Sony has thrown a lot of lines into the water in a desperate attempt to regain some sort of killer consumer product, but they can't do it. The PSP is popular and there was a lot of hub-bub about the release of the proprietary UMD disc movies. They even had the insanely popular Sony title "Spiderman 2" to prime the pump with. But, folks are not buying them, so the studios don't look like they are going to continue to pay to produce the movies on these tiny 1.8GB discs. At least they are indicating they will scale back the amount of releases in the future. You might say well, what the heck, Sony Pictures will still put them out full bore. But then you would be wrong, even they are saying it's a poor business venture!
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SPHE president Ben Feingold said the studio is temporarily scaling back the number of new release PSP movies it puts out due to weak performance. Sony last year was the first studio to release movies for the PSP and has been the biggest cheerleader of the format since its launch by the studio's parent company. SPHE and sister unit Sony Computer plan to visit other studios in the next month to garner support for PSP by making an adapter that would allow the movies to be watched on a TV, making them more versatile for consumers. |
It would be a huge boost to all these companies if they would simply drop all this lock down thinking with oddball discs and incompatible DRM schemes. It is common knowledge that there is a hack for playing UMD on TV already (see above UMD link) and the UMD disc has been cracked allowing launches of content from memory sticks, making the UMD disc unnecessary. Due to the Internet and the vast community of hackers dedicated to trumping these schemes, it seems futile for the companies to even try. But they will anyway, as long as they see folks like Apple and the success of iTunes and iPods.
Source: Video Business Online
