| Xelloss said: Because I think Balmer and other MS execs are a tad more spiteful by nature. And its actually not even sony so much as it is other members of the consortium like Sun. You are right that this would likely not, in of itself , inhibit MS from going with blu-ray. However, the other reasons are sound financial ones, and when you combine the loss of face , loss of control of the platform and standards ( which is why they pushed HC-DVD ) with sound cost and engineering reasons, suddenly blu-ray becomes a hard sell. If they come out with a cartridge based platform, they will then be able to work their own deals with media companies as well to release product on the platform. It will actually be appealing to the media companies, because it will be an entirely digital distro system. Basically, at Best Buy there will be a Kiosk that has a HDD with 1000 movies on it, all encryped with encryption that requires an Xbox or other MS-media device to play. You will pay and install it on your "MS-Secure-Card", rentals will also be possible via this system. BigMedia likes this idea, because it saves them the overhead of printing disks and up-front royalty, rather they maintain no overhead and get paid royalty. Anyhow, I digress, and things arent set in stone yet by any means. If MS had to caugh up a new system this year, it would likely be blu-ray. But they dont, so it probably wont. They will have an opportunity to take control of their own media platform, and they will grasp that opportunity. MS doesnt need a new system out soon, they just need it out before Sony. |
I would say Blu Ray becomes a hard sell when they consider it in terms of the other means of distribution out there. Going Blu is completely counter to their digital distribution and the additional fixed costs per console for playback and for the drive itself take away money which could be spent on other areas such as performance, features or alternative means of distribution like cartridges. So yes, they would prefer a format they can control, even a derivative of Blu Ray is fine so long as they can own it.
As for cartridges, a unified system of content delivery sounds pretty good. However, they would only really head in this direction if their efforts in colaborating with TV and other media device manufacturers succeed. They have several car manufacturers on board, they just need some TV manufacturers and media conglomerates to get on board with them. Music companies will without hesitation because they hate Apple's dominance of the online music distribution market, its just the movie/tv producers which may hesitate. Im not sure what they would call it, a media passport maybe?
My best guess for an appropriate platform for a media 'passport' style system would be flash based. Its only a means of delivery and loading it up quickly is fundamental to their design. They would probably need something like 2-300MB/s write speeds or 12-18GB/minute and they ought to price the games at $5-10 less than new optical discs to put a small dampner on the used market and to provide incentive. It would still probably be cheaper and more practical to retain an optical drive (red laser HD-DVD would be best) and to use both methods of distribution at once.
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