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Atari president confident about physical media's decline

by Darren Murph posted Dec 8th 2008 at 11:33AM

While high ranking executives from high ranking companies have bickered back and forth about the longevity of Blu-ray as a format, Atari president Phil Harrison has some pretty strong feelings on physical media as a whole. In an interview with Edge, the bigwig stated that "there's a generation of kids being born today and probably already alive who I'm pretty confident will never buy a physical media product; they will never buy a DVD, they will never buy a CD, and they will never buy a game in a box." While some may jump on this as being patently absurd, we're not so sure it's a crazy as it at first sounds. Video games in particular have been distributed via the 'net for some time now (Steam, anyone?), and it's no secret that programming and movies are headed in that direction. There's no way to accurately predict how many more generations will be buying wares in boxes, but it's safe to say we're a lot closer than most people expected us to be just a decade ago.

[Via G4TV]

PS3 to upscale DVDs, says Phil

by Paul Miller posted Mar 2nd 2007 at 8:31PM

Well, sort of. Phil Harrison naturally couldn't just announce the future feature straight out, he had to work it into a clever demonstration of how Sony doesn't usually talk about stuff that's in the pipeline. In a talk with N'Gai Croal, Phil conjectured that to "engender trust in our users, we have to share some things that might be not quite perfect." He continued: "So we could say, 'You know, we're not sure when it's coming, but we're going to have DVD upscaling on PlayStation 3.' There you go. There's a scoop for you." If Phil digs the idea enough to drop some info like that in an interview, we're not sure why he doesn't just go ahead and adopt it as a policy, but we're sure there are powers at Sony that even our shiny-headed little friend here cannot conquer. Of course, this gives us very little knowledge in the way of timing and implementation, but it's nice to know that DVD upscaling -- which Xbox 360 users have been enjoying for a few months already -- is coming to Phil's shiny PS3 boxen all the same.

[Via Joystiq]




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