Thats exactly the point Alien8. All Sony and co have to do is delay the BR drive on the XBox for a while and the whole point of having one becomes obsolete. Thats exactly what I believe theyre going to do.
Heres a deal Ethen. If theres a 360 BR player on the market by May 2008 then Ill stop posting long winded sciency replies to any posts and eat my hat as you seem to place so much credance on. On the other hand, if there isnt one then you can stop posting speculations about things and try harder to spell at least some of the words in your posts correctly. Does that sound reasonable?
Im looking at things from a Business IT perspective as that is what most of my experience and training has involved. Im not a fanboy either way, i dont have a 360 or PS3 because to be fair I wouldnt use them.
As I understand it one of the tenets that holds the BDA together is that an individual member _cant _ stop a company buying a licence to the technology. In fact reading through the data it would suggest that you could get a manufacturing licence for the tech in under 2 months. I would be surprised if Microsoft hadnt already got the paperwork and sent it off. They will already have been working with it so that it works properly in Vista no doubt, though probably only on the software side after buying in drives from a 3rd party.
I would agree though, the only stumbling block for them is the licence. The tech will likely take them a few weeks or months to iron out, put a firmware flash into the 360 and you can have a blu-ray drive up and running with little effort in comparison to trying to retro fit the box (I personally would be very surprised if they dont already have a working protype or two in the 360 development labs). MS have stated publicly multiple times that they will review Blu-Ray for the 360 if there is enough public demand. They now know they can drop the HD-DVD add-on, so why not produce a Blu-Ray add on instead? Its really little to do with licencing and more to do with economics. Sony will be highly unlikely to block a direct application by MS for access to the full Blu-Ray licence, because if they did MS could do a variety of things, including lodging a complaint to the FTC under the US anti-competition laws (that would be highly ironic), or even poking Sonys licence to use WMA files on their Walkman products. The most damaging thing for Sony I would think would be to remove their WMA licence (there is a clause in the licence that says MS can pull it at any time, for any reason). While most of us use MP3/OGG or similar formats, ive noticed that the great majority of home users rip their CDs using Windows media player. Im sure theyll be happy that their shiny new walkman or ericsson phone wont play their music anymore, and they are more likely to swap their phone or MP3 player than their computer.
