Today, life changes for Xbox 360 owners.

Or, rather, we should say “Live” changes.

Right now, millions of Xbox users are booting up their consoles and finding requests to download and install New Xbox Experience, the replacement interface for the six-year-old Xbox Live online media delivery service appearing upon Xbox 360’s start up.

“Experience,” or NXE for short, trades the sliding-blades design for a Rolodex-type format, where moving the left or right sticks on the controller lets users flip through information boxes horizontally and core system functions vertically.

Once installed, NXE users are asked to design an avatar to represent them on the network. Contact information for gamer friends now appears in a “party” list displaying the avatars. (Microsoft promises that everyone’s Xbox Live information will be saved automatically through the NXE update process.) An avatar that appears to be sleeping means that person is not currently logged on to the network.

Beyond that, NXE is mainly Xbox Live in new clothes. The Xbox Live Marketplace for downloading games, movies, TV shows and videos also returns, but with one key change: Now it allows streaming video from the Netflix online rental service. However, to use it, Xbox 360 owners must already have a Netflix account and currently subscribe to Xbox Live at the paid Gold level.

Another key addition is the game “install” feature that lets users move the content of a game disk onto the Xbox’s hard drive, thus making games more responsive and reducing the Xbox 360’s chronic noise by virtually eliminating the system’s need to constantly spin the DVD.

All of this naturally raises a problem for owners of Xbox 360 Arcade, the low-cost system that lacks a hard drive. NXE is a permanent download of 128 megabytes stored on the system, not on the network, and it’s not an optional interface. Though it’s still possible to see a simplified Xbox Live-like feature by pressing the big, green-glowing guide button in the center of the controller, that’s mainly for scrolling through the console’s contents; everone who uses an Xbox 360 now must interact with the network through NXE, so a hard drive has become essential equipment.

With this in mind, Microsoft is offering a special deal that bundles a refurbished 20-gigabyte-storage drive with three free months of network service for about $30.

UPDATE: Hmm. Looks like the Netflix feature has taken a powder. Game Guy put a call in to Microsoft for an explanation, but it appears MS returned the Los Angeles Times’ phone message first …