August 23rd 2005

Microsoft "Prefers HD-DVD To Blu-Ray"

Microsoft Corporate VP, J Allard

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The recent stories doing the rounds that Bill Gates himself had announced that the Xbox 360 would have an HD-DVD drive proved to be just over-zealous reporting of an old interview. However, Microsoft Corporate VP J Allard (no we don't know what the J stands for either) has confirmed that HD-DVD is Redmond's future format of choice.

In an online chat session, the Microsoft exec said, "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 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."