Microsoft Again Denies Xbox 360 Blu-ray, Claims Digital Downloads Are 'The Future'

GG Microsoft. I would have bought a 360 if it had an internal HD-DVD drive, but got a PS3 instead. I think the audience that likes HD games and high tech stuff will also want HD movies and not compressed crap that only lasts 24 hours. People complain about DRM on physical media but it is much more cumbersome on digital downloads. We will see how this all plays out.

grammar nazi alert

shouldn't there be some quotation marks in the 3rd paragraph that begins "Lewis also stated..."?

Consumer choice? What consumers? You mean the pirates? Movies ain't mp3s that are downloaded in 1 minute.

Maybe if they didn't charge so much for downloaded movies and I could take em over to a friends house etc I would believe this. The future sure, in like another 10 years or more when broadband providers suck it up and actually do the networks to let people download in the 50+ mbps like colleges have.

I guess their HD-DVD player was made before "The Future" he is talking about .

I still think this is just all political posturing. Obviously they won't announce a Blu-ray drive is coming, especially not an internal one, because it may affect their sales. Additionally, they haven't been playing well with others (Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, just about everyone), so now they have to go back hat-in-hand and ask for BD drives for their own add-on. The negotiations will not be swift.

That's all to say, they are making an incredibly stupid move if they don't offer some kind of BD option for Xbox 360 owners. I have many friends who bought or are considering buying a PS3 just for Blu-ray. This is exactly the situation Microsoft does not want. They've already got the software superiority, but now they have a huge chink in their armor. If they had a BD drive, people would be perfectly satisfied with the complete package of the 360, barring any PS3 exclusives of course. As it stands now, that same gamer may pick up a PS3 to compliment their 360, and who knows they might find more games they liked for it, or decide to buy a cross platform title that reviews say performs a bit better on the PS3. Once Microsoft lets Sony jam its foot in the door, it can't get it back out. And heaven forbid this hypothetical person's 360 go to the big red ring in the sky. You can bet they aren't going to forget which system continued to work perfectly and which went on a month long vacation for surgery.

In short, downloads are the future for many reasons, but we live in the NOW and downloads are nowhere close to being ready.
1) No extras
2) Bad Quality (lower res, lower bitrate)
3) Cost (as much as a disk rental)
4) DRM HELL (stupid restrictions and timelimits)
5) No resale/trade (I enjoy selling things I own, don't you?)
6) Bandwidth (I have snappy cable where I live, too bad 80% of the country doesn't)
and a plethora of others.

The main reason I like movies on Live is that they available in HD.

Downloads or streaming videos will be in the far off future. The current services suck ass. I dont want to watch some compressed grainy low quality movie. There is a big diff between true high def on a disc and the crappy vids you can download through some of the current services.

Microsoft hasn't given up on physical media yet, it with Toshiba & Panasonic are trying to push the DVD2 standard as plan B after the death of HD-DVD.

http://www.contentagenda.com/article/CA6539511.html

You see HDi was rather important to Microsofts Windows media strategy as they had big plans for legalizing what everyone is already doing (ripping movies to hard drive) and through managed copy they hoped you could push your movies out to various media center extenders like the Xbox 360 with Windows or Windows Home Server acting as your hub.

With the fall of HD-DVD their plans have been thrown into disarray and so you see MS now trying to leverage HDi onto DVD instead. Toshiba will be eager too to keep DVD relevant given it's dominance and not let Blu-ray gain any ground.

My best guess as MS is always coy with it's statements is that if DVD2 fails to gain any traction past the DVD forum then you will see a Blu-ray add-on eventually.

He's right about one thing: digital media is the future. However, Blu-Ray is now.

In the bandwidth-limited world, Digital Downloads are a long way from being the norm. I single 720p movie (which is still a long way from 1080p) takes 5% of my monthly 100GB limit... and I have the highest and most expensive tier of access my ISP provides.

Any chance this could be interpreted as "No, go ahead and buy that Xbox 360 you've been eyeing. Go ahead. No, we're not just about to come out with a new version with Blu-Ray. Promise. Seriously, go ahead and keep buying what's out there"

Pretty much all current 360 owners will want a Blu Ray player at some point.

Seems like a pretty good chance they will buy a PS3 for a Blu Ray player.

Maybe Sony wont let them put it i the Xbox though unless they pay Sony a shitload of license it. Who knows.

Not too long ago there was the rumor that Microsoft really was trying to prolong the Blu-ray - HD DVD battle to give them more time to prepare their digital download service. I'm having a hard time believing that MS was really that blind to see that HD DVD and on top of that pay a large chunk of money for studios to be exclusive HD DVD supporters. In regard to their HD download service hopes, too bad the the infrastructure in the US is not even close to being ready to allow full HD 1080p streaming to the mass market.

Even if Microsoft did want to add a Blu-ray player to their XBox 360, how would they make their non-hard drive bearing units (Arcade model) Blu-ray 2.0 compliant? Would they have to plug a hard drive AND a Blu-ray drive into it? This whole situation is really weird. Can somebody make any sense of this?

Digital downloads that cost as much as the movies I buy in the store....with horrid compression artifacts, and no extras?

No thanks!!!

downloads are the DISTANT future... sure, they're convenient when you have the bandwidth, and the storage space available....but for the general public, there will always be higher demand for physical media.

MS needs 2 things before they get me to start downloading anything:

1) a larger HDD that doesn't cost so damned much
2) The ability to put the movie, tv show, etc content on to my Zune

Well now that MSFT has dashed my hopes on the rocks, it seems that the NetFlix/MSFT partnership might turn out pretty awesome after all (if that ever comes to fruition).

So I guess Michael Bay was right after all. Who'da thunk it?

Now let me BUY the movies and I'll agree. The rental for 48 hours shit is for the birds.

Microsoft might think it's well-placed for digital downloads, but North America's sub-par network infrastructure says, "No." The bandwidth to do this on a truly mass scale that remains convenient, reliable and cheap for consumers isn't there yet and it will take hundreds of billions of (government) dollars to get it there. In the short- to medium-term, I think compression technology is the only advance that will allow what Microsoft is talking about to come to fruition, and only in a limited way at that.

R U for special features chat?

That would be cool and all if digital downloads had blu-ray/HD-DVD quality.