Pandora For Xbox 360 and PS3: Why They're Using a Web-Based App and How To Set It Up On Xbox 360

With its latest release, Pandora is looking to fill your living room with music—Pandora's music, specifically. Pandora announced the creation of "tv.pandora.com" Wednesday, a web-based app flexible enough to make its way into other devices that have an HTML5-capable browser that will play Pandora on your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

Pandora already has apps for some 900 internet-connected home theater devices like televisions, blu-ray players, and set-top boxes, but this is the first time the company has a player for the consoles. With 70 million active users, 10 million of which are already listening to the service through their living room devices, it makes sense that Pandora would want to make its music player available on nearly every living room device with one fell swoop. Before tv.pandora.com, the company would have to make an app for each device's standards, a time-intensive task when there are so many internet-connected home sets, and so many more constantly being released into the market.

Pandora says it's embracing the future "Internet of things" with the web-based app approach. "Our mission is to provide the best personalized radio experience to our listeners in any context on any connected device. Since tv.pandora.com is standards-based, it will allow us to quickly evolve and enhance the 10-foot experience of Pandora with greater flexibility and speed than ever before," said Pandora Chief Technology Officer and EVP of Products, Tom Conrad. "By using this platform, we can deliver a uniform experience across any standards-compliant TV, game console, or set top box and focus our efforts on end user benefits and innovation rather than platform specific details."

Pandora's HTML5-based app looks good on the Xbox 360, taking up the whole screen with large control buttons, cover art, and, of course, song information. The player hides your list of personalized stations and doesn't feature banner ads (as far as the first couple tracks went), making the interface feel much less cluttered than the computer-based Pandora site.

Using web standards instead of recreating the wheel every time Pandora wants an app on a new living room smart device is great for Pandora, and great for Pandora fans that won't have to wait for its music service to be ported to a new TV. But there's a small downside for users. Because it's not an app, you can't download Pandora, pin it to your home screen, register, and just start playing music. You've got to go into your browser, look up Pandora, register, and favorite it. Here are Pandora's instructions for the Xbox 360.

I might add, after adding Pandora to your Internet Explorer favorites, you should double check and edit the Pandora card to make sure it's pinned to your Xbox 360's home screen, so you don't have to remember to open IE every time you want Pandora. Even though it's not wrapped up in a nice neat app package, it should only take about five minutes to make Pandora easily accessible.

So what's next for Pandora? Probably dealing with the rise of Spotify and the seemingly imminent launch of Apple's rumored competing music service, "iRadio." Making Pandora available in as many ways as possible is a good first step towards that.