Several years back, Sony had refused to develop any MP3 portable Digital Audio Players as it feared about piracy. Since that time, competitors such as Apple have developed and released their portable MP3 players while Sony simply relied on music sales and PlayStation 2 sales. With plummeting music and PS2 sales, Sony is struggling to remain
profitable while MP3 players including Apple's iPod are selling
like Sony's Walkman had sold back in the 80's.
Now, Sony looks like they want to fight back, but not with just a plain hard drive based portable jukebox. With a wide range of MP3 jukeboxes and solid state MP3 players on the market, Sony would like to go in the next generation of handheld players: Personal Video Players (PVP's). While there are already a few models on the market including hand held DVD players, Sony want to target those who would like to catch up on recorded TV shows on the go. This would be their main chance to compete against the others.
Sony have already prototyped a PVP at the WPC Expo trade show in Tokyo, which has a 3.5" high-resolution display, sleek design and capacity for 10 hours of video on its 20GB hard drive. While this would be handy for watching movies on the go, Sony have ran into one major problem with this as it is illegal to rip CSS-protected DVDs to a PC let alone transfer them to a PVP. Sony does not want to release a player that encourages piracy and hence the reason they backed off from MP3 players for a long time. Sony plans to instead launch a gadget for recording TV shows on to Memory Stick (Flash memory card). All the consumer needs to do is take the memory stick with them to playback on their PVP.
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Sony was so worried about piracy, and sapping revenue from its Sony Music division, that it chose to do nothing and let Apple ascend. Apple made boatloads of cash from the iPod, while Sony struggled to remain profitable as revenues from its main cash cow, the PlayStation 2, plummeted. But it's not too late for Sony. We don't mean the rumored hard-drive MP3 player that Sony supposedly will introduce next year. There probably isn't a whole lot the electronics giant can do now to unseat the iPod, but Sony does have a chance to leapfrog competitors in the next wave of entertainment gadgets: personal video players. PVPs are basically hard drives with screens attached for watching videos. There are already a few models on the market from Archos, RCA and others, and it seems every month or so another obscure Taiwanese manufacturer announces another offering. Microsoft and Intel have developed a design of their own for others to build. While there isn't as much demand for watching video while on the go, plenty of people will want a PVP to watch movies or catch up on TV while traveling or commuting. With color LCD screens getting cheaper by the minute, the difference in price between an MP3 player and a device that can also play videos will be small in a year or two. Besides, having an MP3 player that can play videos is icing on the cake (just like it doesn't hurt to have a DVD player that also plays CDs). You can expect to see at least a dozen personal video players on the market by the middle of next year, if not sooner. Read the full article here. |
It was not long ago that we had news of the Archos portable PVR , but unlike Sony's plans the Archos designed their PVR to allow users to record directly from a DVD player by getting around copy protection signals, use MPEG4 encodings of their DVDs as well as any other video clips the consumer gets their hands on. Sony may find them selves in a problem if they discover that consumers want more from their portable player other than playing back recorded TV shows and MP3s. Maybe Sony have plans for launching a pay-per-download movie service where users can use a Sony PVP to play them back similar to Apple's iTunes service with an iPod player. With colour TFT display prices dropping, it may be just another year before PVP's replace hard drive based MP3 players on the market.
Source: Wired News
