The New Xbox Experience had a bit of a rough start, after the feature that was supposed to bring value to the holiday gift idea and provide thousands of choices for consumers turned into a classical example of bad timing.

To be more explicit, users can choose from a lot of different titles, as long as they’re not Sony’s Columbia Pictures movies. Gaming blog Joystiq noted that just as the service prepared for the big launch, there was a long list of titles that were “not available on Xbox.” Similar messages regarding Columbia Pictures movies don’t seem to appear on other on-demand Netflix services.

Microsoft was not very keen on explaining, so there was one place left to go: Netflix. The online movie rental company wrote in an e-mail statement for MTV Multiplayer that it was not a glitch, but in fact a licensing issue.

“As watching instantly becomes a more prominent part of the Netflix service, our goal is to have all of our streaming content licensed for all of our partner devices,” Netflix VP of Corporate Communications Steve Swasey wrote. “We’re doing well in this area, but it will take some time before we fully achieve that goal. Today, titles regularly come in and out of license and there is a natural ebb and flow to what we have on license at any given point in time.”

So there you, go, bad timing, with licensing ending just before the New Xbox Experience got to see the light of day. For the time being, the movies will remain unavailable on Xbox. Whether this was truly a coincidence or not, only time will tell.