Ranting Kenya

Xbox 360 Blu-ray console shipping by September?by Thomas Ricker, posted May 2nd 2008 at 2:12AMFor all of Microsoft’s denial, the Xbox 360 Blu-ray console rumors just will not die. In fact, they are getting more and more specific. The Chinese language Economic Daily News is reporting that Pegatron, an OEM subsidiary of ASUS, has won the order from Microsoft to assemble the Xbox 360 with Blu-ray Disc ROM drive — shipments are expected to being in Q3 of this year. Now come on Microsoft, just come clean on the matter, we won’t tell anyone.

Xbox 360 Blu-ray console shipping by September? – Engadget

Honestly, even after getting burned by HD-DVD, I’d probably get one.

Tags: hd, blu, ray, xbox, 360, xbox 360

So by now, everybody’s heard the news.

Phil made an interesting comment on one of my other posts. He said:

…Chances are a lot of Telus subscribers will ditch their CDMA phones in favour of the trendy iPhone, especially the young and fashionable population…

While I believe this is certainly a possibility, with all the news surrounding the next version of the iPhone (Engadget has a bunch of posts), how many people are really going to go for it? Perhaps many, since not everyone follows this type of thing in the media.

If Rogers negotiated a lucrative exclusivity deal, and their voice/data plan is actually good, then yeah, I think Rogers will be selling them hand over fist. I heard a rumour that a 5GB data plan might be an alternative to unlimited.

However, I believe Rogers will be Rogers and will be greedy. Any really good data plan will undoubtedly be quite expensive. That’s really the deal maker/breaker in the Canadian iPhone story. The monthly charges.

It will of course sell out when launched, it will get all the media attention, and I will see more of them and want one more.

Here’s the price comparison from Daily Tech:

The numbers look too good to be true… A 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of DDR2 667 memory, a 250 GB hard drive, DVD, and Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics, all for a lowly $399. To put this in perspective a Mac Mini with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, equivalent memory, a 160 GB hard drive, DVD, and the same graphics processor, will cost you a hefty $949. Of course the $399 Mac came in a full-size case, and the Mac Mini came in a shrunken footprint, but obviously for some Mac users, the decreased size wasn’t worth $550.

So what does this tell us about Apple, Macs, and the industry? Well for one, there’s interest in an actual low-cost alternative to the Mac. The Mac Mini gets a lot of attention due to it’s form factor, but it was billed by Apple as the cheap alternative. The computer that was for people who wanted a Mac experience, without spending thousands of dollars.

Some would argue that these computers are a good thing, that they will increase the Mac platform’s spread in the computer world. And they probably would. I would even bet that it wouldn’t cut into Mac sales much, if at all. The people who buy Macs still want “a Mac”. This however would bring more people in, and probably convert them to full-blown Mac users eventually.

Apple however, I’d bet, isn’t interested in this scenario. I forget where this comes from, but someone speculated that Apple isn’t all that interested in increasing their marketshare in the PC/Windows dominated world. They have their little corner of the market, and they’re happy with it. Why not sell a “premium” product at a premium price? They even get to play by a lot of their own rules as a result. They are in essence a monopoly of sorts. Sure they compete against PCs, but not really.

Hopefully this product doesn’t die. I’ve been thinking hard recently of hacking a PC to run OS X. It’s a cheaper alternative to buying a Mac and running Windows on it via Bootcamp. My PC has far more power than any iMac, and probably competes with the Mac Pros on some benchmarks, and is half the price. Which is really why Apple doesn’t like this Open Computer. They don’t want to compete on price (they’d lose), and they don’t want more of the market. Simple as that.

Update

One problem with Apple’s dislike of this company… it doesn’t exists really… Oh well.

Update 2

I guess they do exists. Who can keep up with this? Oh right, Engadget

There’s been a number of rumors re-surfacing in the last couple days about Blu-Ray drives coming to the Xbox 360. Microsoft said a few weeks ago after HD-DVD officially died that they weren’t talking with Sony about it. What that really means is “we’re thinking about it, and as of this moment we haven’t contacted anyone.” So are they going to do it? I think so.

I don’t think there’s any question that the future of the DVD/Blu-Ray is limited by digital downloads. We’re already seeing a number of services available that provide just this service. Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace, iTunes Store/Apple TV, and the VooDoo box are a few. Plus you can watch so much online for free now straight from the internet browser. And of course, there’s still Video on Demand (VOD). VOD could be a real competitor if they’d just fix the quality issue.

Anyway, many have speculated that Microsoft won’t do a Blu-Ray (BR) drive because they want people to move to the download model. This is about half true in my mind. Yes, absolutely, they want people to do digital delivery. However, the Xbox division main goal is to sell Xbox 360 consoles and Xbox 360 games. Would adding a BR drive (either internal or as an add-on à la HD-DVD drive) be an added incentive to buy Xbox 360 consoles? I believe so. Many people bought a PS3 solely as a BR player. The PS3 continues to be one of the best and most flexible BR players available.

However, should Microsoft make such a drive available, it would surely sell at least as well as the HD-DVD drive did. All those early adopters are bound to jump on it since the format war is over. True, Sony would benefit from licensing fees, but at least Microsoft would get a cut on the players. It’s also another bullet point on the Xbox 360 box (BR capability), which would eliminate the major difference between PS3 and Xbox 360.

Plus, you can look at Microsoft’s track record with the Xbox 360. They’ve bowed to the community’s pressure on multiple occasions. The HD-DVD drive was in a way, bowing to consumer pressure. As was when Microsoft released Xbox 360 consoles with HDMI ports (their story before hand was that nobody needed HDMI). And perhaps less due to consumer pressure and more media pressure, the warranty extension to 3 years for all the red ringed consoles. Is there any reason to believe Microsoft won’t flinch and release an external BR drive? I don’t think so. The only reason in my mind that Microsoft hasn’t said there will be BR drives for the 360 is they may be waiting for the cost of the drives to get low enough to be able to offer an external drive at the $199 price point.

I don’t really watch a whole lot of TV programs anymore. I used to watch 2 to 3 shows every weekday night. Now, I consistently watch Lost. This is the only show where I freak out about missing an episode. I frequently watch Star Trek reruns, but I don’t care if I miss an episode because I’ve seen them all 5 times anyway. I watch The Office if at all possible. I catch a good amount of reruns Family Guy, American Dad, and Southpark. Then I watch sports.

Now aside from my many complaints about Shaw’s HD-PVR (the same as Comcast’s HD-PVR, that horrible Motorola box), and my complaints about my inability to get HD (or digital) channels on my Windows Media Center computer (i.e. The “Canada and the cablecard” issue and Shaw’s (my cable provider) encryption of digital and HD channels), I’m still going to rant about something else. Watching TV shows online.

On March 24, Gizmodo reported that all the Southpark episodes are online legally. Sweet. That adds to Hulu.com‘s great content and implementation (from what I hear), and also ABC‘s online episode viewer.

There’s really only one big problem for me, and my fellow non-Americans… NOT AVAILABLE IN OUTSIDE THE US! I understand that us Canadians (and other countries, but I will speak from a Canadian perspective) have different laws, and different content agreements. But seriously, these shows are already available in Canada. They are, legally. I can already see all of them on my 50 inch television. They’re on all the time, plus with my PVR (or my media center computer) I can watch them whenever. I even skip the commercials *gasp*. I can download them “illegally” from a torrent site and watch them all that way, without commercials. I can goto Blockbuster and rent and entire season on DVD for a fraction of the cost of buying (or even paying for cable/satelite), and even duplicate the discs (I don’t do this, but there are plenty of people that do).

Now imagine if I could just watch them when I want, online from the network’s website. As with the Southpark implementation, you’re forced to watch a couple quick ads, so the ads will be played (unlike with the torrents, PVR recordings or DVDs). I don’t have to worry about missing episodes, I can’t download and keep them forever (nor do I need to since they’re available day or night online), I’m not blowing as much bandwidth as downloading/uploading torrent files, I don’t need to “hide” from the authorities, the networks can actually gather viewer statistics about how popular their shows actually are, they can pilot an infinite numbers shows and keep them available (let’s face it, content is their real issue, not piracy), the networks can reach their viewers more consistantly, they can reach a greater audience and word of mouth can now spread wider and faster (you know all that social phenomenon… facebook and all). What’s better that TiVo’s recommendation feature? How about “Your Friends Recommend”? In fact, it’s a win win solution for everyone.

Now I know I can use a US proxy server, but so far, I’ve had little usable success. I’m going to try a few different methods in the next couple weeks, so perhaps I’ll update this post. But I shouldn’t have to work around these types of issues. This is all content that we all have access to already, this is mearly another delivery method. My only hope is that the South Park Studios changes their “Coming Soon” image to some great laughs soon.

Now that my new computer has arrived, I’ve had a chance to play around with Windows Media Center included with Windows Home Premium. I have clicked around Media Center before, so I had some idea of what to expect. I would also like to preface this by saying I haven’t used a TiVo before.

Media Center immediately makes me mad angry at my cable provider. I can’t get the digital channels, and obviously that includes the HD channels. That is a huge let down, because this product is excellent. It has features for every possible contingency. The guide is snappy, the interface is efficient and good looking, the program loads quickly, it’s generally very good all-around.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that the PVR functions are working without any hitches. On my Motorola 6416 PVR, which works just good enough that I don’t run it over in my car, pausing usually skips a couple frames, same for pressing play afterwards, sometimes the sound goes down, or the picture goes wonky. None of that happens in Media Center. It’s very polished by comparison.

Sports

As a sports fan, I suppose I could complain since there’s not dual tuners for PIP or using two channel buffers. However, this is pretty much as good as it gets with only one tuner. In the sports section, you get to watch a sporting event in a “windowed” screen. But, around the reduced size video, is a ticker of the other sports games across the top. So you may be watching the Calgary Flames game, but you’ll have the instant updates for other NHL games, the NBA games, MLB, NFL, Tennis, Golf, whatever is on. If you click on one, you go to that channel to watch the game.

Also, accross the bottom, there’s a news ticker. It’ll scroll news that you’d see on Fox’s sports website. You can scroll down and click on it, and it’ll take you to the article within the Media Center interface. This is excellent since it doesn’t launch a browser so you can read it all from your couch using just the regular remote control.

Along with news stories that appear on the bottom, it’ll also have game highlight updates from other channels. Things like “Sidney Crosby Scores”. When you click on that, it takes you to the appropriate channel. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be on that channel before the televised replay. It’s an excellent feature.

Searching

My Motorola box also has searching, but it’s really an exercise in patience to use it. In Media Center, searching is easy. The numbers on your remote work like the numbers on a phone. Each number has about 3 letters. As you type, you get real-time results. So you can just type until you see the show you want, saving you the most amount of time possible. Excellent.

Searching allows you to look for shows and movies by a number of categories. Title, keyword, genre, actor, director. What’s neat is say you search for “Sean Connery”, not only to you get the movies he’s been in that are playing in the next 2 weeks, you get all the movies he’s ever been in. You’ll see all the cover art for all the movie boxes, which is much nicer than scrolling through a list of text. Now, seeing all the movies at once doesn’t sound very useful. Who cares if he was in “Dr. No” if it’s not going to be on. Well, Media Center allows you to mark shows that aren’t necessarily on in the next two week to record eventually when they are on. I believe this is a stupendous feature. I could program Media Center to record the world movie premiere of whatever movie when it eventually comes out. I don’t have to think about it.

Online Content

Now I haven’t clicked on all my options here yet, but I did find some excellent features. For instance, you can find other related videos to certain content on the web. So, in my case, I was able to find some post-game sports interviews to watch. They stream right off the web. Awesome.

Media Center Extender

I have an Xbox 360, which I’ve finally been able to use as a Media Center Extender. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, especially since I’m running my 360 wirelessly now. If you look at the network connection on my Xbox, the wireless signal is only 3 out of 4 bars.

This, however, was enough for me to stream HD content (on an 802.11g wireless network) to my Xbox with no frame rate issues whatsoever. It was actually quite exciting that it worked so well.

You can stream live tv, recorded shows, pictures, and music to your extender. There are really only two limitations to this interface. You cannot stream DivX videos with the media center interface. You can play DivX videos on the actual computer in media center, or through the Xbox (but not in the media center extender mode).

The other limitation is that you can’t stream a movie from a DVD in your media center computer to your Media Center Extender. But the Xbox 360 has a DVD drive already, why would I care about this? Well, I was hoping that would work because then I’d go buy a Blu-Ray drive for the computer and I’d have Blu-Ray movies on my big screen. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky. So close!

In Conclusion

I’ve really only had my computer hooked up to the analog cable for a day now, and I’m already really impressed. I’m wishing I had another Media Center computer to hook up to my cable box and then eliminate the need to use the cable-box’s software. I’m also wishing that Canada would go cable card or something similar so that I could get my HD directly into my computer. It’s when I see the potential of things like this that I wish I lived in the US.

All in all, I’m going to be looking forward to getting a flatscreen TV and a comfortable couch/chair in my computer room.

Now that the music industry is allowing it’s content go out DRM-free, the music battle is more or less over. I believe that soon, music will be avaiable from all the major labels on all the major services. Apple pioneered the industry, Amazon was the first to fully nail it (in my opinion), and now there’s a baseline from which to judge the rest.

But what about video?

Well, the newest player out there (as of yesteday) is Apple. They started the music revolution (or was that Napster?), and now they look to duplicate that success for movies.

There’s another gorilla out there too, Microsoft (have you heard of them). They’ve been doing this for a while now on Xbox.

Amazon has their unbox service, which has already gone through some major revisions.

Aren’t we on the tail end of a format war right now?

So what’s the deal with all these services? From what I can tell, here is the list of similarities between them:

• They all use some form of DRM.
• They all work on different devices.
• They’re all rental services.
• They’re all unique, just like all the others.

So here are my quick thoughts on each service:

Apple

Pros

• Apple’s biggest advantage is that it’s Apple. Their computers continue to sell, iPods are huge, iPhones are even bigger. They have a highly desirable brand in the public consciousness.
• In a close second place, it’s next biggest advantage is that they have all major movie studios onboard. That’s better than the iTunes music store, and a great place to start.
• The quality of the HD video that Steve Jobs outlined sounded excellent. Finally the Apple TV will have some HD content, and also 5.1 digital audio.
• You can rent your movies through the simplicity of iTunes, or another excellent Apple interface via the Apple TV that you access from your couch.

Cons

• However, unlike the iTunes music store, Apple will have a much harder time since other companies are working on the digital delivery model too. iTunes was revolutionary, but others have seen the virtues of Apple’s product and business models.
• Media companies are getting more savvy, and more wary of Steve Jobs. Many feel that he unfairly compensated the recording industry with his low prices. He has been hailed for negotiating some of the most lucrative business deal for his own company (hello AT&T and the iPhone).
• Another problem, you have to purchase an Apple TV to enjoy these videos from your couch. Another couple hundred dollar investment.
• Figuring out what you can do with these videos is also a problem (but not unique to Apple). Here’s an example from Engadget.

Microsoft – Xbox Live

Pros

• Microsoft’s biggest advantage is probably that there is already 10 million Xbox 360 consoles in the wild. As far as getting content from the net to the TV with some propietary box, Xbox 360 is way out front.
• Similarily, they’ve already been selling videos (both HD and SD) on their service for well over a year now. In the Xbox 360 vs PS3 battle, a headstart is clearly a big advatage to have.
• An Xbox 360 console does far more than an Apple TV. It’s not a dedicated media extender/set-top box/service. It plays games, plays HD-DVD (with appropriate attachment), plays DVDs, and a whole lot of other stuff.
• As much as it doesn’t hurt to be Apple, it doesn’t hurt to be Microsoft. They’re huge, they got fingers everywhere, they have excellent technology, huge amounts of cash, and they’ll be in the for the long haul no matter what.
• Xbox 360s, when connected correctly, can upconvert it’s output to 1080p. This is a minor destinction to most, but not all.

Cons

• However, Microsoft lacks full studio support. Content is clearly king.
• You need to have an Xbox 360 console, and it’s more money than an Apple TV.
• You have to use these “Xbox points“. And it’s not a 1:1 ratio with real money. And you have to buy them in bulk. They’re annoying.

Amazon

Pros

• TiVo integration. What could be better than having your videos already waiting for you on your TiVo?
• Amazon got music right. Low prices, DRM-free, huge collection.
• They also have a working video service right now. As far as I know it’s PC only, but they’re in the game.
• I also think that Amazon has some unique possibilities regarding sales. They could sell you the DVD copy, while allowing you to rent or buy a digital copy that you can watch before the DVD arrives in the mail. This also eliminates that whole rental/purchase issue.

Cons

• How do you get it to the TV?
• Doesn’t have the brand recognition in this space of a Microsoft or Apple.
• There is no HD as far as I’m aware.

Final Thoughts

All in all, now that HD-DVD seems to be on its deathbed (at the hands of Blu-Ray), we’re really on the beginning of another “format war” of sorts. How are you supposed to pick between services? Some work with some ipods, some only with specific hardware, all have strict DRM schemes, none of them have anything to do with purchasing content, none inter-operate either.

However, I believe that this is a battle that we can’t afford to sit out. I’m sure if the movie studios see no sales in this digital space, it will delay the roll out of truly good download services by years. Money really is the only motivation that us as consumers can provide for large companies to develop technology and delivery methods that work for us.

This is also essentially the problem the music industry just went through. How do we trust our customers and allow them to enjoy the content they purchase the way they want?

*laughs* Actually, wouldn’t cable card solve a lot of these issues?

It seems that Telus may be set to abandon its ‘Betamax” network and is now ogling the hundreds of millions of dollars in roaming revenue that the GSM carriers enjoy by considering a move to tap into it. Of course, this is merely speculation, but the story does seem to be gaining traction and Rogers shares actually suffered a 2.6 percent drop on this news yesterday. The Olympics are in Vancouver in 2010, we’re thinking if Telus really was going to go for it — and shell out an estimated half billion dollars — that would be a prime time to roll out a hybrid EV-DO / HSDPA network.

CDMA provider contemplating move to GSM: The Telus edition – Engadget

Rogers sales will drop a whole lot more if it’s true. Then Telus could bring the iPhone to Canada.

Tags: telus, mobility, cell, iphone, rogers, wireless

Warner actually wanted to go HD DVD. They gave Toshiba the chance to bring another studio into the HD DVD camp before they turned Blu. Fox was lined up, and told the HD DVD camp it was going to switch to HD DVD, which would’ve also turned Warner exclusively HD DVD. At the last possible minute, it nixed the deal.

Lindich says it’s because Fox received a reported $120 million payout from Sony to stay Blu-ray—Warner then switched and received between $400 and $500 million for its defection. BW says it’s closer to $400 million. In our phone call with Warner Kevin Tsujihara said it wasn’t a bidding war that brought them over—that’s true, in the words of Ben Kenobi, from a certain point of view.

Dirty Business: The Real Reason Warner Went Blu-ray

After reading this on Gizmodo, I’m almost mad. I’ve felt that HD-DVD has been superior, I bought an HD-DVD player, I have probably about 8 movies for it. To think that the crushing news of Warner going Blu-Ray was so close to falling on the other side of the fence stings.

Tags: hd-dvd, blu-ray, format, dvd, warner

Well, I’m guessing not actually. But I did find that if you eliminate a keyboard altogether on your dell order, you get no cost savings.