Like many Xbox 360 owners, today we received the New Xbox Experience update. The process was fairly painless, as it took longer to customize our avatar than it did to download it and get it installed.

According to reports, for the most part users have been able to upgrade without issue, but some reports of minor issues have been trickling in from a variety of sources. Microsoft is said to be monitoring the situation and addressing issues as they arise.

As for the NXE upgrade itself, our impression is that it is very “Zune-like” and for the most part this isn’t necessarily bad, as the interface still remains relatively clean and easy to use. Still, the NXE will require a bit of an adjustment period, like anything new. As it is a major overhaul of what the dashboard interface used to be, we suspect that some negative comments about it will be made. So far, we can’t complain about what this free makeover offers; and as far as we can tell all of the original functionality is still intact so we didn’t lose anything by getting the upgrade.

One interesting note about the NXE upgrade comes from the new Netflix streaming service, which allows Xbox 360 owners who also happen to be Netflix subscribers to stream movies on their Xbox 360. According to several sources, it would seem that a variety of movies appear to be unavailable for streaming on the Xbox 360, while they still can be streamed on to their computers.

From what we have been able to gather, the movies that are appearing as unavailable seem to only be studios that are either owned by Sony or have distribution agreements with Sony. Movies from studios such as Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer do not seem to currently be available for streaming via Netflix on your Xbox.

Netflix did not really have much to say on the issue, other than the fact that titles regularly flow in and out of license at different times. The number of titles and studios providing licenses to Netflix can vary at any one time and right now only a few hundred titles are affected by this licensing situation.

From what we can tell only Sony-related titles are affected and we have no reason to doubt this explanation from Netflix, but it could be that Sony does not intend to extend licenses for their titles to the gaming consoles that are not a Sony platform. We don’t know if this is the case yet, but it is possible that Sony would like to steer their content to the PS3 and this development would not surprise us in the least.

Even with the few glitches that have happened so far, the deployment of the NXE has to be a success, as we are not receiving reports of bricked or dead consoles and that alone has to be viewed as a success with so many Xbox 360 units to upgrade.

We experienced a few “content unavailable” errors ourselves while testing the NXE, but if this is the only issue with the NXE and it should be an issue that is easily fixable, Microsoft should be satisfied with the deployment of the NXE.