Blu-ray on Xbox 360? Don't Hold Your Breath!

Just days after Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer alluded to a Blu-ray device for Xbox 360, the rumor was quashed. Yesterday Aaron Greenberg, group product manager of Xbox 360 reaffirmed his team’s commitment to high-def movie downloads instead of a high-def disc format. 

The message from Greenberg is clear: Microsoft Corp has no plan to release a Blu-ray player add-on for its game console. 

“Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience,” Aaron Greenberg told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. 

Comments from Steve Ballmer earlier this week lead many to believe the Blu-ray add-on was imminent. But like he said at the Mix08 conference, Microsoft’s connection to Blu-ray so far is only in the form of device drivers for its Home Theater operating systems. 

In Ballmer’s quote he said “…we’ll support Blu-ray in ways that make sense.” But it doesn’t make sense for Xbox 360 to jump the Blu-ray bandwagon at this time. 

The Speculation started when news website, SmartHouse.com published a story alleging insider leaks at Microsoft about a prototype Blu-ray add-on. Despite the frenzied speculation all over the web - Audioholics correctly identified it as a link-bait story with little or no fact to back it up. 

Microsoft has little reason to make an add-on for Blu-ray. Unlike its competitor PS3, Xbox 360 games don’t rely on the format. Until the general public shows overwhelming support for Blu-ray there is little profit to be gained. 

Perhaps in a few years Microsoft’s next generation Xbox will sport an internal Blu-ray drive. By then in-game graphics are likely to be so storage hungry they’ll use up more than 25GB. And by then the movie-discs may have already caught the fancy of the mainstream, making Blu-ray a profitable no-brainer move for Microsoft. 

But until then – don’t hold your breath.