Can Kinect be programmed to control the switcher so you can say, "Xbox, play movie," and it switches to the BRD player and starts the film? (I assume voice commands for the BRD player could be achieved with IR blasting)
Why does Xbox One have a Bluray player?
- Thread starter blakjedi
- Start date
I wouldn't think so. You asked if you could hook up 2 devices to the XB1. There's a way to do it. Most likely if you hooked up more than one device to the XB1 you'll be on your own & as it wasn't designed that way. Same goes for Google TV with it's HDMI In support.
Tommy McClain
They added BR player perhaps to appeal to the initial people who bought PS3 when it was an early mess. The BR disc represents an "exclusive" library of high bitrate HD movies. Some/many of them are not streamable yet.
It is also a suitable mechanism to deliver HD games physically.
It is also a suitable mechanism to deliver HD games physically.
I asked in the context of the discussion:
Why do we need a BRD drive?
To play movies?
Use a BRD player. XB1 has an HDMI in.
How do you connect your BRD player and STB (to that HDMI in)?
Use an HDMI switcher.
Can you use Kinect with that?
If the BRD player isn't being attached to XB1 as part of the system so it can be controlled via XB1, connecting it to the HDMI in serves no purpose. The HDMI switcher can be used between XB1 out and the TV. Or the BRD player can be connected to a second HDMI connector on the TV if it has one. Thus I disagree with the sentiment that a BRD drive isn't needed for films as the HDMI in provides a useful substitute when coupled with a BRD player. For MS's vision of being connected to the world while watching TV or movies or games, the console needs a BRD drive.
This idea just crossed my mind for some reason...
With so many "day and date" download titles already, and it supposedly being standard next gen...why not sell a no optical drive SKU?
This would be totally OPTIONAL, and maybe knock $50 off the price.
It just occurred to me that if the optical drive on a One/PS4 broke, you could probably get by just fine without it.
What got me thinking is that now consoles have two drives, HDD and optical. The HDD becomes increasingly necessary this gen thus is no longer optional. But you've driven up BOM with two major fixed costs in two drives. A way out would be to remove the optical, then you're down to one drive again.
Heck you could probably do it to an extent in a pinch on 360/PS3 now, and I bet some people do.
I guess the downsides would be, is $50 really enough incentive to give up a few advantages of disc? And some people may truly be hampered by download caps I suppose. But remember of course this is only an ADDITIONAL SKU.
I dont know, this idea kind of seems like a no brainer to me, and I wish MS would do it. It would also pave the way for a future DD only console. These things tend to go down a slippery slope like that.
With so many "day and date" download titles already, and it supposedly being standard next gen...why not sell a no optical drive SKU?
This would be totally OPTIONAL, and maybe knock $50 off the price.
It just occurred to me that if the optical drive on a One/PS4 broke, you could probably get by just fine without it.
What got me thinking is that now consoles have two drives, HDD and optical. The HDD becomes increasingly necessary this gen thus is no longer optional. But you've driven up BOM with two major fixed costs in two drives. A way out would be to remove the optical, then you're down to one drive again.
Heck you could probably do it to an extent in a pinch on 360/PS3 now, and I bet some people do.
I guess the downsides would be, is $50 really enough incentive to give up a few advantages of disc? And some people may truly be hampered by download caps I suppose. But remember of course this is only an ADDITIONAL SKU.
I dont know, this idea kind of seems like a no brainer to me, and I wish MS would do it. It would also pave the way for a future DD only console. These things tend to go down a slippery slope like that.
Would that really knock $50 off the price?
It'd just be the current box with a blanking plate as I cant see them going to the expense of designing a new case, and going through all the various RFI certifications, for niche product.
It'd just be the current box with a blanking plate as I cant see them going to the expense of designing a new case, and going through all the various RFI certifications, for niche product.
Saving $50 seems like a fools errand if you're just going to end up with an Xbox One for $450 that can't play Blu-rays on the shelf next to a PS4 for $400 that can.
International bandwidth usually is anything but cheap, but within the borders of one country its usually dirt cheap.
As an internet service provider you have a few ways to connect your customers to the internet.
For domestic traffic you go with connections to your local IX and/or individual peering connections with other ISP's.
For international traffic you go to Level3 or what ever they are called and/or individual peering connections with other ISP's.
Last time I worked with it, the international traffic was about 3-4 times more expensive than the domestic. Add storage and discs are quite interesting from an economic point of view.
I do not know much about disc distribution, but I ass-u-me that with disc production/distribution you have a one time fee that is mainly capex.
But with digital distribution you probably got some recurring fees like bandwidth and storage instead....
Microsoft already has a cloud infrastructure that's storing petabytes or more worth of data from Windows Azure. Sticking on games that will be up to 50GB in size really isn't all that much. It's much more of a problem for Sony which needs to build out this infrastructure already. Anyone who owned a PS3 knows of how slow downloading anything from PSN was, and that's only more recently been fixed.
You'd need dedicated servers in US, EMEA, Asia, Australia, and Oceania but since Microsoft is leaning more towards games augmented by cloud servers anyway, that shouldn't be much of a problem. You won't have the "international" traffic problem if data is locally served.
It's even worse than that, dropping the Bluray drive is a lost sales opportunity. Since all games have to be installed to the hard drive anyway, a friend can come over with a disc, play a game and then when they leave with the disc, you can be offered a chance to purchase a license to continue playing a game immediately without ever leaving your home or waiting for a download. That's simply too good of a business opportunity to give up.
Given the option, why would I want to pay for a feature I will never use?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's a little more complicated than that. In both cases, you'll be paying some cost associated with each game sale. For physical discs that's going to be an upfront cost with regards to materials, duplication, packaging, shipping, storage, etc. For DD, that's going to mainly involve bandwidth. Storage, utilities, etc. are all vanishingly small on a per title basis for a DD game.
That's the simple part. And one of the reasons DD is so attractive. Those are the only associated costs.
For physical distribution, the above is complicated by the fact that you have to determine at the time of duplication how many units you want to have for launch. If you duplicate too many you risk a situation where you can't sell all of the units made. At that point your cost is now multiplied because you cannot recoup the cost of unsold units. This is the main reason the publisher THQ recently went bankrupt and out of business. One title so massively underperformed that there was no way to recoup the cost of all the physical packaged products that were manufactured. Now for that particular instance, it wasn't possible to offer it as a DD title. But if it were possible, and if all titles were DD, then THQ would likely still be in business.
If you make too few, you run into shortages and potentially lost sales which is lost revenue which is lost profits. As there is no guarantee that someone that would have bought your game in the first month will still want to buy it when you finally supply enough to meet demand. You'll generally end up moving less units in total than you would have if you were able to supply enough to meet initial demand.
This is why publisher and retailers try REALLY hard to push pre-orders. It gives them a practically guaranteed sale as well as a measure stick (no matter how unreliable) of what initial demand could be.
Added to that, there is an ongoing cost associated with physical media in storage costs and the fact that money devalues over time due to inflationary pressures. If you manufacture something that takes 1 year to sell, you've lost a bit of money in that whatever cost was associated with that unit, is tied up in something that you cannot use (whether to invest in a new game or invest in any other thing to drive future revenue).
There's a LOT of reasons why publishers would love to move to a DD only world. But there's also reasons why they want to maintain a retail presence. Having retail shelf space can be considered as free advertising in that it makes consumers aware of your product without spending any advertising dollars.
Regards,
SB
well this works for everybody. i'm sure you'd like a 349 ps4 with no blu ray.
it isn't necessarily a fools errand if the benefits of blu ray are negligible to a certain set of the populace. my brother is a pc gamer, and it's just the norm to buy things off steam and download them and not go to the store and buy a dvd, for some years in that arena.
blu ray for movies almost isn't worth mentioning in this age of VOD, at least for me. there are a few who care about that, but again that's why you have two sku's and it's strictly voluntary.
when the first drops come MS can get a bigger bang for their buck if they remove the bluray player from the system.
1) You get the original price drop
2) You get to make it even cheaper cause that $30 drive isn't in there anymore
3) It gets even smaller and cheaper to make since the bluray drive takes up half the console.
1) You get the original price drop
2) You get to make it even cheaper cause that $30 drive isn't in there anymore
3) It gets even smaller and cheaper to make since the bluray drive takes up half the console.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Hell, I'd love it if they sold a console without an optical drive for 50 USD cheaper. I almost never use the optical drive in my PC. It's been used exactly once in the past 3 years, and that was to create a Windows 7 bootable USB key for installing Windows 7 so that I wouldn't need the DVD. And you no longer need to use a DVD to install Windows 8.
I no longer include optical drives in any PC's I build.
Regards,
SB
I no longer include optical drives in any PC's I build.
Regards,
SB
Persistantthug
Newcomer
Because if the XBOX One didn't have hard media for retail to sell, then we'd be looking at an $800 XBOX One....maybe, and probably more.
Such is the consequence of not having "razor blades" for retail to sell.
see: THE RAZORBLADE BUSINESS MODEL
Such is the consequence of not having "razor blades" for retail to sell.
see: THE RAZORBLADE BUSINESS MODEL
And yet I can buy a roku box for $99 from best buy. I'm not sure going forward you should expect that these boxes will be sold with no margin as they have been in the past. And there is always the opportunity to sell money cards for the retailers. It works for itunes and a dozen other 'online only' revenue streams.
Persistantthug
Newcomer
Honestly,
I don't think brick retailers will ever go for a low/no margin console with no hard medium games.
Although money cards can possibly work. But we have yet to see this model work well with home game consoles.
My money is on the 9th generation still having disks or some kind of hard media.
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