Why Microsoft Won't Have Blu-ray on the Xbox 395
Ian Lamont writes "Ever since Toshiba stopped production of HD DVD players, many Xbox 360 owners have been wondering when Microsoft will offer some sort of Blu-ray option for the Xbox 360. The answer: Probably never. Microsoft's product manager for the Xbox 360 has told Reuters that Microsoft is not in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association. Why not? The Industry Standard points to HDi, an obscure Microsoft technology that was part of the HD DVD interactivity layer. HDi may be dead on physical media, but it could potentially be applied to other Microsoft HD-compatible technologies such as Xbox Live Arcade and Windows Media Center, and be part of a long-term play to own a big share of the market for HD content delivered over the Internet."
The reason is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody is ever going to support a product from a direct competitor (or backed by a direct comepetitor) . Microsoft & Sony are direct competitors.
Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Correction! (Score:5, Insightful)
HDi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Because one thing that Microsoft does better than almost any other company is look to the future. They seem more than willing to sacrifice $1 billion today (or $20b for Yahoo!) if they think there is a good chance of $2 billion in a few years. For example, I believe last year their video game department finally broke even (don't quote me on that). So, for 7 years, they lost money to develop a new market.*
Selling a blu-ray player means conceding the format wars. So, even though though the optical media they were using lost, they care more about the format on the discs. So, theypass one the quick buck and hope to get their information recognized a different way.
*Although the XBox didn't come out until 2002, implying it was only 4 years of losses, development occured in 1999, and possibly earlier.
Good way to lose market share... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, where does this leave future Xbox 360 games? (Score:2, Insightful)
Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing I find interesting is that for the most part, people aren't seeing High definition DVD as anything but an 'extra' at the moment. It's not a base-line functionality requirement for entertaining your family. DVD is still the base-line and few people feel motivated to buying the new stuff yet.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, is definitely a much more proud operator and probably isn't willing to spend money on the new higher prices. They should have allied themselves with Sony from the beginning to lock in a more affordable rate. They are arrogant, however, and didn't feel the need to do anything but do the opposite of whatever Sony was doing. They gambled and lost. I'm unsure which side of that to be happy for... but I have to say that if Microsoft won its bet on HD-DVD, it would have been better for the consumer. Most of us in the tech community knows and understands how abusive Sony is. Most of us knew to fear what Sony would do if they won. Now it has happened and the fall-out has just begun.
I would not be surprised to find that Sony will attempt to further leverage their Blu-ray victory for further control of the video media market in ways that are likely to be found illegal in many countries. I would not be surprised to find a new coalition of HD-DVD-interested companies form to create a new, open, set of technologies to compete with Blue-ray and bring that rampaging giant down. (I can't get images of Ultraman and Mecha-Streisand out of my head now... damnit!) I guess it all depends on whether or not Sony knows where to draw the line on its abusive behavior... but I'm going to bet that they don't know how to stop.
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. You can't (legally or easily) load OS X onto your generic or HP, Dell or Lenovo PC. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, therefore it does not compete with Windows in the non-Apple hardware space. Linux does.
No Blu Ray in the 360 is fine by Sony (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure if MS doesn't include a Blu Ray drive, it would mean Sony was deprived of some royalties. But at the same time it would negate the one major advantage the PS3 has over the 360 so they'd lose sales. So I think Sony would be quite happy if MS skipped Blu Ray altogether. It would be just another reason for many people to buy a PS3.
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think many people buy hardware based upon the binary "Apple or non-Apply hardware?" decision point. OS X absolutely is a competitor to Windows, regardless of whether it implicitly binds additional decision points.
Re:Live marketplace (Score:5, Insightful)
If need be Google and Microsoft both have the bucks to become the worlds largest ISPs. They both have the technology base and the motivation if the ISPs get too nasty with them.
Also the cable companies are hated. They are hated by the public at large. Congress know this so it may be a battle that they are willing to take on since Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Disney's money is just as green as Comcast's.
Re:HDi (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that having additional functionality (soundtracks, subtitles, chapter icons, menu system) grouped with video files can be great... however a raw video file has the advantage of being easier to play on a myriad of devices and being under the user's control.
I know nothing about HDi, so I don't know to what extent it locks out the user from accessing the internal data directly... but I really hate data containers that companies use to force user-hostile features (like unskippable content), and so I'm wary in this case.
Re:Correction! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Blu Ray in the 360 is fine by Sony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I saw that. I say... wrong. The prices went up. That's economics. There are two resons.
People were pushing the players at a loss (Toshiba, et. all too, from my understanding). Now that the pressure is gone, the prices have moved from the dumping range to the "possibly sustainable" range.
I've seen people complain about the new players being more expensive than the old ones, but that always happens when the new players have more features (BD-Live and all it's costs like Ethernet, flash storage, etc) than the old ones.
They're not "leveraging a monopoly", they are just not competing at/near a loss anymore. You can't leverage a Blu-Ray monopoly, because there is no market share for it right now. DVDs will be the "monopoly" in the video market for a few years yet.
Sarcasm: Yes. That worked so well the last time. I'm sure they'll try it again with yet another incompatible format.
Lessons Learned From "Sewer Shark" (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think Microsoft cares that Blu-Ray is Sony's standard, just that it's not Microsoft's standard.
From there, the decision to forget about a high-definition player add-on for this generation makes sense. The attach rate for the HD-DVD drive wasn't very good (typical for a console add-on), but Microsoft was willing to take that hit for the sake of promoting HD-DVD. (Not to mention keeping up with the Playstation 3 Joneses.) A Blu-Ray movie player for 360 would be just another console accessory that doesn't sell enough to justify the cost. (See also: Sega CD)
XBox "720", if it uses an optical drive at all, will probably use Blu-Ray out of necessity. As a baseline for the platform, it will be far easier to justify that cost as upfront R&D.
Based on previous history... (Score:4, Insightful)
Consequently even if Microsoft licenced Blu-Ray, I'd bet they'd change parts of it somehow to make it their own in some way that would be incompatible with everything else.
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
No it ain't, unless you're defining that market as the subset of the real console market focused on games that could as easily by played on a PC. Probably the real center of the market (in unit sales) is the Nintendo Wii with its innovative controller. (Just checked online [blorge.com]; February '08 sales for Wii were 432,000 vs Xbox 360's 254,600).
The games available for the Wii are attracting people that would never consider your traditional console games (especially not first-person shooters). There was something in the newspaper recently about bowling leagues of all things built up around the Wii's virtual bowling game, made up of the kind of AARP crowd that Xbox doesn't cater to.
Re:Why blu-ray? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only in the initial purchase of hardware, which is not the context of the discussion. The great(n)-grandparent post wondered why Microsoft would create a version of Office for Mac but not for Linux.
Once the Mac sale is made, making Office available for it increases the potential pool of Office sales without hurting Windows sales. Making Office available for Linux could have a severe impact on Windows sales. If it were possible to install OS X on a (non-Apple) PC that might otherwise run Windows, Microsoft might well reconsider making Office available for it (especially if this could cut into the pre-install market, but Jobs is unlikely to ever allow that).
Re:So, where does this leave future Xbox 360 games (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Live marketplace (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus, the Microsoft Points purchase system is way too clunky. You have to buy the points in advance, and you can buy them only in multiples of 500 or 1600. Since HD movies cost 480 Points, you're always going to have wasted Points.
Re:SUN vs. MicroSoft - Fight (BD-J vs. HDi) (Score:3, Insightful)
Java's inclusion in the BluRay menu system means forcing Microsoft back into implementing a Java VM on a new platform. Let's hope that none of the Sun v Microsoft legal agreement prevents them from doing so.
Not that MS seems to be doing much to capture the developer market (and it wouldn't take much effort to do better than Sun in this regard... I even find the Apache community lacking in some aspects).
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Eventually ... (Score:5, Insightful)
People sometimes say "well, it worked with DVD and VHS!" That's because DVD was an ENTIRELY different technology...no rewinding, perfect still images, clear and focused slow-mo, chapter selections, extra features, multiple language and audio, etc.
Blu-Ray, even with its "internet enabled extra features", is at its core nothing more than a prettier version of DVD. It's not nearly the leap that VHS to DVD was, and as such I think it's going to be much much harder to convince folks to switch (ESPECIALLY considering how much cheaper DVD is, both for the player and the movies.)
Screw Blu-Ray (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:2, Insightful)
Too bad ! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Live marketplace (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why I say, HD video downloads work from local cable services across broadband chanels, as part of a VoD or rental service. Direct streaming for keeps, not likely a reality. If one assumed that I could start this now, purchase and download a fair number of movies over time (say 1 per month) then in 3 years, I'd need something akin to 1TB just to store those flicks on a single PC (assuming 25GB ea, fairly average for a BD movie with HD audio). If my drive crashed and I had to re-download that, over an 8Mbit connection and assuming maximum throughput, it would take 10.5 days to re-download that content! Even assuming I'd be willing to dedicate 50% of my bandwidth to that, i'd be looking at almost a month to re-download just 36 lost movies. Heck, just to DL a single new movie at 25GB would be 7 hours if my math is right... (25GB X 1024MB X8bits
Re:Eventually ... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I do believe that all those features are ultimately why DVD was seen as worth the upgrade, it's also worth pointing out that it did look better than VHS without you having to buy anything but the DVD player.
No real new features except a superior picture, and you only get that if you buy a brand new television too. That's a much tougher sell no matter how you slice it.
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, they're well positioned to be the first ones out of the gate for the next generation of home theater / video game equipment, and they won't have to worry about figuring out which disk format to back.*
Now, whether they actually take advantage of that position remains to be seen. But they've by no means screwed themselves out of anything with their design decisions regarding the Wii.
* of course, if it takes Blu-Ray as long to overtake DVD as DVD took to overtake VHS, USB thumbdrive movies will be well within possibility. Remember, this jump was a big jump data-wise, but High definition is pretty well defined for the next decade or so: 50 gig is going to be plenty for any storage medium for some time, but it's also going to get much easier to achieve. In that sense, Blu-Ray is a disaster. We should've gone with HD-DVD as an interim format (well, it was supposed to be cheaper), knowing that it would be replaced fairly quickly by something much more durable, storable, reliable, and possibly even cheaper.