Blu-ray has won the movie war in the same way that the 360 is winning the home console war.

It beat out a competitor.... but there are bigger challenges out there.

hahahaha i love how people are still thinking that was a real hologram.

I have NO INEREST in brd...period! If they can get brd, at the same cost as dvd, then I don't care, since I'm not going to hate on it for no reason, but I certianly am not interested in spending any more money on it, when upconverting works great for me...and most consumers outside of Japan.

Blu Ray is not going to appear on the Xbox period.

Its still a niche product. They recently stopped stocking it in a major store near me.

I think its a good medium but its timing with the Global recession couldnt be worse.

Microsoft never deeply invested in this "format war" you speak of - because they know - at the end of the day there are two winners in the BR vs. HD-DVD war.  1) DVD 2) Internet delivery.

Here's my bet - considering the following three "formats": DVD, BR, Internet - BR will *never* have the highest marketshare.  Right now DVD is still way out in front - and I contend that Internet will beat out DVD before BR does - that is, BR will never be the de-facto standard format.  BR will likely live long as a premium format - higher quality than DVD or Internet delivery can offer - but it will be like DVD-A and SACD were - super-high quality, very few customers care.  Convenience will win over quality - just like MP3 beat out DVD-A and SACD.

Heck, in time internet-delivery is going to beat out cable/satellite.

Hmm, let's try to make some order. The way I see it, we're mostly disagreeing on the required timespans, not on the actual processes.

I _do_ agree that we'll move to a different digital support, leaving behind the optical discs... but not in the next 3 years, and the next 3 years is when the specs for the next gen of consoles will be laid down.

I _did not say_ that BR is the best medium to take with you in a car trip. OBviosuly you would go with an HD of some kind.  My point 1) was against previous posters who said that pure streaming is the way to go as in "my media content is in the cloud". My point was: for reliability you want a local digital support of some kind.

And again the Netflix remark was in response to previous posters talking specifically about the xbox360 delivery strategy.

Estabilished that we need a local storage, my point 2) was that BR was an obvious back-compatible way forward. A bigger capacity optical disc is a trivial answer to the problem of delivering Hd media content. _Of course_ in the future we'll have petabytes of hard disks and greater bandwidth, but that's not the point. It's been now 3-4 years that hi-def capable tvs are gaining a substantial share of market, and thus the request for hi-def media content has been rising. What would have been 3 years ago the response to this request according to you? "Please buy your 1080p TVs, we'll deliver the content you could now enjoy to a big-ass hd when it is economically sound and we have the bandwidth everywhere... let's say in 2012-2015"

And my point 3) was that _right today in feb 2009_  the dvd is not a good enough solution for delivering games to current-gen consoles, much less nesxt gen. I did not see an answer to this issue, by the way, unless you think that _right today_ in MS r&d labs they should spec next xbox so that when it comes out in like 2 years it will download the next gen games (I expect sizes of the order of 100-200 Gbs) into a big hd. How much viable does it sound to ask your users to download 100-200 Gbs, wherever they are in the world, in 2011?

Again, it's not in the concepts, you see, it's in the involved time spans....

PS:

As a last remark let me call bullshit on a minor issue, ie when you said that CDs, DVDs and BRs are less durable as a medium than floppy discs. I have used floppies since the 5 1/4" ones on my c64, and I still have hundreds of my 3 1/2" Amiga floppies. Last time I checked about 1/5 of them were unreadable, because magnetic recording on floppies degrades over time.

At the same time not one of my hundreds of my pressed CDs or DVDs has ever become unreadable, and I know that Blu-Ray even has a much better coating rendering them much harder to scratch.

Optical drives suck for many other reasons: power consumption, noise, mechanical failures, laser head lifetime. But the lifespan of the actual disc medium is not really one of them when compared with the life expectancy of Floppies or Hard Disks.

no time is not the issue.... that's the trick they play on us.... BR is not an intermediate tech.... it's pure BS when HDD was already the right solution to go with 4 years ago.... and optical disc was already obsolete when DVD came out.... but that's another discussion I don't want to start... what I'm saying... it's you are buying in a tech that shouldn't even exist by it's low interest... look for music the jump went from CD to MP3 players .... 5 years ago people where talking about music om mini dvds with high def sound and 5.1 sound.... it's a pure BS idea... BR is the same and you won't convince me of the opposite.... 100 to 200 Gb i'm sorry it's not a standard size i expect in 3 years... in what world do you live (no offence man really) but that should be the standard on a iPhone... other reason I think most smartphone are a joke for the price they ask....

what I'm telling is not a problem of time... they could have done what I\m talking about in the XBox 360 almost... so in 3 years they won't have a single excuse.... none... 3 years is a galaxy jump in the tech and computer industry....


you can buy a 1 TB HDD samesung brand new for your desktop for $105 bucks and i didn't even look long.... imagine if MS order 10 million of these for an XB 3 what would be the cost compare to an optical disc of some sort.... and the price of pressing every single BR after.... it's the dumbest choice even in november 2005

so yeah i see your counter arguments for the other guys and now agree more with your first post in that light under that angle....

now tell me why you still think it's not the time... once again I can ensure you you have more DL video content every day world wide than BR are bought.... why should they logically go towards a path that is not the standard today in the future... in order for a global distribution you have DVD then DL and then BR.... TODAY... last 2 weeks time warner and several other ISP announced they were going to cap 30Gb a month connection due to too much DL... 30 it's a easily 5 HD movie a month.... the right transition is DVD>>DL

about floppy well all mine work now you said an important thing... pressed... I don't have a lot of burned CD or DVDs that last more than a year.... I still have most of my floppy stored in the same manner than burned optical media that still work... my issue is scratches.... and I have HDD more than 13 years old that still work better than both and I never shut down my PCs except when I go in vacation or the 2 second it's off during a reboot...

and anywhere in the world.... yeah I expect that... do you really think poor countries can afford to buy disc more than DL illegaly stuff ???? in poor or control countries DL has been the standard for years already.... without talking about politcal restraint in some of them... it's easier to go around that on internet than in a local store.... ask to saoudies... north corean..... and other controled content countries....and anyway the main market are not there... I still don't see why people still believe it's not possible right here right now... it's plain falls

720P H.264 looks great at 1.1GB / 50 minutes, and most people with high speed can already do that.

That would be stupid. the 360 is a console, not a dvd/blu ray player. If you wanna buy blu ray, get a blu ray player.

I completely agree with the OP. "Streaming media" is like a fucking joke compared to a Blu Ray Add-On and whoever in here is actually in support of it has seriously bought into MS's bullshit.