Good news for Xbox 360 and Xbox One users: Microsoft is finally planning to lift the requirement for a paid Xbox Live Gold subscription to access Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming media apps, according to ArsTechnica.
There's a caveat, though. The report notes that Microsoft may put other services behind the paywall to make up for this shift, though it's not yet clear whether that includes existing services or upcoming content.
The move is said to be directly linked to a changing of the Xbox guard after Don Mattrick, former President of Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft, left the company and joined Zynga as CEO.
The company is also facing pressure from rivals like Sony and Nintendo, who have never charged a fee for access to streaming media apps on their systems. On the other hand, popular media boxes like Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV have also been pushing the software giant to follow suit.
There is no word yet on when this will be made official, but given the fact that we are around a month away from June's E3 games expo, Microsoft could use the platform to reveal more about this. Keep in mind this is purely conjecture at this point. The company's keynote is scheduled for June 9.