I read the whole thing. Geez you get defensive about your console. If it makes you feel better I will officially declare the PS3 the greatest invention of all time. I was just pointing out that is was more than "just a rumor" from the "Xbox fanboys".
Glad to see they are going to keep the online play free. It is pretty gay that Mircosoft charges for it. They have a bad habbit of getting you on every little thing, and I am sure that is going to come back and bite them in the ass. I was just thinking today about Live's movie service. You can rent and even buy movies through Live, even in HD. But they cost a little more than it would to rent a new release blu-ray from Blockbuster or other rental places.
Microsoft seems to want to see streaming and downloadable media take the place of blu-ray, which is why they never invested much in the HD-DVD aspect of their console. Wise move right? Seems like it at first, if HD-DVD fails, just discontinue the HD-DVD attachment and move onto plan be, streaming and downloadable HD content. But they are shooting themselves in the foot on that one. I could buy a movie off of the Live marketplace for about fifteen bucks, but what is the incentive to do so? I actually have an extremely good reason not to, it'll just take up space on my wussy little 20gb hard drive, and it would cost me over $100 to upgrade that drive to just a meager 160gb (meanwhile, I can buy an external USB 1tb drive for under $100).
For this reason, I'd never even begin to consider buying any movies from them, it would just take up space on my drive and force me to buy an over price higher capacity drive. Same thing with their new "Games on Demand" service, where you can actually purchase and download complete 360 games to your hard drive. Nice, now I can have Mass Effect on my hard drive, playable at anytime and taking up 8gb of my precious hard drive space. I could always redownload it with no additional cost if I decide to delete it to make room for other things, but then I would have to wait for a 8gb download to complete before I could play it again, with a hard copy I could throw it in the drive and be playing it in mere seconds. In this way I see no advantage and many disadvantages to this whole system.
Really seems like it would be to their advantage to drop the price of their hard drive (which are in fact, just your standard PC hard drive with some special firmware installed. Anyone can actually make their own Xbox hard drive out of an ordinary hard drive, provided they have the patience, a desktop PC, and a Xbox HD casing).