Except that Blu-Ray involves paying license fees to Sony. I expect that part of the reason the Wii doesn't actually play DVDs out of the box is because Nintendo didn't want to pay the DVD Media Group (or whatever that consortium is called) a share of every Wii sold. CD is different because it was jointly developed by Philips and Sony and Philips has a history of publishing their technology specs (remember the audio cassette?) royalty free to promote uptake of the technology rather than wanting a fee from everyone to use the tech like Sony and their previous media ventures, which have historically worked against them becoming industry standards (MD anyone? Memory Stick?).

Whilst I think it's possible Nintendo could use a format like Blu-Ray in a future machine, I rather doubt they would have the ability to actually play films. There are plenty of alternative high-capacity media options being developed by Chinese companies that also don't want to pay Sony's fees and higher capacity storage like holographic disc technology or even using a card format like SDHC.

GD-Rom is coming back. You heard it here first!

All hail the GD-ROM!

ah yes, i'm pretty upset over sony's handling of minidiscs in the US. they have better sound quality and portability than CD along with the added bonus of fast recording from any source... yet no player i've ever owned has lasted more than a year. somehow sony is the only one allowed to make them and with no competition to keep their prices down or quality up, sony made your only choice of player one of their own plastic pieces of crap; no wonder MD never caught on.

back on track, i didn't realize there were many other high storage disc types out there. i guess nintendo could always use an obscure disc type that's a near equivalent to blu-ray for their games, but i wonder if that reduces the chances of backward compatibility. it sure diminishes the chances of movie playback too, but when have we ever had that from nintendo anyway?

Well, the solution in Blu-Ray and some DVD players is to include two different laser modules: one for Blu-Ray/DVD and the other for DVD/CD, so I'm sure Nintendo could do the same thing if they went with a different optical format and wanted backwards-compatibility (something I don't think is a foregone conclusion).

I also enjoyed MD and it really should have replaced CD, but Sony has long had a problem of the over-protective media arm sabotaging the consumer electronics arm: separating the audio and data MD formats in a bid to prevent the piracy of audio CDs did a lot more harm than good to the format. Other companies did produce players and recorders, but Sony obviously made more and better units than everyone else. I stuck with the format to the bitter end, but now I'm firmly committed to digital for portable audio playback and recording.

yeah, MD didn't fail because of licensing fees or Sony's marketing etc, but because of MP3's. MP3's killed it. Just like ISO's and stuff like that will kill ANY physical media in the future. The physical media is ALREADY dead. I get it that people prefer to hold the objects in their hands, but especially with pirating... how many places still sell CD's with music? Those went bankrupt all over the world. Seriously. Maybe in the U.S and U.K there is a certain appreciation to the arts in a way that's not in many other places around the world. And the convenience of downloading, even legally, like Sean, has also crushed the music business and is crusing the movie business. It's that easy to watch it for free or for peanuts that nobody even cares about the difference in resolution or sound, and that's not even true, because you can burn the entire disc and put it in your system... so physical media died... Microsoft and Sony are **already** selling their retail games as downloads!! Blu ray is ALREADY dead in every practical sense.

So yes, Nintendo can use blu ray in their next console or something like that (it'll be so cool if they can sell it as SDHC cards instead) but does it matter? they can sell put floppy disks of 360KB instead, since everything is heading online.