Monday, August 22, 2005

If you have Media Center [PC] you will be able to stream standard and high definition video [to the Xbox 360].

While we designed [the Xbox 360 as] a no compromises game system, a huge percentage of our customers are not like the folks in this chat room. Recognize that more than 75 percent of the folks on Xbox have not played Halo. By introducing the core system we are sending a signal to the market that we are committed to this part of the market just like with the Xbox 360 premium bundle that we are committed to you [the hard core gamers]. The significance of this message can not be understated. Many of the publishing and retail partners want our commitment to grow the market. And as you have heard from us in our press conferences and such we are very committed to growing the market.

It's going to be interesting to see how and if a high def format for movies plays out. When we designed the the initial Xbox many people asked if SACD [Super Audio CD] or DVD Audio would be the successor to the CD format for music. As everyone knows, the real successor was MP3 and digital distribution with things like Napster, iPod, and MSN Music. While there is a lot of talk about this in the industry it will be interesting to see what the exact future of this is for movies. Of course I think there will be a need for higher capacity optical media for storage applications. We prefer HD-DVD to Blu-Ray in terms of the flexibility it offers to different applications as well as the infrastructure costs to the market.

Backwards compatibility [with Xbox 1 games] will require a hard drive. The good news is that the core system owners can upgrade if they deside to update at a later date.