As no-one else has made a thread to about this yet, I will.

There has been a lot of talk about Xbox One's specs, about it's upgrade from the X360 90nm launch GPU and CPU to the One's 40nm SoC with CPU, GPU, memory controller and more on one chip.

A lot has been talked (understandably) about the RAM, CPU and GPU specifics, but what I've hardly seen mentioned is the Microsoft Custom Built 50GB Blu-ray Drive.

Before the reveal there had been reports that One wouldn't launch this year because of problems with the drive license. Ever weirder is that fact that there were numerous uninformed posts about why Microsoft couldn't use BD.

Reasons such as "Sony Console Exclusivity", Sony blocking Microsoft and Microsoft not willing to pay royalties (Seriously, brush up on common sense guys).

So what happened? Now this has been blasted as nonsense it's no longer a talking point?

Long live unity! AMD and Blu-ray hit console trifecta!

It was nonsense all the time before. A media center console just wouldn't make sense without bluray and we all know sony wlis not able to block microsoft from using it.

If anything this makes Nintendo look even more backwards for not supporting BluRay in the Wii U...

They use a blu-ray drive though dont they? I'm sure they do...

Of course $ony doesn't own bluray - the people who thought that are just... well, we know what and who they are.
To me the drive is useless for movies by now, because I already have a bdp but it's definitely good for future games. This gen it was close with dvd, nextgen will require more capacity.

I'd rather have backwards compatibility than BluRay playback.

Especially with Netflix, Hulu, etc through TVii giving it enough other non-gaming features.

If it didn't have it I would be shocked because apparently it can do everything else in TV land.

I am surprised that it even can do 4k and that the box will have the ability to upscale content to 4k.

If I remember correctly, the WiiU had a custom BD drive and discs that only does games not movies, lower royalties I believe.

I never heard that... but yeah it was nonsense.

Afterall, not only does Sony not have that big of a share of Blu-ray that they could dictate that. Microsoft makes money off of almost every Blu-ray sold.

They were a partner in the development of AACS.  (Along with Sony...)

Which is Blu-rays standard copyright protection scheme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System

They don't make a lot of money off of it... (I mean hell, even sony doesn't make a lot of money off Blu-ray) but... the companies are a lot more intertwined then you would think.