Wii U won't play DVD/Blu-ray movies
Nintendo's Satoru Iwata has announced that the Wii U won't feature DVD or Blu-ray playback, citing it as cost-prohibitive and saying people already own devices to play movies.
Though it seems to be a match for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in most ways, the Wii U won't have the capability of playing DVD or Blu-ray movies. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed the news in a recent investor Q&A, saying that people already own devices for that purpose and "it didn't warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies."
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean you can't watch movies on your Wii U next year. Netflix is aggressively pursuing every device with a screen, so it's a safe bet that we'll see some form of instant streaming on the Wii U. If Nintendo can get a low-latency stream from the device onto the controller screen, even better.
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Steve Watts posted a new article, Wii U won't play DVD/Blu-ray movies.
Nintendo's Satoru Iwata has announced that the Wii U won't feature DVD or Blu-ray playback, citing it as cost-prohibitive and saying people already own devices to play movies.-
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the interview with reggie post conference had him talking around it. i think he was asked if it would have bluray or some other alternative format that would be similar. he said something like the disc format won't limit the system. as in it could still be DVD or it could be a proprietary format probably because he is confident in the games. doesn't seem like they want to talk about it yet.
i think this was the gametrailers video interview.-
http://www.develop-online.net/news/37932/Nintendo-Wii-U-disc-capacity-at-25GB
And the Wii can run DVDs, it's just set up so it doesn't. You can easily softmod it to do so. Ninty would have to shell out loads of money to make it capable of doing so.
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Yeah it's kinda shitty. It makes sense to cut costs whenever possible, but dvd playback especially can't add that much cost to the system. Nintendo dipped it's toes into the media hub pool with their picture channel and the music playing abilities on their hand-helds, and the netflix capability, but for whatever reason they don't want to play dvd's.
Which I'm more and more ok with, I'd like to get rid of my physical media completely as time goes on, but hopefully I can stream to the device ala PS3/360 without hacking the thing. -
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Is it honestly a selling point nowadays? DVD players are bargain basement cheap, and have decent quality despite the cheapness. Blu-ray are almost as cheap with a much higher quality. There's really no reason to keep buying the same device over and over again, especially with optical media on the decline, and high quality streaming video on the rise.
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I think it's a decent selling point. Not everyone is into streaming media at the rate diehard gamers or technophiles are and many folk like an all-in-one solution for their gadgetry. I know I do. Fairly decent disappointment but not unexpected because I'll be they're seriously scrambling right now to find ways to get the cost down. It's not going to be pretty.
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Bluray is not on the decline (DVD obviously is), 2011Q1 saw a 10% increase in sales over 2010Q1, the same growth that streaming & digital downloads saw, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.
Anyway, the way I look at it, why would I want to buy a bluray player when I can just buy a console that has dual functionality? Bluray penetration is still only 45% of HDTV households. If I don't have a bluray player yet and am eyeing a WiiU now I have to buy both.
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