The future of gaming has arrived, and it’s brought the future of entertainment kicking and screaming along with it. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are now available down under, and these amazing boxes of technological wizardry aren’t content to use their Skynet-levels of sentience merely to play games. They’re supposedly the interactive suns at the centre of our entertainment universe, kicking DVD, Blu-ray and Cable TV boxes to the curb. Even if you’re not addicted to games, both consoles pack enough mainstream entertainment into their small dimensions to forever eliminate boredom. Well, that’s the theory.

Xbox One

It appears that most of the non-gaming features didn’t quite make the lengthy trip from the shores of America and Europe across those large puddles of blue stuff between them and us. Maybe Operation Sovereign Borders mistook these powerful new features for refugees, and sent them packing? As the Xbox One has spent so much more of its US$471 build budget on entertainment features than the PlayStation 4, our investigation will begin with Microsoft’s multimedia Trojan horse.

Xbox On

While Aussies have to spend twenty minutes figuring out where the Xbox One’s power button is, then fumbling in the dark to find it, our Yankee and British friends can use the magic of their voice to turn on the Xbox One. Simply uttering the phrase “Xbox On” brings the Xbox One pulsing to life, but that’s not all. The same phrase also turns on the television or projector, as well as the speaker system and cable/satellite TV box. Meanwhile Aussies have to spend another sixteen minutes figuring out where all of the remotes are. We can’t understand why this feature isn’t available in Australia, as most of the voice recognition works pretty well with our sexy Aussie drawl.An IR Blaster isn’t a futuristic weapon designed to kill aliens with heat rays. No, it’s commonly found in universal remotes, and is a small box that shoots out all of the necessary IR waves to control every device in a home theatre. It just so happens that the Kinect 2.0 makes for a wonderful IR Blaster. This means Kinect can control all of the other devices that call the living room home, including powering on and off, changing inputs and channels, and adjusting the volume. This feature has been disabled in Australia. Considering 99.9% of the TVs, speakers and other entertainment gadgets sold in Australia are identical to those of the US and Europe, there’s no obvious reason for this to be the case.

One Guide

This is what the One guide looks like in the States.

The Aussie landscape on Xbox One right now.

PlayStation 4

Oh dear. Don't get us wrong, it's a great app, but it desperately needs friends.

Found wanting

If you stayed up until 3am to watch the first Xbox One reveal event, you probably walked away at the end thinking Microsoft had given up on games. Based on this unveiling, it appeared the Xbox One was designed solely to integrate with and improve existing cable TV services. This cable TV coupling was a huge part of the thinking that went into the Xbox One’s design, dictating the use of three layers of operating systems, as well as the choice of 8GB of DDR3 memory.Americans and Brits can plug any cable or satellite TV box into the Xbox One via the console’s HDMI input, which is then controlled via the snazzy One Guide, an electronic program guide that is fully voice controllable. By all accounts it improves the cable viewing experience no end, finally taming their frequently nightmarish menus. Australians can use the same HDMI input to attach a local set top box, but the Xbox One can’t control it or add any more features. All it does is pass through the signal; users still need to use the set top box’s remote control to do anything with it, and we don’t have the One guide.This functionality is also being used by the incredible NFL app, which is once again limited to the US. The result of a US$400 million relationship between Microsoft and the NFL, this single app perfectly illustrates what can happen when a console integrates seamlessly with a cable TV channel. The NFL app is displayed around the edges of the live NFL cable broadcast, and shows additional info and statistics about the game being watched, as well as a news ticker about other games. The menu allows the user to pull up short videos about the players currently on-screen, as well as highlights from different angles, plus dozens of other pieces of information and video. There’s also fantasy football and Skype functionality, so viewers can update their league while viewing the real deal, or argue with mates about the ref’s judgement. NFL truly is a flagship application that shows how the Xbox One’s online capability can integrate seamlessly with the traditional TV experience to deliver something entirely new… and it’s entirely absent down under.Head to the Xbox One’s Video and TV section in Australia, and you’ll find a handful of options. Xbox Video (via Microsoft’s store) hosts a passable collection of movies and TV shows at DVD-store levels of pricing. It’s pretty horrible to navigate, with no effort to encourage discovery of content, and the pricing varies from reasonable to outright absurd. $68.99 for season one of Invader Zim in standard definition? Really? Compared to the range and value offered overseas by Hulu and Netflix, this is a poor man’s VOD service.Elsewhere, there are apps for Twitch, TED, Machinima and Crackle. In terms of the local market, Xbox One owners have two streaming TV services - SBS on Demand, and Channel Ten’s Tenplay app, which streams disappointingly low-resolution versions of its TV programs. There are rumours that Netflix is set to launch in Australia in 2014, but we’ve been hearing that Netflix is coming “next year” for the last few years. Sadly, many of the apps that are currently available on the Xbox 360 haven’t made it over to the Xbox One yet, including Quickflix, FOXTEL play or Crunchyroll. Fingers crossed they won’t take long to make the switch.Americans and Brits, on the other hand, have many more ways to view online video content in their app sections. Highlights include Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, ESPN, Hulu Plus and VUDU, with many, many more subscription-driven apps ready to stream tens of thousands of hours of high quality content to Xbox Ones for a low subscription fee.Compared to the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4’s attempt to take over the living room is far less ambitious. The lack of a Kinect means it can’t control your other devices, and there’s no effort here to merge with the traditional TV viewing experience. It appears that Sony instead favours a totally digital approach to video consumption… provided you live overseas.The range of viewing choice on the PlayStation 4 locally is way more limited than the Xbox One. The native options are all hold-overs from the last generation – renting TV and movies through the PlayStation Store, and streaming music via Music Unlimited (albeit with the ability to stream within games now).In terms of apps, the PS4 currently plays host to only one in Australia – the official IGN PS4 app. Great for keeping up with gaming, but where’s everything else? Aussies miss out on the many apps that our overseas brethren have access to, including Amazon Instant Video, Crackle, Crunchyroll, Epix, Hulu Plus, NBA Game Time, Netflix, Redbox Instant, Vudu and YuppTV. Instead we’re asked to pay $6.99 to rent a HD version of a movie.As you can see, both consoles lack nearly all of the online video capabilities that are available elsewhere. Whether or not the blame for this can be assigned solely to Sony or Microsoft is debatable, though we’re sure either company could help facilitate the launching of at least some of these services if it was truly a priority.Unfortunately for the Xbox One, the ambitious features that make this such a desirable all-in-one entertainment device elsewhere also make it such a hard sell in Australia. None of these features actually work here, and Microsoft has not committed to launching any of them. In fact, up until this point the only answer we’ve been able to get for a launch date for Foxtel integration is “possibly 2014”.We reached out to both Sony and Microsoft to ask them about the reasoning behind these decisions, as well as to find out when we can expect to see any of these services debut down under, but sadly our numerous emails weren’t answered. It’s a busy time, certainly, but the lack of a response suggests that the strategy for launching additional features and services hasn’t been nailed down yet.As a result, we recommend that your next-gen buying decision is based solely on what each console can do right now, and not some hazy promise of what might happen at some undetermined point in the future. In terms of services, Australian gamers got the raw end of the stick last generation, and that looks set to continue with the new machines. Guess we’ll just have to use the damn things to play games, eh?

Bennett Ring is an Aussie freelancer who loves tech and plays way too many first person shooters.Want more from IGN AU? Join our Facebook community