Assignment 1 Collaborative Computing

What I find interesting about this data?

What I find most interesting about this data is the Sales Information figures for the number of XBox 360 sold as of August 2007 compared to the number of Play Station 3’s sold as of September 2007. The data says there were 17 million Xbox 360 sold compared to 5.6 million Play Station 3 sold. I would have expected this data to have been reversed and the higher figure of 17 million more like # of Play Station 3’s sold.

The reason I was surprised was because Play Station 3 used the Blu-Ray Format (made by Sony) and they won the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD war in May (2008) the following year. In fact, Toshiba who made the HD-DVD’s stopped making them once Warner Bros. decided to produce their films only in Blu-Ray format. It had been a close war up to May 2008 but once Warner Bros made their decision, it meant that three quarters of new film releases would be available on Blu-ray discs only. Warner dropped Toshiba’s HD-DVD format and started selling high definition DVDs only in Sony’s Blu-Ray format. Leader of the US box office receipts in 2007 Time Warner joined Disney, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Fox in backing Blu-ray exclusively. Individual sales figures of both players in the end of 2007 reflect the way the war went 8 months later in that over three Blu-Ray players were sold for every one HD-DVD player. I would have thought by Sept 2007 Play Station 3’s #’s would have been closer, if not higher than Xbox 360 given the fact that 8 months later Toshiba, the makers of HD-DVD players/format felt forced to stop making HD-DVD discs.

I was also surprised at how high the # of iPods sold were as of Oct 2007. They were over 5 times higher than combined sales figures of XBOX 360 and Play Stations 3 given a few months earlier (17 million Xbox 360 plus 5.6 million Play Stations 3 for a combined figure of 22.6 million). What does this say? That listening to music is more popular than playing with these entertainments centers………that audio is more popular than video!

I liked the Video entitled “Creative Xfi dock review” – shows how simple and inexpensive ($399 with Dock) it is to display media and music video from iPod on TV. Then instead of using the iPod control wheel we can now use the TV Remote easier/more flexible controls.


What does Comcast and Apple’s Ipods have to do with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray War?

With the latest technology, music on IPODS can be presented visually at same time –e.g. like what we saw on the dock station video. So they have to use disc format to show the video and here is where Companies like Comcast and Apple etc., can get into wars such as the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray War. Apple is supporter of Blu-Ray so would go with Blu-Ray format is my guess. But is that the best way to go? Comcast with its new broadband Internet Technology called “Wideband” could blow Apple and Blu-Ray out of the water in using Internet rather than discs to present videos/media. And iPod videos can now be projected onto the interior of a pair of glasses with built in earbuds. This sounds great especially if you intend lying down listening to iPod but in my opinion it may be taking it too far- how can we walk around and watch video at the same time?


How are all of the products below related?

PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are both video game entertainment centers and are each other’s main competitors in this market. Blu-ray (Sony) and HD-DVD (Toshiba) were rival incompatible formats until Blu-Ray won the war as major US film studios backed the Blu-Ray format. The end of the war meant people did not have to choose between Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players as Toshiba was forced out of the market. How these are connected is that PlayStation 3 had used the Blu-ray format while Xbox 360 relied on HD-DVD format. These are all related to visual presentation while the iPods are concerned with audio. They are related in that they are ways of presenting entertainment and it looks like they will be even more connected in the future as iPod makers are leaning towards adding much more visual appeal to their audio presentations.





Finally, research one of the following products in detail and explain the pros and cons in comparison to the other products below.

It would be hard to compare apples with oranges so in the interest of comparing similar products, I decided it was best to either compare the video game entertainment centers PlayStation 3 with XBOX 360; OR Blu-Ray player/format/disc versus HD-DVD player/format/disc. I choose to research the Blu-Ray player/format/disc and explained the pros and cons in comparison to the HD-DVD player/format/disc.


Pros of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD

Higher disc capacity - i.e. 25GB versus 15GB/single layer; 50GB versus 30GB dual layer; and 100GB versus 51GB/prototype quad layer.

Video Capacity higher (23 hours versus 13 hours) – Blu-Ray capable of holding much more data/video.

PlayStation 3 owners lucky in that machine can play Blu-Ray movies so capability of running greater # of movies etc, because Blu-Ray has support of 70 percent of movie studies. This is internally built in to PS3 and not like the external HD-DVD accessory sold separately for Xbox 360 users to play HD DVD discs.




Cons of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD

Blu-Ray players are more expensive than their HD-DVD counterparts ($499 plus for stand-alone Blu-Ray player or $400 for PS3 alone that can run Blu-Ray format compared to only $150 for HD-DVD stand alone players plus $130 for Xbox 360 accessories).

Blu-Ray discs also higher in price –thinner layered discs cost more to make/protect.

Tighter specification on HD DVD players means that all players have a more consistent feature set – requiring every player to include secondary audio and video decoders, 128MB of local storage and an Ethernet Jack. Blu-Ray buyers have had to struggle with confusing Blu-Ray hardware profiles which meant HD-DVD had an edge in terms of hardware.

And finally we have to address the problem of portability with Blu-Ray movies. The only way to play Blu-Ray movies is on a PS3 or standalone player. They will not work on your laptop unless you have super high-end laptop. And forget about bringing them along in your car. HD-DVD does not have as much of a portability problem with many HD-DVD players including standard-DVD version on same disc, thus making them much more portable.