Zune has been in the news a lot lately, mostly for what it isn’t or hasn’t done. Or what it has done, if you count some creepy dude endlessly showing off his Zune tats and complaining about how momma Zune don’t love him and so he had to hide the tats now. Blech. More after the clicky thingie…

But Microsoft, of course, would rather have people talking about Zune for what’s cool about it. Unfortunately, nobody, incluing Microsoft, has figured out what that is yet. Well, they think it has something to do with Zune Social, but they’re just not sure how to make the best use of it.

But according to a piece at the Hollywood Reporter, one thing is for them to offer exclusive video content. But how would they do this? Either they’d need a Zune-only file format or some type of check to make sure that the file in question would only play on a Zune. Either way, isn’t it likely that within a week, there’d be Zunebreak programs that would let you play it on another player? Like, you know, an iPod?

Props to MS for not just giving up on Zune, but I’m not sure that Zune entertainment development Director Richard Winn admitting that he got the “idea” for exclusive content after thinking about how Halo helped establish XBox is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that’s gonna make Zune as household of a name as iPod is.

Maybe Microsoft is just missing an obvious boat here: Since they’re the underdog in the media player fight, how’s about a series of TV commercials where one guy pretends to be a Zune and another guy pretends to be an iPod, and the Zune guy just picks on the iPod guy for 30 seconds?

The Hollywood Reporter