14 DAY TRIAL // Sometime in January last year, Warner Bros. was announcing that they no longer supported the HD DVD digital media playback format, precipitating an avalanche of announcements leading to the downfall of the concept and to the triumph of the Sony backed Blu-ray players in the so called “format wars.” Toshiba announced that it would no longer develop its digital media playback players, while Microsoft discontinued the line of HD DVD players that could be attached to the Xbox 360 gaming consoles.
All through last year, Microsoft played hide and seek regarding the subject, adopting an attitude of ambivalence towards rumors signaling that the gaming device made by the company would be getting a Blu-ray add on, in order to offer superior movie quality. Now, at the Consumer Electronics Show 2009, Microsoft has stressed the fact that it does not plan to add a Blu-ray to any device it creates.
Robbie Bach, who is the president of the Entertainment & Devices division at Microsoft, has stated that “It's not a feature we get a ton of requests for. When you ask people the list of things they want to see us spending time creating in Xbox, Blu-ray is way, way down on the list. The second thing is, from a technical perspective, it doesn't help us in the core of what Xbox does, which is in gaming. We can't have publishers produce games on Blu-ray disc. Because then they won't play on the 28 million Xboxes we've already shipped. So it doesn't help us in the core gaming space.”
It's interesting to note that Bach is not taking the recent company line, which emphasized the fact that the Xbox 360 became a more family oriented console. Still, the movie viewing abilities introduced in partnership with Netflix are probably considered enough by Microsoft to eliminate the need for an add on player.