Bad news, slightly good news. After announcing a 10:00AM ET launch time for today's Xbox Live Dashboard update, Microsoft's Larry Hyrb — known more affectionately online as Major Nelson — announced via Twitter that it would be "slightly delayed." A new timeframe will be announced later this afternoon / evening — which sounds to us like it might miss today entirely. In the meantime, our preview build seems to have lost the ability to successfully do Bing search, but this might just be a temporary affliction. 

On the upside, the Netflix app has been updated — but only those in the preview build. The 74.62MB download provides rows and rows of movie posters on the front page and some new menu features while watching video: tapping "A" and then hitting down on the joystick during a TV show episode, for example, brings up a description, the option to navigate to another episode, and suggestions in a second panel. There's still no voice search for Kinect. Overall, the experience is laggy and slow-loading, but it's also in the beta program only at this point — hopefully that all changes by the time it does a public release.

Hulu has additionally been updated, but other than the Metro UI look, there isn't much to highlight in terms of new functionality. We'll keep you posted when we hear more about the Dashboard update timeframe.

Update: Major Nelson has announced that the first set of Xbox Live members should be getting the update within in the next few hours. As for the second and third set (and so on and so forth)? Stay tuned.

[Thanks, Daniel!]