Rick Clancy, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at Sony, recently posted on the Sony Electronics Blog about Blu-ray and the XBox360. This is a very rare post on Rick’s part, as the blog is often used in this sense to dismiss rumors that Sony finds necessary to address. However, its quite the opposite tone in a recent posting titled, “Microsoft Now Supporting Blu-ray?” There is no dismissive rhetoric whatsoever, and he even seems amused by the proposition, which leads us to believe that the drive is most certainly real and will happen soon.
Rick goes on to say,”One possibility might be that the BD peripheral will be branded by another company, but still be designed to work with Microsoft’s game console. Either way, as I’ve seen here at Sony, retail sources generally have pretty good inside information since companies will often share product introduction plans with them in advance of making announcements to the press or the public.
Another interesting note in the same article is that the drive is being built by a joint venture called Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology. If true, how ironic is it that two of the biggest opponents to Blu-ray — Microsoft and Toshiba — may now be turning the corner and facing the reality of this huge market opportunity?”
Blu-ray on the XBox360 would be a massive addition to the XBox360 hardware range, and enable a new slew of customers wishing to purchase Blu-ray discs which in turn could lead to massive Blu-ray sales. This could be the smartest move Microsoft has made for the XBox360 yet, especially after the embarrassing release of the HD-DVD addon that proved to be completely useless. The rumored price of the XBox360 Blu-ray addon is $149, and should be available soon.
