Bill Gates talks about next gen discs

[erdega79]

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000400042080/

Let’s change gears a bit. There’s been a lot of talk recently about a possible compromise between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, but Microsoft isn’t mentioned in these discussions. You guys aren’t firmly in one camp or the other, but how important is a single unified standard to Microsoft?

Well there’re certainly some great features in terms of the fabrication costs that the Toshiba proposal has and there’s some capacity benefits from the Sony camp. And I’m not a hardcore hardware person to know if there is a way to get the best of both worlds, given the politics of who gets the patent royalties and the credit and into the market first and all that. It may take a little bit of time for this to be worked out. We’re not at the center of that because we’re not a hardware company, and yet we need to make sure that whatever comes out is supportable in Windows. And there’re some configurations of those devices a year ago that in terms of the way they were thinking about things technically wouldn’t have worked well with the PC environment. We’ve made significant progress with both camps on that. For example, supporting what we call VC 1 as an encoder that we have as a feature in Windows. Not exclusively, but as one of the required things that happened like six months ago. That was a great milestone for us.

Microsoft is basically agnostic towards either format?

[Long pause] We want to see a single format, and we think it’s best for the PC industry for a single format to emerge. That won’t necessarily happen and if it doesn’t then to some degree we’ll have to support both formats.

If there is a stalemate, which format do you think will come out ahead?


I really wouldn’t want to pick that. I think you basically would have a stalemate because who’s going to buy movie thinking that they’re buying a Beta movie? I think it would freeze the marketplace. That’s why there’s so much pressure to try and get this resolved. I think basically the winner of [any stalemate] will be called DVD. And HD movies, at least those delivered on an optical disc, would be set back two or three years.