kevin.rivers said:
And where did you get the idea of them asking companies to pay royalties on Blu-Ray, I would like to see it.
The drives: "(Royalties matter here. Sony, Philips and some of the others that contributed intellectual property to the Blu-ray standard stand to earn millions in licensing fees and the same is true for the HD DVD camp.)" (
link
Oh, and here we have one for the discs:
"No company has more at stake than Sony. Long one of the most innovative companies in electronics, it stumbled badly in recent years. With Blu-ray, it has the opportunity for a triple play. It'll reap royalties from all the disks sold with its technology."(
link)
kevin.rivers said:
These comparisons to past Sony only formats are ridiculous. Sony is not the only one working on Blu-ray, nor the only one pushing it.
That may be true, but Sony has put the lion's share of money and research into it. Not to mention they're also preparing to lose upwards of $4-500 per PS3 when that monstrosity comes out just to get Blu-Ray drives out there.
kevin.rivers said:
How many people are posting asking for Apple to take on UMD, MS, MiniDiscs, or heck even Betamax? None. This alone should wake you up to the fact that Blu-ray is different than Sony's previous attempts. What's more, when was it ever implied other than Betamax, that Sony was going for a standard with these formats?
I would imagine that the fact that UMD's were designed purely for the PSP, that Apple doesn't build card readers into their laptops, that MiniDiscs are old news, and BetaMax is even older might have something to do with the lack of questions as such. Of course no one is going to ask about those, because it'd be like me asking the forum if I could use leaded gasoline in a new Cobalt. And while Sony never made a push for Memory Sticks to be used by other vendors, it
has tried to get the movie industry to put their stuff on UMD's, and to subsequently pay Sony to put them on the discs (since no one else can produce UMDs.) And guess what? No one wants to pay $20-30 for a movie picture the size of a large Post-It note, so not only have several companies given up, but retailers are dropping them as well. Oh, and MiniDisc? Sony did manage to convince a few other companies to make MD-based players of varying types -- Toshiba being one of them. Of course, this was 4 or 5 years ago, when people still thought MD might actually be worth spending money on.
kevin.rivers said:
Oh yeah, MiniDisc is still huge, as high quality recorders.
By all rights there, BetaMax must still be huge too, since many news stations use it to record high-quality footage in the field inexpensively. I don't think niche markets can really count as 'huge'.
