Microsoft says no way to Blu-ray for Xbox 360

They won't add Blu-Ray because they already have the next console in the works somewhere deep in a laboratory.

Four years from the console's birth, they've got to be at least thinking about it. Will Microsoft put Blu-Ray in their next generation or is this "we're good with online video" for real? If they do add Blu-Ray, it'll probably be to power the games, as that's what it seems Bach would like to get out of it.

Well I beleive that in the long run, blu-ray player in the xbox console itself would be a profit.

1. MORE space for game companies to work with to make a final product.

2. Not everyone has enough space for 1080P Hi-def movies to download to the console let alone the widespread use of Broadband network to carry the signal.

3. It would give sony a rival in the Blu-Ray market.

Cons:

1. The Xbox 360 would have to be completely redone in the processing power retrospect to the PS3. (I have both and use my Xbox 360 for games, and my PS3 for movies due to higher release of updates for the PS3).

all in all I think Microsoft needs to rethink their way of selling an HD Blu-Ray Product either addon or internal. No one wants to keep downloading the same movie and only be able to watch it for a certain amount of time (one week). I think once the movie is bought it belongs to the end-user until it is deleted (use of points to download movies from microsoft).

enough of that.

Pete

I doubt that Microsoft wants to pay their console rival Sony a royalty for the installation/use of a BR drive on an Xbox. They would rather they continue to take a loss on every PS3 sold and want to do nothing that would stop the bleeding. Instead, they will counter with alternatives, that steal market share and make the BR drive less attractive.

Ditto what Crabbyappleton said.

On top of that, Microsoft is very dedicated to streaming content -- i.e. Netflix -- and believes streaming content is the future, not relying on a physical format.

Storage space needs for high definition video games exceeds the capacity of DVD's. We can already see this by looking at the multi-DVD Xbox 360 games that have been released and by reading comments from many PS3 game development companies who say that their games would not have been possible if they were forced to use DVD as a storage medium.

You know they wouldn't pay sony but the Blu Ray Forum and the company that will manufacture the Blu Ray drive. You know Sony is part of the DVD Forum which Microsoft has to pay for every dvd drive and disc.

Umm I don't think Sony is getting any royalty from a DVD. I think it is Time Warner and a few others. The thing is, Sony is a direct competitor to MS gaming platform every PS3 sold can hurt the Xbox. And also I forgot to mention- MS probably does not want to run Java either.

I would think Microsoft would include a bluray drive in the next generation, simply because they'll need the extra room. Allthough If you really want to prevent piracy, you'd stick an HD-DVD drive in there, because it'd be obscelete technology, and hard to find blanks/burners to clone games

Also a smart move not to include a bluray attachement for the 360. Standalones continue to drop in price. If they fall a bit more, people would probably just buy a standalone instead.

"You know they wouldn't pay sony but the Blu Ray Forum and the company that will manufacture the Blu Ray drive. You know Sony is part of the DVD Forum which Microsoft has to pay for every dvd drive and disc."

Wrong, for EVERY single BD and BD player SONY recive royalties, same as PHILIPS recive royalties for every CD and DVD media and player sold!

For M$ to include such technoology they would HAVE to pay SONY in some way or other unless they designed there own hardware which is very unlikely since they are completly useless at designing anything except software, just look at how they screwed up a simple chip and heatsink!

They could go proprietry and make a hybrid format or something like Dreamcast did. Unlikely but still probable they could go flash media. With 16gig drives at $40 bucks right now by the time the next xbox comes out they could be cheap enough by then.

Forgot to mention that Microsoft would have to be crazy to go flash drives since even if they got costs down to near Dvd prices (which I really doubt they will since 512mb flash drives arn't even that cheap). They would still be considered the least eco-friendly company with all that plastic. They could also think about digital downloads but who wants to wait 1-2 days to download a game or who has got the bandwidth?

True to a point yes they would get paid but in a indirect manor. The Blu Ray forum will recieve the fee's that are incured and since Sony is on that board they will get a percentage. Sony is also on the Dvd Forum so they also get a percentage of any fee's that are accumulated from members wanting to use there patent.

Zod, i'm with you on that one - microsoft would be well advised to use hd-dvd on their next gen machine as it would give them the the added capacity, the technology and license could be had for peanuts and the pirating would be greatly hindered due to lack of blank discs. existing dvd manufacturing can be easily adapted to produce the discs, and you could always adapt the hardwae slightly to allow for bluray playback of movies, as they both use the same laser.
Psychoace, why would it take 2 days to download a game? say they are 15gb each, on a 20meg line that would take maybe 2-3hours to download. flashdrives could be th answer for the 360 though, as they could also overcome the lack of mandatory hdd that some developrs are complaining about by using spare capacity on the flashdrive to store data.
with regards to royalties, shouldn't those only be paid to the patent holders? the forums are simply steering comitees, they have no onershiprights and therefore no access to royalties

Microsoft will never incorporate a failed HD format like HD DVD into its Xbox 360 - that's sheery lunacy given that the format is dead and unsupported.

As for Blu-ray, Microsoft sees Sony as a main competitor and will do anything to spite them.

Thats the whole point of them us hd-dvd. It's not for HD movies. Its for storage capacity for games. The format might of failed for movies, but it would be a solution to get more space for games (if they didn't want to go blu). The technology exists, it works, it can be had for cheap. Burners and blanks are scarce, so it would be hard to pirate games. If Microsoft chooses not to go bluray and keeps its path of downloaded content, it would be a cheap way to solve disc capacity problems. Then again the Dreamcast use GD-Roms's and some genious figured that out
I would say the downside would be bluray has a little more capacity, and it might be a nice bonus for customers to have a bluray player. Sony's big mistake was including bluray when it was really expensive to produce. I assume by the time the next xbox comes out, bluray parts should be reasonably priced, making it easier to include. If they choose to go blu, then it should be ok. Either way they probably can't stick with dvd, they're going to need more space.

Failed HD format yes, but its still a viable storage format.. Also, last time I checked it was incorporated into the 360 as an add-on component.. While it may not be incorporated into the current 360, it may well hold the key in answering the storage and piracy issues with their next generation console..

Toshiba is not going to restart the HD-DVD forum just for Microsoft. They have left that ship behind they are not going to start up manufacturing lines for this. Also costs will be obsurd on a per disc basis. Blu Ray will only get cheaper because they have more production lines and have now an extra year+ of getting the technique down so there will be less unusable discs. HD-DVD will be to expensive not cheap Zod

It would cost Toshiba nothing if MS decided to use HD-DVD. The spec is ready and making the discs requires very little changes from regular DVD. Toshiba would not be the ones starting up mfg lines either. This would be done by the Xbox disc makers that are making DVDs for Xbox now. It would make sense for MS to do this since HD-DVD is not available to the rest of the market.

"It would cost Toshiba nothing if MS decided to use HD-DVD. The spec is ready and making the discs requires very little changes from regular DVD."

But saying that it would take little change to move lines from DVD to HD-DVD is the same excuse they gave back when the format first appeared yet there prices were still comparable if not more expensive then Blu Ray. And it would cost Toshiba money because they have to employ people to run the whole legal and sales aspect of that department. It's not like Toshiba is just going to give them the blue prints and say make whatever you want. Toshiba will want to make money off the deal. So if DVD's costing few cents per disc are charged in the market at $60 a game think how much the price would go up if you used a technology that is non existent.

Dont rule out the possibilty that Microsoft will buy the HD DVD patent altogether therefore eliminating the middle man and any possibility of licensing out that technology to others..

The HD-DVD 'blue print' is already out there and proven to work. MS could probably make a very good deal with Toshiba and pay them a per disc fee which would be reasonable for a dead format. Toshiba probably wouldn't hire anyone new, they would just use their existing IP dept to handle the deal and end up making some money off HD-DVD. Besides, HD-DVD isn't dead everywhere. China bought into it to be their next gen format (with some changes most likely). But that means Toshiba already has the structure to handle this business if needed. The cost per game will stay on par with competition no matter if the cost per disc increases slightly or not. The cost to make HD-DVD is way lower than BD. Trust me.

If it did cost way less then why did it cost the same or more in the stores? Burnable discs were also more expensive when they finally came out (considering that blu ray had 10 extra gigs and was still cheaper is saying something)

Hypnosis I agree they can buy them out but then they would have to buy a place to manufacture them and then people to run the line and managers to organize the workers and a human resource department ect. Cost can really pile up especially after just buying out the patient.

Sure they would pay Sony a royalty if it was beneficial to MS. Sony and MS are already in bed together with Sony studios offering movies on XBOX Live. The business world is a strange animal, your partner/friend can be your competitor/enemy at the same time, or go from being one to the other rather quickly. Look at Sony/Toshiba for example. Sony, Toshiba and IBM designed the cell processor together, then Sony went to "format war" with Toshiba over HD format, and before the "war" was over, Sony & Toshiba were working on a joint venture deal for the cell processor manufacturing / supply etc..
Stranger things have happened

I'm sure there's enough HD DVD manufacturing equipment waitiing to be scrapped that could be had for cheap

Hey everyone.
Here's a bit a wake up call about DVD royalties that were being discussed above. This is kinda funny because it seems that DVD has several patent holders like blu-ray, and yes Sony is just one of them like with blu ray:

DVD: The official specification was developed by a consortium of ten companies: Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and Toshiba.

Any company making DVD products must license essential technology patents from the " 3C ' pool (LG, Philips, Pioneer, Sony: 3.5% per player/drive, minimum $3.50; additional $0.75 for Video CD compatibility; 5 cents per disc), the " 6C " pool (Hitachi, IBM, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Time Warner, Toshiba, Victor: 4% per player/drive, minimum $4; 4% per "DVD Video decoder", minimum $1; 7.5 cents per disc) and from Thomson (~$1 per player/drive). Patent royalties may also be owed to Discovision Associates , which owns about 1300 optical disc patents (usually paid by the replicator).

The licensor of CSS encryption technology is DVD CCA. There is a $15,000 annual licensing fee, but no per-product royalties.

Macrovision licenses its analog anti-recording technology to hardware makers. Macrovision charges a royalty to content publishers.

Dolby licenses Dolby Digital decoders for approximately $0.26 per channel. Philips, on behalf of CCETT and IRT, also charges $0.20 per channel (maximum of $0.60 per player) for Dolby Digital patents, along with $0.003 per disc. Dolby also licenses 2-channel Dolby Digital encoders.

Dolby licenses MLP decoders for DVD-Audio players.

An MPEG-2 patent license is required from MPEG LA (MPEG
Licensing Adminstrator).

Philips licenses the Video CD format and patents on behalf of themselves, Sony, JVC, Matsushita, CNETT, and IRT for $25,000 initial payment plus royalties of 2.5% per player or $2.50 minimum.

Nissim claims 25 cents per player and 78/100ths of a cent for parental management and other DVD-related patents.

Various licensing fees add up to over $20 in royalties for a $200 DVD player, and about $0.20 per disc. Disc royalties are paid by the replicator.

Royalties for DVD+R patents are charged by Philips (approximately $0.06 per disc) and Sony (1.5 to 3.5% of disc price).

Translation (referring to original article above):
XBOX 360 blu ray add-on will be available in a few months.

If they don't, no big deal, I have learned its not always a good idea to make your game console also be your HD movie and main DVD player, specially a 360. I got burned on the 2 occasions my 360 died and I had to send it to MS for repair. Not only was I without games, I could not watch HD DVDs and had to settle for a crappy old DVD player for a few weeks.
360 is a great gaming cosole but as we all know its been disaster for the reliability & stability.

Would be nice if M$ would replace all the optical-drives in there XBOX's with a blueray-drive. Maybe that solves te scratch problems they say they donn't have (http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...oq=xbox+360+sc)

psychoace, the cost of the disc has very little to do with the retail price of the end product. blu and hd dvd cost more, simply because they are seen as a value added product, so the profit margins are expected to be higher. Hddvd was cheaper to produce than Bluray right up to the demise of the format, particularly since they required little extra investment in new manufacturing plants compared to Blu, and the liscensing was a lot cheaper - just ask any small studio. The cost to release a bluray disc is still prohibitivly expensive for them. Why do you think the majority of new titles are only comming from the sony stables and why only blockbuster titles are being released by other studios?
One of Microsoft's biggest problems at the moment is piracy of their discs, as it is a lot cheaper to rip off a dvd based xbox 360 game than a blu-ray based ps3 game. The smart move for a new console would then be to use a medium that is not widely available & harder to copy. This could be flash based as a card or cartridge (going back to the retro days), downloadable a'la Steam (easy to implement and control) or on a disc format (blu-ray would not make much sense as by then it's wide availability means you will have the same proble as with DVD, so a dead format like Hd dvd or a variant of it, would be sensible, particularly as you can reuse decomissioned DVD plants and you can use the same laser technology as bluray so you can offer bluray film playback)