René Kock

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Over the past decade there has been a fierce battle between Microsoft with the Xbox and Sony with the PlayStation to attract gamers to their respective platforms. They both had a different strategy and focus to attract users to their platforms.

Sony focused with the PlayStation 3 more one free online gaming while the Xbox 360 had a slightly more powerful graphic processor, but users had to pay to make use of these online gaming possibilities. Although this was a paid service, the online gaming experience was relatively similar to the PlayStation 3 (Diffen, 2016).

When the next generation consoles were introduced Sony made sure that this time they were the ones to launch their console first and make use of this first mover advantage to attract more users to their console. They clearly differentiated the PlayStation 4 from the Xbox one with a significant higher amount of graphic capabilities of PlayStation 4 compared to the Xbox one. The PlayStation 4 has a 1.84 teraflop GPU compared with the less powerful 1.31 teraflop GPU of the Xbox One (Techradar, 2016). Microsoft tried to counter this by trying to let the Xbox One be the all-round entertainment centre for the living room. But as the graphics of the PlayStation 4 were clearly better than that of the Xbox One hardcore gamers preferred the PlayStation 4 over the Xbox One. This can be seen in the amount of PlayStations sold (40 milion) compared to the Xbox One (20 milion) (Techradar, 2016).

With the next generation 4k televisions becoming increasingly cheaper they become more affordable for consumers to buy. Sony and Microsoft try to catch on with this trend by introducing new consoles that are able to play 4k games. Sony has already announced that the PlayStation Pro will be released on the 10th of November, while there is no release date for the next Xbox console. This gives Sony again the first mover advantage over Microsoft when introducing its new console.

The most important point is that Microsoft has done something completely different this time. They have made the new Xbox (Scorpio) comparable to a high end gaming PC. With a massive amount of 6 teraflops (compared to 4 from the PS4 Pro) they can now target the PC gamer to also consider a console to get the same type of graphics on their 4k screen (Trustedreviews, 2016).

This will become an interesting new episode to get hardcore gamers to choose between a Playstation Pro or Xbox Scorpio. Although Sony has the first mover advantage, Microsoft has the better graphics this time which could draw more gamers to their console.

Trustedreviews, 2016. PS4 New VS Xbox Scorpio. http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/ps4-neo-vs-xbox-2-xbox-scorpio-specs-comparison
Techradar, 2016. Ps4 VS Xbox One. http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-vs-xbox-720-which-is-better-1127315/2
Diffen, 2016. PS3 VS Xbox 360. http://www.diffen.com/difference/PlayStation_3_vs_Xbox_360

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There are various ways of playing your music wirelessly these days. Most devices have Bluetooth, but this has several big disadvantages compared to the options provided by Google and Apple. Bluetooth uses a lot of battery power from your mobile phone, and also it is not able to send lossless music, which is a major setback for music lovers. On addition to that it also compresses the music it sends (Audiogurus, 2016).

Google Cast sends the music straight from the servers of Google, therefore you don’t need your device to be active. This is different with Airplay and Bluetooth where the music itself will be send from the phone which will have a negative effect on the battery life. Google Cast has the option to send lossless music until 24bit/192khz which is the highest standard possible (Google, 2016). This is the only possible option to send your music in this high quality to your speakers. Apple Airplay is also possible to send lossless quality but only until 16/44khz which is inferior to the quality that Google Cast provides (Apple, 2016) Bluetooth is not able to send lossless quality due to the fact that it does not support such a high bandwidth.

Apple Airplay is fairly Apple centric, but has the advantage that it is already around for a couple of years. This enables Airplay to be able to connect to a lot of different devices because manufactures have enabled airplay in a lot of devices from stand-alone speakers to receivers and tuners. Google Cast has been announced only 2 years ago, so only the most recent devices are Google Cast Enabled. Google is trying to solve this problem by releasing its own Google Cast enables hardware such as the Chromecast and Chromecast-Audio (Google, 2016). As Spotify connect is only able with a Google Cast device, it has another advantage major advantage over Airplay (tweakers, 2015).

If Google continues to update Google Cast it has a clearly major advantage over Apple Airplay, with its native Spotify, lossless quality and low battery live.

Audiogurus, 2016. Bluetooth audio. Available at: http://www.audiogurus.com/learn/news/bluetooth-audio/3176

Apple, 2016. Sound quality Airplay. Available at : http://www.apple.com/shop/question/answers/product/MC414LL/A/i-have-a-fairly-hi-end-stereo-system-will-sound-quality-thru-airport-express-to-my-system-be-degraded/QH7XYCT9PXYAH7TKA

Google, 2016. Chromecast. https://www.google.com/cast/

Tweakers, 2016. Spotify voorziet apps van chromecast ondersteuning. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/105742/spotify-voorziet-zijn-apps-van-chromecast-ondersteuning.html

Inside the platform battle of the gaming industry.

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The Battle of Wireless Music Streaming

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