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Why Microsoft Won't Have Blu-ray on the Xbox
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."
I guess the recent poll was wrong then. "who cares" was not the correct answer.
No monopolist is ever going to support a product from a direct competitor. Plenty of other companies do so. Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung all directly compete in many of their core markets. Yet they also often adopt and support technologies developed by one another. The difference? None of them are monopolies and accustomed to monopolistic control in a market.
Ummm, because like others have said, the war is not over. Blu-ray discs still have to compete with digital distribution. Even Gates mentioned at CES. They've partnered with quite a few places (One is Disney!) so they will likely pursue downloads through their Live marketplace, including HD content before trying to license something from a competing console.
Apple just didn't want to miss out on 85% of the computer market. If Microsoft didn't have a near-monopoly, there wouldn't be iTunes for PC.
Sony vs. Microsoft. I guess Slashdot is going to have to go with Sony. We have been triangulated.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
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.
It makes perfect sense if you realize that the PS3 is the only really future-proof Blu-ray player on the market right now. That, and the fact that it's almost the same price as a stand-alone player, plus you can play games, media, and install Linux on it.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Check this out and look for the word "pawn" in it:
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
M$ bought a huge chunk of Corel, and probably control the company these days. I'm never seen any analysis of the fallout of this deal, it was a while ago.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
And Microsoft wants to miss out on 100% of the HD movie market? They're not dumb enough to think downloadable content is going to be a competitor any time soon. And if consumers buy separate blu-ray players, they'll buy the cheapest one: the PS3. And that cuts into 360 game sales.
There's absolutely no denying that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray look considerably better than just an upscaled DVD. The question is, are retailers going to be able to convince that there is a big enough difference that warrents a couple thousand dollars to get started, as well as increased prices every time they buy movies.
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.)
Living With a Nerd
But Nintendo has the advantage of having never sold the Wii at a loss. They could put out an upgraded machine right now without having real losses (pro-forma "losses" though)
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!