Gates MS "Neutral" in HDTV Disk wars

[Grubert]

Is this the same Gates that said that Blu-ray is 'anti-consumer' and that it couldn't work properly on people's PCs?



HDD interview with Amir Majidimehr, January 2007

As it became clearer and clearer that the studios and manufacturers might be splitting into two separate next-gen camps, why did Microsoft decide to side with HD DVD over Blu-ray?

Amir Majidimehr: For a while, we were neutral. Both of the formats had been testing with our codec technology. But for us, there were two technologies in particular we cared about for a next-gen format: interactivity, and content security. In terms of interactivity, Blu-ray looked for a while as if they were going to adopt the same technology as HD DVD, which is called HDi. And on security, it looked like Blu-ray was also going to use the same encryption technology, which is AACS.

Unfortunately, in both of those areas Blu-ray deviated from those plans. Which meant that if we wanted to support Blu-ray, we had to implement two completely different authoring systems to support both. And that, combined with the manufacturing issues we saw with Blu-ray versus HD DVD, pushed us over the edge to side with HD DVD. This was about, a little over a year ago.