Microsoft wants HD-DVD to fail

Posted on June 30th, 2007 by PS3Vault

Predictions of the end of the face-off between Toshiba and Sony over next-gen DVD standards have been rife for the last few years. But while hopes that it would all be over by last Christmas were wildly optimistic, it seems certain that a dominant format will have emerged in plenty of time for this year’s holiday season.

The reason is simple; Blu-ray, always the favourite to win but never seemingly having the momentum to fully outpace its rival, has finally started to pull ahead in a meaningful way. The finish line is in sight.

This won’t come as a surprise to many people. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the battle has stretched out for so long. HD-DVD has always been a peculiar beast - a technologically similar format to Blu-ray, but one whose curious alliance of business partners has raised eyebrows from the outset.

The most important backers that a movie disc format can have are, obviously enough, the movie studios. But thanks to stronger protection systems and, in no small part, to the fact that Sony owns many of Hollywood’s biggest studios, Blu-ray has always been the preferred choice of those firms.

With only one studio (Universal) exclusively supporting the format, the most vocal supporter in Toshiba’s corner has actually come in the slightly unlikely form.

Microsoft has been HD-DVD’s champion; Microsoft, a company which doesn’t own any movie content, which has repeatedly stated that it won’t be releasing any game content on HD-DVD, which doesn’t build any of the PCs that run its operating systems and therefore has very little say in which disc format becomes standard on desktop machines.

As such, for all its huffing and puffing, Microsoft’s sole contribution to the HD-DVD ecosystem has been to launch an external drive for the Xbox 360 console. It’s not a bad contribution, in some ways; it offers a very cheap entry point to HD-DVD for a fairly significant number of consumers, for a start.

However, Microsoft has been sending mixed messages even over this commitment to the standard; it has gone to great pains to point out that should Blu-ray win the standards war, Microsoft can always launch a Blu-ray external drive.

Even though such statements are usually followed up with a “clarification” stating that it doesn’t plan to do any such thing right now, it’s hardly the ringing endorsement Toshiba might have wanted from its best-known partner in this enterprise.

Read rest of the article