DivX, Nex-gen consoles, and Jordan Greenhall’s Wii
In an interview at Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection, DivX CEO Jordan Greenhall talked about the progress of DivX as a company, its history, and what it’s plans for the future are. Since we’re a gaming blog we’ll focus on the pieces of information pertaining to the relationship Between DivX and the next-generation consoles.
This bit from the interview actually follows the part where Greenhall got questioned about the Wii, and the DivX platform making its way to the Nintendo baby. We’re posting this first, just so that all the consoles get some coverage, and more importantly, so that you get a decent picture of the situation that DivX is in when it comes to the consoles.
As far as the console strategy goes do you think that if Microsoft were to license DivX for the Xbox 360 that Sony would be under a lot of pressure to license the codec as well or do you see an opportunity where Microsoft could differentiate themselves there?
The pressure would certainly be on and then itÂ’s a matter of the politics of each organization. I would argue that on a pure market competitive basis, if Microsoft stepped up and put DivX on the Xbox, they would have a significant competitive advantage and the onus would be on to reduce that advantage by licensing DivX as well, but that doesnÂ’t imply however the Sony would have the forethought to do it.
Here’s the thing, during the “ooh-this-is-hot” days of P2P, a lot of people’s so-precious-it-is-best-viewed-in-private videos were in DivX format. Now if you’ve still got that huge “collection” with you and you somehow want it viewable using you’re next gen console, you’d be wishing that your Wii, PS3 or your Xbox 360 could run those files right?
Come on, as the song goes, people who use the Internet for self-gratification is in the thousands, and a lot of those people play with their consoles, don’t tell me you do not see the monetary opportunity there. So what has DivX been doing about this?
Now that you know the issue, here’s the rest of what Greenhall said about DivX and consoles.
Get the rest of the article after the Jump!
In an interview at Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection, DivX CEO Jordan Greenhall talked about the progress of DivX as a company, its history, and what it’s plans for the future are. Since we’re a gaming blog we’ll focus on the pieces of information pertaining to the relationship Between DivX and the next-generation consoles.
This bit from the interview actually follows the part where Greenhall got questioned about the Wii, and the DivX platform making its way to the Nintendo baby. We’re posting this first, just so that all the consoles get some coverage, and more importantly, so that you get a decent picture of the situation that DivX is in when it comes to the consoles.
As far as the console strategy goes do you think that if Microsoft were to license DivX for the Xbox 360 that Sony would be under a lot of pressure to license the codec as well or do you see an opportunity where Microsoft could differentiate themselves there?
The pressure would certainly be on and then itÂ’s a matter of the politics of each organization. I would argue that on a pure market competitive basis, if Microsoft stepped up and put DivX on the Xbox, they would have a significant competitive advantage and the onus would be on to reduce that advantage by licensing DivX as well, but that doesnÂ’t imply however the Sony would have the forethought to do it.
Here’s the thing, during the “ooh-this-is-hot” days of P2P, a lot of people’s so-precious-it-is-best-viewed-in-private videos were in DivX format. Now if you’ve still got that huge “collection” with you and you somehow want it viewable using you’re next gen console, you’d be wishing that your Wii, PS3 or your Xbox 360 could run those files right?
Come on, as the song goes, people who use the Internet for self-gratification is in the thousands, and a lot of those people play with their consoles, don’t tell me you do not see the monetary opportunity there. So what has DivX been doing about this?
Now that you know the issue, here’s the rest of what Greenhall said about DivX and consoles.
One of the things thatÂ’s clear from watching DivXÂ’s popularity online is that a lot of people want to know how to get DivX on their Xbox 360, the PS3, even this weekend some industrious hackers figured out a way to bring their DivX movies to the Wii, have you talked to the console companies about officially supporting DivX and how have those talks gone?
We actually talked to those companies back in the PS2 and the Xbox days and back then things didnÂ’t go particularly well. As a company we always have a basic launch where we start with the consumer and work our way back and as a consequence we tend to be more successful in marketplaces that are more influenced by market forces then top down strategies. Which is to say we do better in open vs. closed, so if itÂ’s more open like a DVD player as opposed to closed, like a cable set top box or a cable provider, our systems will have more traction. We found that the second generation game consoles (or technically the fourth depending how far you go back), the PS2 and Xbox and before the gamecube, were still very closed in their way at looking at the world. Increasingly, for a variety of reasons, many which are random as happens to be the cases, we are seeing these next generation game consoles are taking a more open approach the way they are looking at the marketplace and so I have more optimism about our ability to get DivX to those clients, mostly because the consumer is being more vocal in demanding DivX for those clients. We havenÂ’t gotten any concrete announcements about to happen yet, but I do tell people itÂ’s important and I do spend time focusing on it and certainly you can put me on the record as somebody who would be delighted to see DivX in all those media consoles. Also you can put me on the record as someone who recommends that if you donÂ’t currently have a Wii, that you buy one.
Yeah, the guy likes his Wii. Who doesn’t? (If you don’t like Wiis you wouldn’t be owning one would you? And no, in that sentence,”Wii” was not a metaphor for certain reproductive organs.)
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