Technology was invented a few years back. And a number of outfits are working on it. So Microsoft is not the sole researcher on it.
They all run to the film studios as they think that is a sexy application. Archiving all that film on digital though is super expensive as you have to scan and clean it up first. With little revenue behind old titles these days, the motivation is not there to do the copying unless they can talk a company like Microsoft into paying for it for some PR. The slow write rate of this media makes it even more expensive to do.