Xbox One Skydrive
With cloud storage being standard in some capacity as well as the desire to share just about everything socially, Microsoft has made the Xbox One Skydrive app one of the big features available on its next-gen console. Although SkyDrive isn’t new and isn’t exclusively on the Xbox One, it is a part of the push to make the console an all-in-one entertainment unit. Skydrive is Microsoft’s free online storage so the photos and videos you add to it can be viewed anywhere on any device that connects to the internet. It’s part of your Microsoft account so if you have an Xbox account you have access to Skydrive and 7 GB of free storage. Yes you need an Xbox Live Gold account in order to be able to use it from your Xbox One however if any account with Gold membership has that particular Xbox One set as their home Xbox then you’ll be able to use Skydrive from it even if you don’t have a Gold membership. There are two main sections: Photos & Videos and Shared. Photos & Videos is the section where, yep you guessed it, all the videos and photos you uploaded are kept. You can sort them on your Xbox and all your Game DVR clips are kept separate from the other photos you’ve uploaded. The Shared section is where the photos and videos others share with you appear. Logging into Skydrive from the website gives you access to stored documents and connects your Skype account, hotmail account (now Outlook account) and Calendar and you’re also given these things automatically if you have an Xbox account.
Skydrive truly becomes useful for gaming when used in conjunction with the Upload Studio. You can upload all your videos directly to Skydrive and it doesn’t take very long for it to upload and of course that’s related to your internet connection. However it is very simple to upload and I haven’t encountered one problem yet. The interface on the Xbox and on the website are easy to navigate and use, and even though uploading to Youtube directly is supposed to be available in the future, I can simply upload to Skydrive on the Xbox, download the video and then upload to Youtube. And with 7 GB available for free I’ll definitely be using this regularly.
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