Wired: Sony Prototyping Personal Video Player

Cinematique writes "Wired is running an article about Apple beating Sony in the personal music player fight. The author suggest that Sony should skip its planned answer to the iPod and focus instead on a portable video player. But there's a catch: the legality of the content such video players would use."

Comments

Skipping iPod clone is a poor idea

[drinkypoo]

I'm not reading the article - I've given up on wired entirely - but that doesn't matter. There will necessarily be a gulf in price between a device which plays mp3s, and a device which plays video. The needs for storage, a fancy display, and additional processing (either in the form of a dedicated video decompressing engine in hardware, or a generally more powerful CPU) pretty much guarantee that a video player is going to cost more money.

Meanwhile Apple is taking pretty much all the money for a large-capacity portable mp3 player, and Sony would like a bite of it for obvious reasons. They own all the technologies they'll need to implement it, so they need not license anything to do so - the only costs are for development and production. Sony is known to be able to churn out hardware at very low costs, so this should be a doddle for them.

Let's also not forget that Sony is bringing out their new somewhat-PS2-based handheld, the PSP, in the not so far future. Since they already have a handheld video player coming, they might as well toss off the mp3 player right now, and work on video later.

Maybe its just me but I just don't see the point..

[PierceLabs]

I'm not sure I really see the validity of carrying movies and TV shows around with me. With music its different - I can listen to music while driving, while coding, while jogging, etc. I just don't see the same appeal for video. While it would be a very useful device for those long plane rides when you're unfortunate enough to not be travelling on JetBlue or to calm a child on a road trip (and you already have a larger screen for them to watch) - I just don't see video being a big a draw.

Listening to music is just a much more passive activity than actually watching a movie. I simply see fewer instances where I'd want to use it AND I wouldn't want a more compelling experience from a gameboy or cellphone games. Maybe its just me - but by the time this market develops - I would expect that 4G phones would be able to deliver all the video I need right to me :)

That's a stupid issue. Sorry.

[Esion Modnar]

But cassette tape players, VCR's, etc. have been made for years, and the responsibility for legal content on these devices has been squarely on the user. I know the music industry had tried to squelch them, just like everything else, but as long as there is a significant use other than piracy (and there is) then the {RI,MP}AA can go fly.

Re:Legality of content?

[evilviper]

if you own a DVD, you should be able to "rip" it to one of these players as fair use.

Under the DMCA, that would be illegial.

Being able to "TiVo" shows and watch them whenever you want would be quite a nice feature.

That would be legal, only if you are MOVING the files, and not COPYING them. Technically it's a small difference, but legally it is major.

Ridiculous...

[evilviper]

There probably isn't a whole lot the electronics giant can do now to unseat the iPod,

This is absolutely ridiculous. There are millions of things Sony could do to beat the iPod.
On of the reasons I look at Sony products first, is because they get incredible battery life out of all of their products. What's the point of hundreds of hours of music, if you need to carry stacks and stacks of AA batteries, and swap them every 2 hours?

Then there is capacity, price, formats (I'm still looking for a good player with Vorbis support... Spex support would be very good too.)

However, don't exepct much from Sony. If you've looked at the products they've made in the past few decades, you can see that they are fully in-bed with media companies, and include all the DRM they can.

DATs were killed off due to DRM. MiniDiscs are just hanging on right now, because of DRM. You aren't allowed to make many copies of your own music, and they do everything they can to prevent you even having digital output at all. You can copy from your computer to your minidisc, but you can't copy the files back. They are going out of their way to give you a product with restrictions you don't want. With hundreds of products just like this, I can't imagine they are going to see the light, and throw out all restrictions immediately.

The big problem is that all electronics makers are in-bed with DRM of all types, which is the sole reason why computers are doing so well. Instead of doing the same things with stand-alone electronics, we have to do it with a general-purpose processor, because no sector other than the computer industry is willing to give you permission to access your own property how ever you want.

Apple is only partly in-bed with restrictions against the public, so they made a device that was far better than anything the electronics industry would ever think of comming out with.