​Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft. It was first made available to the Xbox system in November 2002. An updated version of the service became available for the Xbox 360 console at the system's launch in November 2005, and a further enhanced version was released in 2013 with the Xbox One.

The service was extended in 2007 on the Windows platform, named Games for Windows – Live, which makes most aspects of the system available on Windows computers. Microsoft has announced plans to extend Live to other platforms such as handhelds and mobile phones as part of the Live Anywhere initiative. With Microsoft's mobile operating system, Windows Phone, full Xbox Live functionality is integrated into new Windows Phones that launched since late 2010. The service shut down for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010, and original Xbox Games are now only playable online through local area network (LAN) tunneling applications such as XLink Kai.

The Xbox Live service is available as both a free and subscription-based service, known as Xbox Live Free and Xbox Live Gold respectively, with most features such as online gaming restricted to the Gold service.
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​Xbox (stylized as Xbox) is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. It represents a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with three consoles released in the sixth, seventh, and eighth generations respectively. The brand also represents applications (games), streaming services, and an online service by the name of Xbox Live. The brand was first introduced on November 15, 2001 in the United States, with the launch of the original Xbox console.

That original device was the first video game console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. It reached over 24 million units sold as of May 10, 2006. Microsoft's second console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and has sold over 77.2 million consoles worldwide as of April 18, 2013. The successor to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's most recent console, the Xbox One, was revealed on May 21, 2013.[4] The Xbox One has been released in 21 markets in total, with a Chinese release on September 29, 2014. The head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who succeeded former head Marc Whitten in late March 2014.