| Kynes said: Just a petition... Since the beginning of this generation, most people defended Sony's strategy with the PS3 based on future revenues of Blu-Ray royalties. Can someone please provide me any numbers of those royalties due to Blu-Ray? |
Sony royalties on Blu Ray are quite a tiny fraction of the forfait fees the consortium receives on drives and discs, except in the cases it produces or publishes the contents or it licenses its specific implementations of the standards to 3rd parties. Sony sells its drives, blank discs and contents too and on them it profits obviously more, but royalties on the tech should be quite low. More than royalties, Blu Ray victory on HD-DVD avoided Sony and other HW companies to pay far higher royalties than Sony's share on BD, to Microsoft, as MS owns the most used implementation, based on Windows CE, of HD-DVD's interactive contents, while BD OTOH uses a Java derivative for them. About codecs, MS gets royalties when its codec for the VC-1 format is used, but alternative codecs can be used too, as the format itself isn't proprietary anymore, MS opened it to have it accepted by both BD and HD-DVD consortia.
Saying Sony gets much money from BD royalties is wrong, it gets money from its whole presence in the BD business, and having won the format war put Sony and the other producers of the winning format in a better situation than the losers, having drives and discs already in production when the war ended and not having to sell at a loss supplies of the losing stuff, but royalties from others are a tiny fraction of the profits..
