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Mistake #3: No HDMI support

While claim and claim is made about Microsoft offering HDMI or DVI support in the future "with a special cable," I find these rumors very hard to believe. If HDMI support was as trivial as making a cable, don't you think Monster Cable or any of the 3rd party manufacturers would have already made a cable?

There are some possibilities. Perhaps the outputs from the Xbox 360 can be re-programmed using different firmware? This is somewhat wishful thinking. For all we know, Microsoft may decide to pawn off an analog-to-digital converter as the HDMI cable. Perhaps in that not too distant future when HDMI becomes the norm, a special cable will convert the analog component video out to HDMI.

There's a problem though. No HDMI support means no copy protected high-definition content.

Coming back to the Xbox Live as iTunes competitors, it would not have been difficult for Microsoft to release high-definition movies or TV shows using the Xbox Live infrastructure. The hardware is HD capable and the networking infrastructure is capable of handling large files -- game demos are already topping 1GB. Without HDMI or DVI/HDCP support, Microsoft may find it impossible to convince Hollywood studios to allow users to download high-def, full-length movies for playback on an analog source.

Of course, the advantages of HDMI support in games should not be minimized. Anyone with a 19" LCD monitor can attest to the difference in image quality between a VGA connection and a DVI connection.

I would have enjoyed Movielink.com pricing with the advantage of high-def and 5.1 content. The chances of that still happening are pretty slim.