1. That's a red herring.  WTH does your previous assertion have to do the potential quality of these upcoming $99 BD players?  I proved you wrong.  That's all to it.  Suck it up.

2. All BDs don't have network connectivity, so that fails.  I already mention the "CPU".  That's what SoC is (System on a Chip).  What 4 streams are you talking about?  I mentioned the BD Java before as well.  I guess this is your way of agreeing with my response to your earlier 2nd point.

^

"I proved you wrong.  That's all to it.  Suck it up."

Cool down, please, you're sounding like a teenager on E. And a rude one, at that.
And read again my last post and maybe the whole conversation with the local Squilliam. This was about the question "will being a great BR player have a definite value in next gen consoles, or will it be a cheap feature of limited practical value?"

1) bad BR players in a year time from now won't be as cheap as bad DVD players were in 2005, nor will have as much mass-market penetration.

2) Network connectivity is mandatory as for the full specs of BluRay Live, and frankly even if you were to say that you won't use it, it will be invaluable for updating that Java interpreter or the stream processing software. The 4 streams are 2 videos, 2 audio streams that must be processed in parallel as per specs to allow PiP and other features. Did you also gloss about the 1GB of storage and the virtualized filsystem that again is per spec?

@ Werekitten, the important timeframe would be the price of BR players in 2.5 to 3.5 years from now. In that time im certain that even mid range players will cost at most $150 if they haven't dropped all the way down to $100.

Who exactly will create content for that?

Blu Ray is already beyond good enough, we've reached a point where developers almost can't keep up with the high end. Another upwards shift will not happen.

It's all gonna be about SD cards and internal storage from now on, which this technology may apply to but I know you're not thinking about that. So you can rest from watching dick measuring competitions for now. Technology is about making things smaller, just as it is about making them bigger, as it is now it's beyond massive so you can expect that to take a back seat if you haven't tasted a clue of it already.

I doubt that time reference. It would be all in Sony interest, as they are playing catch up this gen. On the other hand, it will be MS to cut it short and come out with a new machine first before Sony takes too much advantage of the increasing sales post price reduction.

Even 2.5 years would mean a launch date of end of 2011/start of 2012, but I rather suspect that MS will want to ride the economic post-depression upturn in 2011. To come out in mid 2011 you have to set the specs in 2010, that's why i was comparing the BR players of one year in the future with the DVDs of the beginning of 2005.

But of course, you're entirely right about the player costs if this gen really lasts another 3 years or more with the same consoles.

It could still be more convenient to have a single piece of hardware. Less hassle with firewalls setups, maybe remote playing of all kinds of media via wireless - even internet-wide - to small devices (PSP, Zune...), a single device you have to update.

Even if the hardware is finalised at the end of this year for an end of 2010 release, it will be finalised for the expected market conditions in 2011/12 and beyond.  

The issue with trying to predict the future is that there are so many viable strategies for console makers to employ. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Shift everything forward in time, then. A cheap DVD player did cost $30 by the end of 2005 and into 2006 - first year of lifetime for the 360. And the market penetration was 75% of USA households by Q3 2005, 81% by Q3 2006  (source: Tom's hardware). I doubt similar costs and market numbers for BluRay in 2011/2012.

But, yeah, I agree that it's all in the air. It's fun, though :)

@azelover

Logically, I'd agree that BluRay will be enough for everything the mass consumer will be interested in for a long while. But I used to think the same about CDROMs and then DVDs, and yet the wretched content creators managed to overflow their capacity again and again :)

I hope we'll come soon to cheaper permanent RAM technologies. Those sound much more future-proof.

Cheaper per gigabyte? Let's see... It said the format could hold 100 times the data of a DVD, right? That's 100 * 4.7GB = 470GB (or 100 * 8.5GB = 850GB for dual-layer DVD). Then it said the cost would be less than $0.10 per gigabyte, right? Well good luck buying those discs: $0.10/GB * 470GB = $47, or $0.10/GB * 850GB = $85 for dual-layer. Not exactly cheap. It would have to be more like $0.01/GB to be reasonable ($4.7/$8.5GB per disc). Well, $0.02/GB at max: $9.2/$17 per disc. For comparison, a recordable single-layer Blu-ray disc (25GB) seems to cost 7€ at lowest here. Of course it's cheaper for industry...

That is, unless I made a mistake. Feel free to correct me if there's need for it; by no means I want to spread false information.

Naturally costs of this technology will fall. It's just a matter of time. However, I wouldn't be so sure about this technology being reasonably priced at the start of the next generation. It would have to MUCH cheaper than it now is to be a decent option. Sure, it could make it... But I wouldn't count on it. Besides, Blu-ray will do for a few years just fine. With all those extra layers (hadn't they already reached 200GB with eight layers?), it could possibly make even the next gen.

Anyway, if Blu-ray is viable enough, Sony ought to use it. And that alone will be great for Blu-ray. Besides, we don't need a new format every five to eight years. Hopefully, at least. It'll get pretty expensive for the consumer.

And I must also make it clear that I have nothing against holography. In fact, I believe it could well be the successor of Blu-ray and it seems to be one of the best options right now. It's just that its costs seem too high now.

Sony will more than likely stick with an upgraded Blu-Ray player in PS4. Microsoft are more likely to implement Holographic player in X720 due to having deeper pockets. Holographic players could be implemented into Home PCs within 5 years as normal due to large storage capacities.

I just like the idea about massive storage disks:)