Microsoft says no way to Blu-ray for Xbox 360

ivid

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

ivid

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).

ivid

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.

guest

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)

guest

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)