the service blocked the use of Netflix. Think about that for a moment. You needed to pay an internet bill to make use out of paying for Netflix, but if your only access to the service was through your console, you needed to pay to remove yet another barrier. Thankfully that’s something Microsoft are changing in the coming months.

According to Arstechnica, sources within Microsoft have been told to start working towards removing the paywall from Netflix, Hulu and other similar digital streaming platforms. It’s not all good news – removing the requirement of Gold on these services mean other apps might become blocked, although whether or not that’s stuff that’s already available, or if it’s things that’ll come in the future hasn’t been revealed.

Although not officially revealed, this information comes at a time when Microsoft are discussing their E3 presentation internally, so it’s perfectly possible that an announcement like this could make its way into the hands of people willing to leak it to the press. As good an announcement as it is – it could potentially save certain people quite a bit of money – it only puts it in line with other versions of the Netflix service, where you don’t need to pay an extra fee for access.