Online video sales may take in about a third of a billion dollars this year. Sony wants in on the action. According to today's Financial Times, Sony is making plans to enter the video download market, specifically to provide content for its existing 20 million plus PSP installed base.
Amazon's movie download service, as well as video content providers like MovieLink and CinemaNow have pretty much been resounding failures. So what will Sony do differently? For one, they intend to distribute their movies in a memory-stick friendly form, storing up to 10 feature films on a 4GB stick. For another, they won't require any hardware upgrades to the existing equipment in order to purchase and play movies.
I'm pretty unclear about how they intend to manage their digital rights with this setup. And 10 movies on 4GB sounds over-compressed. A two-hour iTunes movie is about a gigabyte in length. 400MB sounds more like what you'd expect coming out of iSquint or Handbrake. It would, of course, be lovely if their content would play back on the iPod as well as the PSP, but I'm not holding my breath.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-18-2006 @ 6:18PM
Reg said...
The PSP's video format is MPEG-4. The user-encodabable resolutions can be 320x240 (4:3) or 368x208 (16:9). Firmware later than 2.0 supports AVC / H.264 MPEG-4 encoding.
Each of these variants plays on an iPod with the latest updates.
The proprietary "PMP format" takes advantage of the full resolution of the PSP's screen, which is 480x272. Although proprietary, it is still based on MPEG-4 and in fact has been hacked and a player and encoder is freely available. It would probably be a trivial matter to strip out the MPEG-4 stream.
If Sony started distributing movies, however, they would likely include a DRM layer...
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12-19-2006 @ 10:41AM
Alex Abate said...
Sony has botched the PSP and the PS3 launch. Lately they cannot do anything right. I have no reason to believe that this attempt will not fail as well. The problem is not the platform. The PSP had great possibilities. The management at Sony doesn't know what Sony stands for. They need their own Steve to run Sony like it should be run.
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