Continuing to provide product support
The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD may be over, but the 300,000 current owners of Microsoft's HD DVD drive may be happy to know that an auto-update has been released which will improve compatibility and provide additional network support.Via Major Nelson, comes the news that the update, which will be available later this week to all non-Xbox live subscribers on Xbox.com, includes:
* Compatibility improvements with certain titles
* Additional support for network features
Following the decision to stop producing HD DVD players, it was suggested that Microsoft would release a Blu-ray player for Xbox 360, but Microsoft's Neil Thompson has recently said that "offering a Blu-ray player to Xbox 360 gamers would not be the best use of resources for the firm" and believes that they should instead focus on developing services in the digital domain.
"Our belief was that in the lifetime of the Xbox 360 we were going to move to this online world and online distribution for content outside gaming," he told the BBC.
"If we didn't believe that we would have put a hi-def player in the console. But there was a time gap of us launching and getting to that world. We knew certain of our customers would want a hi-def format and we thought the most cost-efficient way of doing that was going down the hi-def peripheral route," he concluded.
"We think it's better to focus our efforts and resources on developing services in the digital domain," he said.
In North America consumers can currently download a wide-range of TV shows, including new episodes of South Park (Screw you guys!), whilst in the UK,apart from being able to download the odd decent movie, we're still waiting for the video marketplace to really take off.
