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I see this talk of MS "taking over the living room". That's just pie in the sky nonsense, and my gut tells me they really think they can extract alot of revenues and fees out of this business. It's a simple translation to $$$. They are not going to earn substantial profits off of a $99 box unless there are heavy fees attached. Roku is a small company, so MS could literally take over 100% of Roku market share and the hardware sales wouldn't even make a dent for a company the size of MS. Microsoft NEEDS subscription fees on top of hardware sales or it simply isn't a viable business for thier shareholders.
MS doesn't have CONTENT. So what exactly are they selling us here? If they drop the paywall that would certainly be a good thing for customers, but then it also means MS dropped their ambitions down a notch. There won't be enough money in it for them to please shareholders long term, and certainly it won't even put a dent in their overall business (which is likely to be a declining business with the collapse of the PC market and Windows). So my take is this whole process will end up being Zune 2.0 - and in 5 years time MS will be in some major trouble (not unlike what Sony has gone through).
2Chalupas
It's been Sony's dream to make the all-in-one entertainment center console since the psone. That dream has been a failure. The ps2 did benefit from the DVD playback, and the ps3 benefits from bluray playback, but most people prefer to have dedicated devices for those functions, both for simplicity's sake and to extend the lifetime of the console.
The wiiu has proved that nobody wants the all-in-one online media center. The wii u has that TVii thing that integrates hulu, netflix, web surfing, gaming, and all with that miiverse stuff. Nintendo is the only all-in-one device on the market and nobody cares. You can't say that it's because the wiiu sucks or an anti-nintendo sentiment either. BS. It's obvious that the all-in-one dream was a way for marketing executives to pat themselves on the back. It doesn't reflect market demand. It's side note to any device and nothing exciting.
With the expansion of smart TVs and tablet integration, it will be even less than a side note.
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