Interesting article. Definitely shows what I believe are an abuse of monopolistic powers owned by Microsoft...
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showA...leID=175400242
A snippet from the article that made me chuckle...
"While the major next-generation DVD market will be based on dedicated DVD player platforms, there is a substantial and growing market for playback on PCs," said Lipoff of IP Action Partners. "Microsoft, then, can add the needed digital rights management to the Windows operating system for a more-seamless and perhaps higher-security protection of the content than would be possible for DRM software that is an add-in."
Microsoft DRM "more-seamless and perhaps higher-security protection..." sounds like an oxymoron to me seeing how they are doing such a wonderful job with security with their OS. Anyhow, I thought the article was intersting in that I thought they were right about some possible Microsoft strategies which I think are two-fold...
1) To prolong a possible format battle so that they may become the vendor in the living room possibly providing online content.
2) To not have Java running with their OS.
However, I believe their strategy will fail because I think that the distribution of online video content still has a lot of maturing to do and if anything, I think Apple will capture that segment, capitalizing on their success of iTunes and the iPod. Maybe MacWorld in January will give us some sort of picture in that regard. Also, I think their strategy will fail given the indusrty support of MHP (within the articl and Java-based) which I was not aware of. Anyhow, I don't want to underestimate the pull ol Microsoft has, but given the support of 90% of the Hollywood studios, the impact PS3 will have from Sony, and the overwhelmingly stacked numbers of vendors in the Blu-Ray camp, I think Blu-Ray has a better chance of being victorious than does Microsoft swaying the batlle to the support of HD-DVD. Too little, too late.
We'll just have to see, 2006 should be very intersting indeed.