rocketpig said:
With all due respect, that's not why MS is fighting for this market. They're not fighting Sony because they're a threat to the Windows empire, they're fighting Sony and Apple for control of the living room.I I don't think Sony bowing out of the industry would stop MS from producing another console; they still have Apple to dealwith.Digital n't see them leaving the console business for any reasomulti's a perfect vehicle to use to penetrate the television set. |
You know, it is, but the funny thing is a "set top box" without videogame hardware would actually make a lot more sense.
Similar to Apple's iTV box.
There's no particular reason to piggyback videogame hot, state of the art graphics hardware that only has the function of playing games, into a set top box product. Which is exactly what say, a Xbox360 is. In other words, if you built a set top box just to stream and play all sorts of internet and PC streamed media, you could leave out a lot of the heat and expense involved in playing high end games. And the people that dont care about games would also get a much better deal, since it would be cheaper.
Apple's iTV for example, is launched at $299 which is already $100 less than premium 360, and I'm sure rather than losing, Apple is making money on the hardware. That's because by not playing games the tech specs of the iTV are much more managable.
I think it makes sense to duplicate your set top box functionality in a video game system, but I think you also need to market a true stand-alone set top box. I think such a device that could stream all manner of videos and audio and codecs from your PC, (including Xvix and Divx, etc) as well as function with the various pay movie/music stores around, as well as even work with things like youtube, would be pure genius. It's a market waiting to be filled and whoever does it first is going to tap a huge market. Such a box could also be much cheaper, and I can see it falling to $99 pretty quickly, which videogame systems cannot do.
Xbox 360 has too many codec limitations, and the same with Itv currently. They do not play enough content, probably because they dont want to promote piracy. So it make take a small company not as worried about such things to really bust this market wide open.
