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.
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The reason is simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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For what it's worth, I think the parent makes a good point. Whether he's right or not, only time will tell... but I find his POV interesting. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 are both much, much more than game systems, whereas the Wii is primarily a gaming system that has a few extra features (e.g., web browser) thrown in for good measure. Nintendo focused on one core area of competency -- they wanted a big slice of one pie -- whereas
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LoB
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Correction! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correction! (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, ah, Microsoft and Corel are partners (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, ah, Microsoft and Corel are partners (Score:4, Informative)
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I see what you did there. Clever.
Rampant stupidity aside, I think that if Microsoft will integrate Blu-Ray into their consoles it won't be until the next Xbox is released.
Not to mention there is still no garuntee that Blu-Ray will win...it beat out HD-DVD, but now it has to beat out plain vanilla DVD. Sony may have been able to win by buying out [gizmodo.com] some of the movie studios, but it's real challange lies ahead: convincing folks to stop buying DVDs and DVD players (which can be had for thirty dollars) and b
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...but it's real challange lies ahead: convincing folks to stop buying DVDs and DVD players (which can be had for thirty dollars) and buy Blu-Ray discs and players...
This is a task that electronics retailers (such as Best Buy) are in a real position to do with side-by-side demonstrations. Heck, I was in a Future Shop on Boxing Day and saw two identical televisions - identical except that one was the 1080i model, and one was 1080p - and I could tell the difference. It was subtle, but it was there. Showing someone a 1080p Blu-Ray feature next to the 480p DVD feature on the same television is going to be a pretty convincing show.
The real trick is going to be getting the
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.)
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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
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Re:The reason is simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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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
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OS X is much more of a competitor to Windows than Linux,
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.
You can't say "no" about what someone says, and then change the scope of what they said.
OS X very much *does* compete with Windows. When people buy a computer, the question is "PC or a Mac?" which, as it applies to the OS, is "Windows or Mac OS X?". An absolutely miniscule number of people who buy a PC, also ask themselves "Windows or Linux?".
The original scope was not how much of a competitor Mac OS X is with Windows "in the non-Apple hardware space". It was not qualified in any way at all, except for the
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It's yesterday now and we are waiting for the next big thing in gaming...
And maybe the next game console won't have any drive at all, instead it will download the games over the net on demand since everybody have broadband. - Eh right?
And why not save the game setup on a central server where you pay a yearly fee for the account?
Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, with HD content you have the not so insignificant issue of transferring many Gigabytes of data for any feature length content, and how many of them could you store on a stock 360?
In any case, this is probably a boneheaded move destined to backfire.
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)
HD-DVD is indeed completely dead, and Microsoft has stopped manufacturing the HD-DVD add-on (more correctly they no longer Toshiba to make it for them). Microsoft knows that HD-DVD as a physical format is dead.
However XBox Live! isn't dead, nor is traditional DVD. The former has great future potential (it, and similar services like iTunes movies, aren't something I'm interested in because the bitrate is going to remain far too low until the end-to-end infrastructure of the internet is dramatically improved, but it's good enough for a lot of people), and the latter is easily good enough for most consumers.
So no, their "standard" isn't dead. DVD is easily going to be dominant until the next generation of game machines, possibly even to the one after that. And then there comes a point where optical media doesn't even matter anymore.
Really this is all rather silly. Microsoft barely supported HD-DVD. Why do people think they're going to rush and support Blu-ray, especially given that the technical requirements of Blu-ray guarantee that such an add-on would be very pricey: How can you compete with Sony that is already selling a full game machine with Blu-ray at less than the cost of a competing companies stand-alone, no-game-machine-included players.
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Check this out and look for the word "pawn" in it:
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf [slated.org]
So thinking that Microsoft will do what the market asks and help a potential threat to their existence is asking a very lot of Microsoft. They've never done this without either a way to own or destroy the cross-platform capabilities or a way to force their own product(s) onto the market. Microsoft's profits in a market sector have been traded many many times for protection of the Windows platform. Again, Microsoft exists only because Windows exists and without that, over 60% of the profits go away very very quickly. If Blu-ray is seen as a platform threat, Microsoft will not support it without some plan to eliminate the platform threat. And I think the threat has more to do with Java being the Blu-ray spec than Sony's ownership or creation of the spec. IMO.
I find it hard to believe they think the distribution/network is mature enough to jump on a network distribution mechanism instead. But they may feel that they can slow the adaption enough with disabling or stalling the Blu-ray devices on their platform(s). Xbox is the obvious one because they attempted to leverage it for promoting HD-DVD. They knew they couldn't embed it in the Xbox because the price increase would have given PS3 more leverage. We should soon start to see see how they will try to stall Blu-ray on Windows as the devices start moving to PCs.
LoB
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My opinion? Because it is too late for Microsoft to have any sway over the Blu Ray spec. Microsoft has always been reluctant to use standards defined by other people that they can't push in one direction or another.
They have a strategy to try to make a Microsoft technology integral to web delivery, and then the
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Development costs, testing costs, update costs (look how many updates the Blu-Ray player on the PS3 has received), shipping costs, inventory costs, shelf space costs, etc.
I always figured that MS rushed the 360 HD-DVD so that they could have something out there to help counter the Blu-Ray install base generated by the PS3. Something to give their HDi some installed base to compete with the Java on Blu-Ray.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they wouldn't make a Blu-Ray drive. Even without that point, an HD drive doesn't add to the console's value as much as it did when all players were $600+. As players get cheaper, the reason to buy the add-on over a stand along player drops.
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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 finall
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Years later, Xbox is pretty much the center of the console market. Well played.
And here we are saying, oh come on- Zune? Get real. Ipod has this market, they're not letting go! (truth be told, ipod, in my opinion, will be harder to gain ground against, since the ipod has something sony didn't have-
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Samsung is a more likely bet for that, they have made some very nice cool products lately.
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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 g
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
The one thing Microsoft does do better than almost any other company, though, is to throw truckload after truckload of money at these missed opportunities. But very few other companies have the cash on hand to do that. Also, it still remains to be seen if it'll even work - remember, as popular as the 360 is among the hard-core gaming crowd it's still selling far less than even the PS2, and not outselling the PS3 anymore.
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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.
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* Acer Corporation
* Alpine Electronics Inc.
* Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd.
* Ashampoo GmbH & Co. KG
* Bandai Visual Co. Ltd.
* BASF AG
* Basler Vision Technologies
* BenQ Corporation
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, it makes them money, but it doesn't make them enough profit. Otherwise, they would've done it.
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By rejecting BluRay for 360, they once more prove that the studios and entire pro video industry was right going with a Sony solution. If there is significant market in "geeks wanting to watch 1080p", Sony w
Slashdot Polls (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft going against the Apple trend? (Score:4, Funny)
Dibs on PODi and TUNEi!
-> I use my TUNEi to fill my PODi
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Raise your hands, how many of you have ever seen an actual real-life CD-i?
Oh well. (Score:2)
Re:Why blu-ray? (Score:4, Insightful)
HDi (Score:5, Insightful)
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It'd be nice to actually have a downloadable video that has menus and chapters and the other niceties that we've grown used to.
Including niceties like unskippable FBI warnings and adverts...
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 t
Live marketplace (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Live marketplace (Score:5, Interesting)
Sony's BR 2.0 spec with a hybrid digital-physical model is the best fit.
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.
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You're making an incredibly bad assumption that an HD movie streamed over the Internet is 20GB in size. It is not in the same format you would find on a blue-ray disc. It would be compressed and ultimately be at most a couple of gigs easily streamed at a respectable bit-rate. People all the time download HD content. Azureus has a whole section just for it and I stream it without any issue over a standard cable Internet connection.
ISP's could wreck the model but they have always adapted to the increases an
Re:Live marketplace (Score:5, Interesting)
With physical media I:
- can easily loan it to a friend or family member, without wasting blank media or time to burn it.
- can move it from system to system in seconds, not hours over a network connection
- don't need systems to be compatible for steaming or sharing, a BD player in each room costs about the same as (and will cost less than) the equipment to connect the TV to the network for streaming HD.
- Can make electronic copies for backup (wether currently legal or not)
- can move it off my hard drives at will without buying media and wasting hours (days) to burn it (If I want to encode it on the computer I can, and in less time than burning a DVD...)
- don't have to buy bigger and bigger hard drives and RAID system as my collection grows
- don't have to wait DAYS for Antivirus scans to complete, or copying to new drives as my old ones fill up.
- don't have to back it up
Digital distribution works fine for music, for which I can have tousands of songs on cheap hard drives, and streaming works great over even the cheapest wireless devices for stereo surround audio. It's easy to maintain and copy when your whole collection is less than 100GB (and that's a BIG collection). When a single HD movie is 20-50GB, it's not easy or cheap to maintain my own collection electronically. heck, even standard definition DVDs are hard to maintain on a sharing network.
On-demand video? yes, digital downloads may very well replace Blockbuster. If an all-you-can-eat subscription was available (netflix size library, digitized in HD, and available to start playing within 5 minutes) and the fee was equivolent to current subscription fees ($15 per month) it might become feasable, but you still can't take it with you unless you download the entire movie before leaving... When I go on vacation, or to a friend's house, I want a few dozen good classic movies with me, and a few new ones to. Even at over 8MB downspeed, I'm looking at typing up my pipe for days to download a weeks worth of movies, and hundreds of GBs to store them on. Also, my laptop, even if it had that much storage, doesn't plug into most hotel TVs...
Digital downloads are strong competition for HBO and other networks. Why pay $12/month per channel when you could pay $20/month and see every movie your hear desires on demand? This I see is where digital downloads will make their mark. They're obviously competition for the rental industry, provided the set top box is part of a service and not several hundred dolars by itself.
The best solution in my mind?
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I support Microsoft (Score:2, Redundant)
The trouble is, there is no open source alternative, but even if it existed, all these companies including Microsoft will not use the alternative.
Because they don't want to, or need to (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft also has stated they are trying to move toward a content-download type system, so the physical media would, again, be irrelevant.
As others have said, there may be a standalone Blu-ray player in the future, but I think MS thinks they simply don't need it. And Ballmer himself has said no Blu-ray for Xbox, of course that's not really worth much and could change with the market.
http://www.crn.com/digital-home/206903456 [crn.com]
Good way to lose market share... (Score:2, Insightful)
SUN vs. MicroSoft - Fight (BD-J vs. HDi) (Score:4, Interesting)
(BD-J vs. HDi aka MSJava Script)
Java is the platform for the world wide distribution of IPTV.
I don't think that MS will be pushing anything that competes with their version of a Java virtual machine much less include a Sony product in their 360.
(the final offer by MS and Toshiba to prevent a format war was the inclusion of HDi... Sony and Sun walked away)
While it makes Cents that they should, I don't think they will.
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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).
Another reason... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't a troll. I love my 360, I do. But I've used it to watch DVDs and stream videos from my laptop, and honestly, even in the most well-ventilated of spaces, the console is just too loud for me to enjoy it as a media center at all.
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Mine is rather silent, outside of the occasional whirring when it first spins a disc up. It never bothered me before.
I recently added a receiver and speakers, so even that I can't hear anymore.
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More than likely, I, like others I know, don't really enjoy the television as loud as others due, and easily pick up background noise such as air conditioners, etc.
Oh well, to each their own.
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Like I said, mine is nearly silent when compared to my PC. If it were loud, I would be as irritated with it as you seem to be.
So, where does this leave future Xbox 360 games? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I can think of another good reason (Score:2)
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So does that mean every XBox 360 now has just a plain DVD drive? Okayyy..... I can understand Nintendo doing that because they were never aiming to have some super high-powered games machine that can do everything but make tea, but Microsoft?
Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:3, Insightful)
So when you want Blu-ray content... (Score:2)
Sorry, I just don't see how what you said makes any sense at all.
Re:So when you want Blu-ray content... (Score:5, Informative)
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My current amp has discreet analogue inputs and the BD players have the outputs. Four pair of audio cables later and I get the new HD 7.1 surround. With a PS3 I need to also drop about a grand on an amp. I consider the audio more important than the video so I wouldn't even cons
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You tell me.
Prices from walmart.com just now:
Sony BDP-300 BluRay player: $378.88 (sale price)
Sony PS3 40GB game console: $399.00
Five percent more for a game console with BD player vs just a BD player? Why not?
(Now, when/if BD player prices ever come down to something reasonable, that logic changes.)
they don't have much choice (Score:2)
They'll have to use a new optical format for the next Xbox, and with HD-DVD dead it seems to mean they have to use BluRay.
And for those who want to say you'll get your games over the next, I really can't see that in the next 2-3 years. By the end of the next console's lifetime (
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I could see a problem with production. They'd have to find a company willing to continue to manufacture the drives for them; k
Ain't going to happen... (Score:2)
Yep, as in, MS' technology now completes with the cable company's product. So, do you think that cable companies are going to roll out fiber to everyone's door just so MS, Apple, Blockbuster and Netflix can deliver video on demand?
Nope.
My Slashdot Biases Are Colliding (Score:5, Funny)
And all I can think of... (Score:2, Funny)
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If BluRay Disc prices goes down to DVD prices somehow (Hollywood needs HD), PS3 users may laugh to both platforms. Of course Wii got excuse, XBox 360 is just "Our standard failed, no bluray for you!" thing.
Hollywood needs some level of quality that can't be reached without 50 GB of data. BluRay really serves to that. Of course, thanks to Java, they may implement "chatrooms of people who watches same movie"
Media Center too? (Score:2)
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.
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This sucks (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah but that's like... paying for porn. Who in their right mind does that?
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.
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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.
BluRay Reader (Score:2)
I don't see how this couldn't be done... However I am not in any way familiar with the innards of the 360.
Monopoly First (Score:2)
Inferior quality and lone support has never stopped Microsoft from exploiting a monopoly position on a technology.
DLC is not true HD (Score:4, Informative)