They previously had to pay licensing fees for including DVD playback in WMP since its inclusion in Windows XP. I believe it equated to around $10 per OS license sold. For a comparison, Windows 7 sold over 670,000,000 licenses since its release and each copy of the OS was covered by Microsoft for that DVD playback option. One of the reasons why the upgrades and retail editions are so cheap is because of a ton of cost-cutting that was done to get to that price point.Stuart wrote:I must agree here. How long will it take MS to provide native DVD playback for their OS? Am I missing some sort of legal technicality here?
I support the move because in countries that have Hulu and Netflix, there's less of a dependancy on using the DVD standard for watching movies. Blu-Ray still has a case for high definition content, but viewing SD content on a DVD is becoming increasingly last-decade. The only reason why I use my DVD drive today was to install Windows 8 and run the copy protection off the games that I own physically. The rest of the time it sits idle and I don't even play DVD movies with it. If you're not using that service, why pay for it?
And besides, R299 for an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro? R529 RRP for Windows 8 Professional in a retail pack? Those are the kinds of prices we were asking for three years ago, even though Windows 7's performance and simplicity was reason enough to justify the price.