CAL4M1TY said:
I agree with your post, except, I'm not to sure if MS's grand plan was for downloadable content to succeed. I mean, what would they have done if HD-DVD won instead? To me it seems like MS switched to downloadable media for the same reason it switched to HD-DVD in the first place, like you said, as a response to sony and blu-ray. I guess the standard 20gb HDD and lack of in the arcade support this, considering that 8 games worth of offline files (save file etc) and the regular 360 files left me with 14gb's as it is (when I had my 360). It looks like either quick fixes or poor foresight to me, seeing as how big files are these days (i.e HD movies are basically double their SD equivalent and then take into account many TV shows are going HD now, which would lead to HD box sets). I know you mentioned streaming, which is a option, but I'm running 1.5mb ADSL with 25gb so I would run out pretty quickly and I would guess that the average net speed is 512k down here with <10gb downloads (partly because Australia's internet growth plan is a joke and because the average consumer doesn't know a good deal unless it smacks them in the face) so it's not yet viable everywhere (I'm pretty sure we are one of the slowest internet speed countries with broadband though). |
I agree that at current broadband speeds, streaming content is a joke. The quality from netflix instant watching is atrocious. But, fiber optics allows speeds up to 100mbps. That should be more than enough to get hd quality video and sound. You would only need an ample amount of ram to buffer the content. You wouldn't even need a hard drive because the server would house all of the data. Microsoft saw it as a twofer. If HD-DVD won, all is well and good, they would use it and still push downloads. If it didn't, they still had downloadable content.