Yes, until I read substantial proof that says otherwise. I'll always take the word of a publicly traded company over anonymous baseless accusations.
The problem is that you inferred that Microsoft was _paying_ Paramount to forgo Blu-ray support. Had you left out that reference and left the "agreement" part, I wouldn't have had such a problem with it.
Tommy McClain
A publicly traded company which has recently been convicted of precisely this type of illegal behaviour in the US, EU, Korea, and I believe Japan, and including tying movie formats. So you would take the word of a convicted felon and a serial offender as gospel truth just because they say they are completely innocent, as they no doubt said before they were convicted? As for myself I am simply pointing out that there seems to be something odd going on here, and there is some sort of agreement between the three parties involved, and the likelyhood is that the agreement is responsible for the oddness. By the way, I have never been convicted of any felony unlike the publicly traded company you place your blind faith in, and unlike Microsoft, I have no vested interests in Microsoft's or anybody else's involvement in movies or anything else.
What I am saying is that any statement like the one Microsoft has made can simply be a play on words, like one famous guy from the same country who said he didn't inhale or impale and so didn't do anything wrong.
Of course Microsoft makes payments when it makes agreements like this - any commercial transaction involves payments or payments in kind. It is just such payments can be hidden behind a contract that looks like it has a respectable purpose - like Paramount is also getting something out of the deal besides purely monetary advantage for ditching Bluray. Microsoft did this with OEM contracts it has made which have subsequently been found to be illegal, and attaches NDAs to them so word doesn't get out, and so do other companies who are doing anything similar that may come under anti-competition investigation. Companies who do this hide the payments behind legal mumbo jumbo to make it look like it is an agreement that was made with the genuine intention of business benefits for both parties and not simply an agreement where one party is paid for dropping a competitors products.
For example instead of writing into the contract "Paramount shall receive $100 million in return for dropping Bluray disk support for one year so as to help kill off the Bluray format", it could be written as "Paramount shall receive $100 million for exclusive rights to it's movies on HD media and online download distribution rights. The agreement shall also include rights for distribution by Microsoft's partner Toshiba on HD-DVD." That looks a lot better and it is less obvious that it may be illegal.
The bottom line is that as I said, we don't know what is written into the contracts. What we do know is that Paramount is not dropping HD-DVD even after Toshiba has, and Toshiba is talking about some deal with it's "allies" rather than about getting it's factories going again manufacturing what is definitely the future HD movie format - BD format- rather than shutting it's player factories down, all of which seems mighty strange.
