Rumor: Xbox 360 CES Announcements Leaked

[Acert93]

20 million end 2007 but with Halo3 GTAIV and a $189 Core in 2008, we could see 65 million by Xbox 720.

If Xbox 3 comes in 2011 that could be possible. As for a $189 Core in 2008... I would really hope MS would go with a SKU structure of $199 / $299 at their next price drop in 2007. It is going to be nearly 18 months between launch and first price drop. The first price drop sets the table for the gen as well as has the highest cost reductions. eDRAM to 55nm in late 2007; Xenon to 65nm in Q2; Xenos to 65nm sometime this year; GDDR3 700MHz is becoming quite popular and benefiting from economy of scale (e.g. not only GPUs are using it, but also the PS3 and Wii). Core has a cheap DVD and no HDD. With the eDRAM, GPU, and CPU all getting yield bumps per wafer in excess of 50%+ I expect a $199 Core price by the middle of summer 2007. But the money side of me says, "$229".

I guess it all depends on how much pressure MS feels they have from Wii and how big of a move Sony makes (who not only will be seeing the same reductions in RSX and Cell, but even bigger savings in BDR costs). I have no doubt Wii should be capable of dropping to $149, so having a console in the same impulse buy zone would be significant IMO. Further MS does not expect to break even in 2007 and I think strategically 2007 is MS's most important year. They need to strike now and follow up in 2008. If you look at Sony and their price drops their first one was a big one and then they didn't let up the gas every year.

Btw, kind of dissappointed not to hear anything about their FPS controller or hear anything from the White Fusion / Reflex guys

 

[Tap In]

yea, I'm definitely feeling $229 Core for Halo3 2007 release; $329 Premium. (sooner and less if they are smart) Then thinking they may go to below $199 ($179-$189) for the core in 2008 when they bump up the HDD peripherals or upgrade the Premium ($279-$289) and keep it closer to the 20 PS3 ($349 by then?). The Wii may force price reductions even before PS3 does, IMO. You're dead on with that. The core is a secret weapon in long term penetration.


I'm thinking 2010 (5year life) maybe 2011 if they're confident they can release ahead of PS4 again next gen and the money is rolling in.

edited for clarification

 

[assen]

Regarding whether the X360 would have to compress IPTV streams. Maybe not but you would think the IO would hit any games that needed to write to disk.

If a game can live without HDD, it can live with a busy HDD - the OS might just tell it that the HDD is not there.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Thats kinda completely contrary to the impression I got, epecially after reading the interview with Gates I pointed to earlier:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/01/bill_gates_inte.html#more

Asked if the Xbox 360's small 20-gigabyte hard disk was a problem, he said that the Xbox 360 didn't need anything more than that to serve as a set-top. That's because with IPTV, so much is stored on the server and you can access it so quickly that you don't really care about storing things.

"We don't have to change the Xbox 360 at all," he said, holding a glass of red wine.

 

[inefficient]

The obvious analogy

"640k ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates

 

[thatdude90210]

"640k ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates

Some urban legends never die.

 

[inefficient]

Some urban legends never die.

Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

 

[Acert93]

Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

That is what I was thinking about your post!

I think Gates has a point. IPTV isn't intended to be a situation where you store 100 movies on your HDD. No HDD is going to be big enough for that. But as Gates points out, the delivery speed plus the bitrate of the movies creates a situation where it is available "on demand" and it isn't necessary to store it on the HDD.

This is not totally unthinkable either. When I visited my parents about 2 years ago they had received a new service where they could select from hundreds of movies and get them immediately--streamed to their TV set. They also had pause (and rewind I think). No HDD, but the service allowed pretty robust variety and instant access at any time.

 

[Arwin]

Sony had this built into some of their Bravia sets at CES. So it's definitely something that people 'do' these days.

 

[inefficient]

I have a 100Mb Yahoo BB internet connection in my apartment which also supports their Yahoo BBTV service. It's a separate set top box and subscription you have to pay for. It's basically an IPTV solution. link

But the channel line up is not better than what I get from my Sky Perfect digital sat connection. There is the video on demand functionality, but the real deal breaker is that satellite TV is 1080 HD while BBTV looks like internet bitrate SD streaming video.

On demand TV could be nice. But I refuse to ever pay for 2 TV services at the same time. Since Digital Satellite and the IPTV solutions cost roughly the same (~$30) and I already have a hard time justifying paying for Satellite TV. When I do watch TV I want it to be in HD.

The final nail in the coffin is that while I am watching BBTV, I would be sucking up my internet connections bandwidth. The current model you actually have to turn the set top box off if you don't want your bandwidth cannibalized away. And I have a 100mb connect. People with slower connections are really going to suffer when trying to watch TV and use their PC at the same time.

A good HD IPTV service might give me some incentive to cancel my Satallite subscription. But a solution for HD would suck up even more internet bandwidth and I file downloads from my PC would suffer even more. I think it will be a good while before I embrace IPTV.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Dean has posted a significantly expanded interview with Gates from CES:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/01/ces_interview_w.html#more

Q: You didn’t announce a larger hard disk drive (for the Xbox 360)?
A: We did not.
Q: No details.
A: If you’re in an IPTV environment, you can stream all of the videos. Today, with Windows Live Marketplace, when we do video, we overcome any broadband capacity things by bringing a video down and then playing it from the hard disk. If you download an HD video, it’s a cool way it does it in the background. You can go off and play games. But it’s not streaming today. In an IPTV environment, there is no reason to put anything down on a hard disk because you created a broadband infrastructure that has enough capacity to stream individual video streams to everybody on the network.

Q: So you won’t be downloading anything to your Xbox 360?
A: Well, interactive games from Live Arcade, you may want to do those because you may want a higher data rate than a video rate. But in terms of videos and music, there is no reason to put it on the local hard disk. This is one of the weird paradoxes. The DVR forces you to think in advance whether you want something. And you to manage the hard disk. And you to buy and listen to a hard disk. Whereas server-based storage has none of those characteristics. But the current rights model where you as a user can choose to store locally. There was that Cablevision model where they were testing whether logically where a user-segregated drive but centrally located drive. They weren’t even in a pool.

Q: You don’t need to change the Xbox 360 at all?
A: No, we don’t need to change it at all to do an IPTV thing.
Q: So it will be the same with AT&T?
A: We don’t know that. We can do it a lot of different ways. There is no missing capability in the Xbox 360. When they did that demo, if you buy a remote control, they’re probably have a special remote control because of the way they designed the service. They probably won’t use our remote control. But a lot of that is to be worked out. We have a year.

 

[AlNom]

Thanks for the link. Hmm.... I wonder if they'll make the HDD be able to be tacked onto their next system. That way if they keep the core/premium SKU setup, a lot of people can just jump onto the core bandwagon next gen while still using the older HDD (not necessarily the 20GB since it'll be at least 4 years). It would certainly make things easier for "transferring" profiles and other data.

It'll be interesting to see what they come up with to entice people to get the next system for things other than games (media centric features).

OT, but um... I thought this was untrue

Q: Do you think that with this generation of games, Sony is going to have anything that looks better than the Xbox 360’s Halo 3 for the PlayStation 3?
A: No. They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn’t know what they were doing. They said the Cell is the video processor. But they turned to Nvidia at the last minute,

 

[scooby_dooby]

Thats kinda completely contrary to the impression I got, epecially after reading the interview with Gates I pointed to earlier:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/01/bill_gates_inte.html#more

It's feasible that they do both.

They could release a standalone PVR type 360 with HD capture card and big HDD. And for people with windows VIsta and a big beefy PC, they could use their base model 360 with the PC as the HD capture device.

Would be a neat approach actually.