For those wondering when Microsoft was going to talk a little bit more about the expanded TV options it teased at this year’s E3 press conference, CEO Steve Ballmer broke it down at a presentation to financial analysts on Wednesday. And surprisingly, it’s all arriving in time for the Holidays.

“The content choices on Xbox will grow dramatically, from hundreds of thousands to millions,” Ballmer says. While not getting specific about the actual providers Xbox Live Gold subscribers will have access to, Ballmer says we’ll see “dozens or hundreds of additional content suppliers this Christmas.”

That’s a fairly sizable jump in either case, which makes it sound like some contracts have still yet to be signed, but there’s plenty of stuff in the works. Pricing info for the new services wasn't discussed in the presentation. 

The ability to stream live TV for news and sports is also going to be possible this year, Ballmer says, although you can already watch the latter on the ESPN app. (If we had to guess right now, we’d say at least a couple of the “content suppliers” alluded to here would be MSNBC for news and NBC for general entertainment, but, obviously, that’d be just the beginning.)

A lot of Ballmer’s presentation seemed to echo the future of Xbox predicted by some in a story we did earlier this year, where the one thing industry observers seemed to agree upon was the device moving further away from a reputation as strictly a gaming console and more into something of an all encompassing entertainment device. “With Kinect, we started a process of pivoting and repositioning Xbox for a much broader demographic: more women, more young children, the content, the games, the activity really draws in a whole different base of people in a new way,” Ballmer says in the presentation.

Ballmer did a brief demonstration showing what the new Xbox experience is going to be like, using Kinect voice commands and integrated search engine Bing to find new content. “Let’s say your kids love listening to, I dunno, Kanye West, and they want to search for his latest music,” Ballmer says. “You say it, Xbox finds it.” (Side Note: How old are Ballmer’s kids? Old enough to go H.A.M.?)

A gaffe shortly after, in which Kinect failed to recognize voice commands for “The Office: Season 8,” prompted Ballmer to remark, “It’s a good thing that’s shipping for Christmas.”

To really maximize the holiday shopping frenzy, you'd have to imagine it'd be in Microsoft's best interest to roll this stuff out sooner than Christmas though. Stay tuned.

The Xbox portion of Ballmer's presentation starts at 3:51 below.