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Sony To Launch PS3 Video Download Service

Posted by Soulskill on Wed Apr 23, 2008 02:39 PM
from the competition-is-a-good-thing dept.
Sony PlayStation (Games) Entertainment
An anonymous reader points out a Los Angeles Times report that Sony is planning on making movies and TV shows available for download through the PS3 "as early as this summer." Sony hopes to make use of the roughly 4 million PS3s already sold in the US to compete with similar services such as XBox Live, which began offering video downloads over a year ago. "One of the service's greatest obstacles may be Sony's own culture. Sony Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Stringer has been battling a corporate silo mentality in which divisions within his company work in isolation, undermining new initiatives. The PlayStation group in Foster City, Calif., has been notoriously aloof. Once, a former executive said, it scuttled plans for a movie subscription service for the PlayStation Portable even though Sony Pictures had supported the initiative. What is more, the company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, often, critics suggest, at the cost of technological innovation."
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[+] Microsoft Announces TV and Movies for Xbox Live 86 comments
PreacherTom writes "In the latest of several recent upgrades to their online service, Microsoft has announced that their Xbox Live service will begin offering movies and television on demand starting on November 22nd. All subscribers (including those using the free service) will have access to movies from Paramount and Warner Bros. along with TV shows from CBS and MTV. Prices haven't been officially released as of yet, but MS has stated that they are attempting to be competitive with similar services from iTunes and cable companies." There is lots of commentary out there on this one, so Read More to reference the many other sites discussing this story. Besides commentary on the announcement itself, Eurogamer has Sony's snarky commentary on this move by Microsoft.
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  • Bandwidth?
  • Just like Home was supposed to be out Q4 2007.
    • "Will Be, Someday" should be the official motto of the PS3.
      • Ditto for me. Home looked fun (I'm big into social games) and I wanted one of the hardware backwards-compatible 60GB units, so I also bought mine last summer when the price first dropped. Now I pretty much just use it for playing blu-rays. And it's annoying sometimes even for that. Last night I had to do a system update just to watch a blu-ray. So I had to go round up the game controller (since for some reason Sony's remote doesn't work for system updates). And then I had to wait while the update downloaded
        • You don't have to do system updates to watch bluray, only to go online to PSN. You might have wanted to (for DTS-HD support in the latest firmware) but that was entirely your choice.

  • do ya feel lucky, Comcast? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spazdor (902907) on Wednesday April 23 2008, @02:56PM (#23175332)
    This might be the service that finally puts net neutrality into perspective. Previously all the arguments about bandwidth availability and the ethics of throttling have conflated legitimate use with piracy. But the crux of the argument has been mostly hypothetical up until about now; A legal, widely deployed IP video-on-demand service will put the TV content providers into a very clear conflict of interests; it will be interesting to see how they plan on treating this traffic.

    • Re:do ya feel lucky, Comcast? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Itchyeyes (908311) on Wednesday April 23 2008, @03:04PM (#23175432)
      Why would this be the one to put it in perspective? Xbox Live Video Marketplace has been out for over a year, and there are more Xbox 360's in homes than there are PS3's. If lawmakers and lobbyists chose to ignore the Xbox 360 (not to mention the plethora of other online video providers) as a legitimate use of heavy bandwidth, the PS3 isn't even going to register as a blip on their radar.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Itchyeyes (908311)
          A) True, not all 360's have hard drives. However, there have been 3 times more 360's sold than PS3's and approximately 80% of 360's do have hard drives, so there are still more 360's with hard drives out there than there are PS3's.

          B) People may prefer watching shows on their TV to their PC, but that doesn't mean they won't settle for their PC is services for their TV aren't available, which is currently the case. According to Job's Jan 2008 keynote, Apple has sold 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies

          • B) People may prefer watching shows on their TV to their PC, but that doesn't mean they won't settle for their PC is services for their TV aren't available, which is currently the case. According to Job's Jan 2008 keynote, Apple has sold 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies. That's a lot of content for just those 200k Apple TV's out there.

            I'd be willing to bet that most (if not all), of the TV shows that apple sold are for iPod use. Everyone I know who watches iTunes content downloads them to their iP

        • Wider than the Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple combined? I think you guys are drinking a little too much of the Sony Koolaide. Obviously Sony's entrance into the online video market is a significant move, but do you honestly think that Sony alone is going to cause lawmakers to rethink their stance on net neutrality? If this were the available for the PS2 I could see your point, but I think you're significantly overestimating the position that the PS3 is currently in.

          Oh, and you're wrong about the 3
    • A legal, widely deployed IP video-on-demand service

      You mean like Xbox Live Marketplace?

      • I haven't seen many numbers on market penetration for the Xbox service, but I've heard that the pricing and video selection were poor enough to make them flop regardless. Is that anything like true?
    • Or how about if Sony makes the service run over a P2P client on the PS3.

      Sounds like an interesting fight to me!
  • FWIW, most large Japanese corporations try to silo their divisions as much as possible. Often, large companies will silo a division, until it becomes 'self sufficient' with it's own P&L, and then the parent company will spin it off into quasi-independence. This forces middle managers to be as efficient as possible, but obviously costs somewhat in corporate-wide leveraging-- leveraging usually comes in the form of cheap capital and maybe shared real estate, but not much beyond that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dreamchaser (49529)
      There are pros and cons to that approach. The big benefit is that the silo's can operate more flexibly and often can react faster to changing market conditions. The biggest con is the one you pointed out, the lack of 'synergies'
  • They don't mention it at all, but I'd be interested to know on what format and quality they think they can manage to release these episodes and movies. No way in hell will any movies be blu-ray quality, 8+gig 780p, or even good DVD quality. Possibly for tv episodes that might be compressed down to ~300Mb, but I'd guess movies will be in the range of 600-800Mb, but questionable on the format. Maybe if Sony hears of complaints from end-users about network tampering, they'll support some sort of net neutrality
    • I just downloaded a 1.1GB Turok demo on my PS3 the other day. It took longer to install than it did to download. I think they should make 5+ Gig movies available. You start downloading them in the morning or afternoon if you want to watch them that night. Seems fine to me.

  • If they continue according to past history (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Whuffo (1043790) on Wednesday April 23 2008, @03:04PM (#23175414) Journal
    When this service finally launches it'll have DRM so restrictive you'll have trouble watching the movie. Their DRM will also be totally incompatible with any other implementation and completely unsupported by any non-Sony device.

    After a few months of low sales and unhappy customers, they'll write it off. They'll blame the failure on poorly educated consumers.

    Keep in mind that Sony Pictures and Sony Electronics are two different divisions of the same company. It's an unhappy marriage; what makes Pictures happy makes Electronics unhappy and vice versa. As these two opposing points of view seek to find consensus some very awkward compromises are made. See any Sony product that does anything with online digital media content for a good example.

    Of course, while Pictures and Electronics battle it out they aren't paying much attention to what their market is asking for. Look how long it took for them to finally support MP3 format in their portable music players; while they fiddled the market went a different way and - well, the people who made the Walkman famous aren't even on the radar in portable music players these days.

    Maybe they've learned something and they'll do this one right. Reality check: now many PSP owners are going to buy movies from Sony that can only be watched on the PSP? I suspect this product may not actually be profitable...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Cheeko (165493)
      Indeed the best thing MS might have going for it was their eventual inclusion of Divx in their media connector.

      IF Sony pushes DRM as much as some suspect it will kill this before it even starts, as people won't be able to mix and match formats they have from various places.

      I never bothered with the MS content downloads or the iTunes downloads or any of the others, but I've sure as hell loaded up Divx-ed episodes of TV shows over my network to watch on my TV stored on my PC. Thats really the model Sony need
    • My favorite part of the article:

      "Sony has this blessing and curse of [having] some of the world's smartest intellectual property lawyers, who've never built or marketed a product in their life, who are good at saying, 'no,' " said Richard Doherty, senior analyst at consultancy Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y. "The sun never sets on the Sony lawyers, they're around the world, in Tokyo, London, New York."

      A blessing? I suppose if you consider the ability to sue the living bejezus out of someone at the drop of a hat, then I guess so...

      • If they can get into proper non-US video downloads before anyone else then they're onto a winner. Xbox live last time I used it (admittedly in November) had only a single episode of southpark for download.. itunes download is still mostly music plus the inevitable selection of pixar demos and about half a dozen programmes that have about 5 viewers between them - at £3 an episode (hence the apple TV doesn't really sell here - the local apple store has it switched off in a corner, because there's nothi

  • Good move (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tknd (979052) on Wednesday April 23 2008, @03:07PM (#23175476)

    I think this is a great move for Sony because it sets them up to move to digital downloads if the competition is fierce but also packages Blu-ray into the same device. Either way, they win the movie-rentals and movie-player game.

    Compared to something like the Apple TV, the PS3 is superior if Sony can push out their movie rental service soon. If the PS3 supported movie download rentals, you would have the best of both worlds in one device. Want to rent a (high def) movie from the store or netflix? Play it on your PS3. Want to rent a movie download? Play it on your PS3. It may sound funny, but I've been considering buying the PS3, not because of the game console features, but because of the movie download potential and the bluray player. Hell, if they had a PS3 that came with a remote instead of a controller, I'd probably buy that instead.

    Oh and BTW, the PS3 does run linux!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by dafing (753481)
      ps3 has a bluetooth remote.

    • Oh and BTW, the PS3 does run linux!

      Yes, the PS3 does, but will Sony allow any software to play these files while you're booted in YellowDog or CentOS or whichever flavor of Linux they promote for the PS3? Or will they restrict these videos for when you're running on their OS?
  • ... It'll have about 10 movies available, all of which are either 10 years old or massively out of date. And the price won't be competitive with your local Blockbuster.

    YMMV, this is from the perspective of a UK user. Maybe in the US you get a decent selection at a decent price?
    • The US gets a great (and frequently updated) selection. Price however is debatable. I'm not a fan of Renting movies from the service, I would rather they offered an option to "buy" it like they do for TV shows (even if it cost more than their current rent prices).
      • I couldn't find anything in the article stating if you buy the movies or rent. That's a big deciding factor for me as well. I don't use the Xbox Live movie rentals because I want to buy the movies, like M$ allows for the TV shows.

  • Great for HD TV Shows (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dalmiroy2k (768278) on Wednesday April 23 2008, @03:21PM (#23175600)
    This is great news for people in developing countrys with little or no HDTV content available and download (pirated) HD content that can't be otherwise obtained, specially HD shows like Lost or T:TSCC.
    At least here in Argentina a lot of people have HDTV-ready TV sets, high-end PCs or next-gen consoles but we don't have HD supported cable, Directv or even a OTA digital tv format (We may get ATSC as standard next year).
    If we could get HD downloads for cheap (let's say $2 an episode) I would gladly pay it.
    Same thing for movies, imported from USA Blu-ray movies cost 60 dollars here and there is no local production like DVDs yet.

    Postdata: I know Apple TV/Itunes has been doing this for a few months, but this device it's not popular over here. PS3 is.
    • If we could get HD downloads for cheap (let's say $2 an episode) I would gladly pay it.

      I'd guess closer to $8. Just guessing though. But hell if you have to pay $80 for a blu-ray disc... I guess you're still making out.
  • Perhaps it's largely due to what the critics claim; that "The company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, at the cost of technological innovation."

    But whatever the case, I think Sony missed a few opportunities to make the PS3 a better suited system for video on demand and the like.

    1. Why only wireless "g" support in them, and not "n"? Wireless "n" support actually makes video streaming possible without drop-outs and pauses

    • Re:IMHO, they should have planned for this earlier (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The PS3 HDD is standard, and can be replaced. There are instructions that come with the console.

      Not so for the 360.
      • Not to mention the PS3 has at least 2 USB ports (with 4 on the "upscale" models).

        You can already use an external USB drive to store music, video and picture, there is no reason that they couldn't store DRMed video content on one also.

        They already store DRMed content on "removable" media by allowing you to download purchased content from the PSN Store via the "PC Store" [playstation.com] or PS3 to PSPs. Since all PSPs use MemoryStick Pro Duos for their persistent storage, there is no real difference between using a MS Pro Du
      • What's really, um, "cute" about the 360 is that the HDD size is hardwired into the unit. It's not hard to crack open one of those drive thingies for the 360 and put your own drive in it, but if you put a 300G drive in, it'll still only format it to 120G at most. Because that's all the Elite will allow.

        Stick a 300G drive into a PS3, and you get 300G. But Sony seems deathly afraid of actually selling you anything that would fill that space.

        • Stick a 300G drive into a PS3, and you get 300G. But Sony seems deathly afraid of actually selling you anything that would fill that space.

          Not sure I'd agree with that.

          I mean, the PSN store has released quite a few download only games, games use the space to cache data, and Sony themselves have announced both PlayTV [wikipedia.org] and this Video download service.

          Not to mention just popping your Sony CD into the drive and ripping it straight to the Hard-Drive. :)

          Sure seems like they're trying to sell you content to fill th

  • Why not just sign a deal with Netflix to do their Video Streaming feature via the XMB?
    • Didn't Netflix recently send out some sort of user poll saying "If we teamed up with Sony to offer downloads via the PS3, would you be interested?"

      Maybe a deal has been made...

      http://gizmodo.com/355607/netflix-movie-streaming-coming-to-xbox-360-and-ps3
    • That's what I was hoping for, but this development makes it look quite unlikely now.

      Once Sony has a first-party video rental system in place, I'd say the likelyhood of a competitor using the system is slim to none.

    • Why not just sign a deal with Netflix to do their Video Streaming feature via the XMB?
      Maybe because they also are looking to market to people outside of the US and Netflix is a US based offering?
  • "What is more, the company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, often, critics suggest, at the cost of technological innovation.""

    I think this can be summed up by:

    You can't serve mana and Heaven to.

    Sony (the technology part) is doomed by the movie part. To bad , they used to make good stuff.
  • Got to keep these rogue corporate divisions from deviating from the path. Except for Apple. Apple can do its own thing.

  • I have to say that the summary makes sense in at least one area - the design interface seems really half-assed. Coming from a MAJOR corporation like Sony, that would lend credence to the accusation that Sony is in some ways its own worst enemy.

    I admit that I bought the PS3 for one reason - Blu-ray won. I do not own an Xbox360, but I have several friends who do. The difference between the Xbox XBL interface/experience and the Sony XrossMediaBar (worst name ever, btw)/PSN/PSN Store interface/experience is n
  • I didn't see anyone mentioning this beast [sonystyle.com] at all.

    Basically it's Sony's answer to people who have too much money and not enough common sense. Share's the PS3's XBR system, holds 200 Blu-Ray discs and has a 500GB hard drive. Reading the owner's manual there's a lot to dislike (DRM everywhere), but I can see the people that they are targeting, and it does look 'cool'.

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