Sony chews the Blu-ray fat with Microsoft

Price

I gotta say, it doesn't bother me as I have my PS3, but we'll need to see Blu-Ray players at $200/£100 before the end of 2009 before they come mainstream. As it's the Asda-esque DVD Players that are most popular these days, and such budget prices that made DVD players a lot more common.

Player costs?

I will only think about a blu-ray palyer if the disks are down to the £15 for new release and £5 for 6 month old that current DVDs seem to be.

Here we go!

Finally, we're at a point where all the big companies are forming up behind one format. It won't be long before economies of scale kick in. Excellent. MS and Apple are deluding themselves with digital downloads - it's a nice nirvana, but it won't happen for a while yet. In the meantime, roll on the Blu-Ray!

Ok but please make the bluray add-on also play hd-dvd.

I was an early adopter of HD-DVD (and still prefer it) and have a fair number of discs. I do hope that Microsoft and Toshiba include HD-DVD compatibiliy into their BluRay offerings but I fear it unlikely.

Let's face it...

....Microsoft does exactly what it wants in order to make money, or stop others from making money. I still say the reason why they backed HD-DVD was to do nothing and eliminate one of the competitors for their HD movie download service.

Sony will be talking BR disk add on in order to make money for themselves and other BR members, but I bet MS won't do a 360 with BR onboard purely so as not to offer consumers something that will compete TOO directly with their online service.

As for Halo 3, most the people who want to buy and play it have already bought the 360 to do so. I'd be very surprised if a PS3 port would actually be worth the money or the dent in Sony's credibility for so explicitly getting into bed with MS just to get hold of one game license.

@AC

Yes, a dual-format add-on drive that means I don't need to make room for a third component next to my 360 and HD-DVD drive would be nice. LG already have dual-format readers for not much more than Blu-only ones, so it's feasible.

We don't know for sure that they were talking about 360 stuff at all, though. Apparently, Microsoft make this OS for PCs that has Blu support. Perhaps someone has heard of it?

Timing

I'm sure Sony will let Microsoft produce an add-on blu-ray drive for the 360, and most likely it will be delayed just enough that Sony can reap the dual rewards of the PS3 having a blu-ray drive built in, and the poor reliability of the 360 - i.e. let's say 6-9 months after the 3 year warranty expires, so even the owners who were happy to keep replacing their 360s finally reach a point where they have a dead console and have to pay to replace it.

Once the maximum number of 360 owners have switched to PS3, Sony will finally let Microsoft produce a blu-ray drive for the rest.

I can't see

downloadable media *ever* competing with the 25-50Gb capacities of Blu-Ray. Not in this country at any rate... 50Gb @ 4Mbps anyone??

@Iain

I think it's pretty unlikely that they will increase costs of a Blu-ray unit, just to incorporate playing of a now obselete standard that was only adopted by a minority!

@Chris

You know that downloadable HD won't look or sound as good as BluRay. I do, too. But when at least half the country seem to think that Freeview is already HD because it looks so nice on a 32" 768p LCD screen, and that upscaled DVD is 'good enough', the performance increase over a 5-10Gb H.264 file probably isn't going to be big enough to persuade them to shell out £15+ to get the best quality available.

On the other hand, is that really such a disaster? Blu is already on course to do better than Laserdisc, and as someone with some lovely Criterions still at home I'd be happy with that.

Not going to work...

Online downloads for movies aren't going to work for a very long time in the UK, at least not while all our ISPS thorottle our download limits impose ridiculous monthly download limits, and monitor every thing we download... as AC above me said 50gb @ 4Mbps is not quick... admitadly the HD Movies (there are only a few) That are currently aviaible to buy via XboX Live, are 4.91 GB still gunna take u a good while to download... oh and you can only watch it once! GG MS!

Not going to work? --- I think you might be wrong there

If you pay a lame ISP peanuts and get 3Gb a month ( unlimited access- righhht) then no it wont work.

BUT- allegedly ;-) with x264 DVD size backups are starting to swamp Newsgroups Newshosts that are SSL too.

So where is the capacity issue?

Where is the size issue?

Where is the the monitoring downloads issue?

Blue ray - the first consumer led choice in AV history ...phhffssss

"Capacity" <> actual useful data

"downloadable media *ever* competing with the 25-50Gb capacities of Blu-Ray. Not in this country at any rate"

Nobody is ever going to put 50G of "movie" onto a BRD. A lot of the data is "extras" that you probably wouldn't pay to download anyway!

The actual "movie" content that you'd pay to download is only going to be 4GB-10GB. It's still a lot, but it's already in reach for some people.

Laserdiscs anybody?

I used to be an early adopter. £400 for dvd player, £4000 for 42in plasma, £300 for dvd burner and plenty more besides. Not any more. The £3000's worth of laserdiscs at £30+ each boxed up in a cupboard will stop me touching anything to do with BR at their current prices for a long while to come.

Mike E

Downloads in the UK can work easily

Not very many people actually have HD TVs in this country you know. SD (or 720p) will be more than adequate for them and SD downloads are not very big (in relative terms). Hell, if downloads weren't going to be successful, the (streaming) BBC iPlayer would have been a massive failure.

Never say never

We're being offered FIOS in our city at the moment. This is Fiber Optic to the home and in addition to being the best vehicle for HDTV distribution -- it beats both cable and satellite according to a recent "Consumer Reports" survey -- it offers phone service and 5MBits/sec Internet access rates. (Consumer Reports is the US version of Which? BTW)

IPTV -- TV over the 'net -- isn't like cable, you don't get multiple video streams sent to you, just the one you selected (although you also get low rate feeds of other channels so that when channel flipping it appears like regular cable TV). The selection is made upstream so its trivial to add movies to the choice of streams -- video on demand.

We already have movie downloads on demand in the US through a number of routes including TiVo. TiVo is interesting because it seamlessly integrates live, recorded and downloaded content.

"Never say never" -- downloads of HDTV content are a fact and given the rate its developing it may even be widely available before an economically priced BluRay player.

Funny, I thought HD DVD would take off

The problem I've always had with the war of the format is that it's all down to which studio is behind the format and what gets released. I suppose all that need to happen is the same old deal as what happened in the VHS/Beta war - porn needs to pick a format and use it, and then rest of the industry will just have to use it. I have a PS3 but I didn't buy it for HD movies - so it's higher quality picture. Whoop de doo. It's still the same old suckful Adam Sandler movie, and nothings going to change that.

Who the hell said DVD backwards compatibility was going to be dropped?

Matthew if you think the BR manufacturers in the whole of that list posted by Paul are going to drop standard DVD playback then you have bought into the bullshit of the doom mongers. DVD was the single biggest change in the consumer home video format in 40 years of common TV ownership, shifting everyone from analogue to digital. BR doesn't have the installed user base to upset the DVD apple cart and won't do for probably 2-3 years. There is no way either standard DVD will be dropped or have production reduced for at minimum, six years. For those BR consortia members, you have to remember DVD is their bread and butter and their main source of steady cash flow.

So where on earth have you gotten the notion that they will drop DVD playback from BR players?! What an absurd notion.

@Matthew

You don't need to spend £1000 to get a top notch HDTV, try a Samsung LE40M87BDX for £699, 40" screen, Full 1080p, excellent black levels, very good motion handling and makes BR and HD look simply stunning.

As for downloads, yes you can download an x264 rip of a HD DVD and it does look excellent, but to me the physical medium is still preferable and the considerably higher quality audio available with HD and BR is as important as the PQ... you don't get TrueHD, or even DD+ on an x264 rip yet.....

Yeah Tim is back!!

Nice to see Tim back making the usual totally off the point, random and ill conceived comment. Of course the BR back catalogue is lacking some key interesting titles because many are tied up in HD-DVD exclusivity for the moment. But as happened with DVD, the mass market mainstream releases come out first to get the sales, THEN the back catalogues get released once the costs can be offset against sales.

A 'more interesting' back catalogue means fk all if you haven't got the volume of sales the moronic comedy films give you. HD-DVD was the absolute personification of that. Get over it, get some perspective and educate yourself about the lead time of manufactured goods and how profit and loss effects this. Because you still have no idea.

Oh yeah, have you had the "welcome to the format" from anyone you were having a tantrum over?.......

Oh and there are only three Adam Sandler films out on BR!

@Waldo

HD-DVD and BluRay both use(d) either H.264 for the even more efficient VC-1 codecs when creating 15-30Gb video files, even before you add audio.

How, pray, do you suggest amateurs without access to dedicated hardware re-encode that lossy data to 4-8Gb including audio for those pirate downloads without losing any quality? It's plain impossible. You might still find the quality acceptable, but we don't all have such low standards.

Oh well

But my point still stands