Despite its runaway popularity on Kickstarter, the Ouya console still has a long way to go if it hopes to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. The major consoles have become more than just machines on which to play games. All three of the top consoles support Netflix playback, and Microsoft demonstrated at E3 this year that it sees the Xbox 360 as more of a media center than a game console.

Of course, one of the strengths of the Ouya is that it will be built on the Android platform. Because of Android’s open design, third-party software developers will, presumably, be able to implement many of the features found on popular consoles. Today it was announced that the Ouya will be getting a media player feature from such a third-party developer.

Over at the XBMC blog, XBMC community manager Nate Thomas today announced that XBMC has partnered with Ouya to create a version of the XBMC media player that will be featured on the Ouya console. Thomas stated that XBMC’s work with the Android platform should speed up an implementation of the media player for the Ouya.

Thomas revealed in his blog post that the collaboration between the developers has just begun. Even so, he announced that XBMC will be getting early developer access to Ouya prototypes.

XBMC is a free and open source media player for Windows, OSX, and Linux. It is designed to organize video collections and perform well on a media center PC. Its support for a huge variety of file and archive types make it popular with users who can’t or don’t want to use proprietary media players such as Windows Media Player.

(Picture courtesy XBMC)