Bad news for those of you with the free, Silver-level Xbox Live account who actually wanted to give money to Microsoft and Netflix for their upcoming streaming movie service launching soon on the platform. You won’t have access to it. Why not? Simply put, on top of the Netflix subscription, you’ll also have to subscribe to an Xbox Live Gold subscription, pretty much limiting the service to those who care enough to pay to be verbally abused by 13 year olds while playing multi-player games.

When MTV’s Multiplayer asked Microsoft why at E3, there was no clear answer. Now there is, courtesy of Xbox Marketing Director Albert Penello. In Short: Making back bandwidth and licensing costs, and oh, helping add more value to Xbox Live’s subscription service.

“I think it’s about adding value to the gold membership,” said Xbox director of marketing Albert Penello. “I mean, obviously, the partnership there — it’s a lot of bandwidth. Obviously, there’s the cost of the licensing on the Netflix side, so…you’re not really paying for the movie. On silver, you have to pay for the TV show or movie that you download. Here, you don’t, so the relationship in gold kind of takes care of that funny business.”