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Game Boy Advance Video Player Coming To U.S.
Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting a press release revealing Majesco is bringing a GameBoy Advance video player to the U.S for Spring 2004. Although there are similar products available in Japan, there's been no attempt to launch a GBA video player Stateside until now, and the press release mentions: "Majesco's new video compression technology presently allows viewing of approximately 45 minutes of quality color video." It's noted that "approximately 12 video titles are scheduled to launch at retail", unfortunately proprietary, with no ability to import movies of your choice, and the Majesco CTO comments that this is "a significant advantage over most competitive technologies that limit viewing to black & white video", a dig at the currently available stand-alone VideoNOW player from Hasbro.
Sorry if it wasn't clear in the write-up, but I think the Japanese GBA video player is actually by a different developer - though it does similar things.
It may be that Majesco's system is a lot more standalone - the Japanese system allows you to write to Smart Media cards, but it could be the U.S. video player carts are just standalone, with no possible PC interface. We'll have to see.
Nintendo has fought hard again the flash cartridge makers. I see no way that they would allow companies to sell flashable cartridges. Even if a company put something out, it would only be a matter of time before someone hacked it and then you would have a cheap flashable ROM.
It was actually pretty impressive. I saw both a cartoon and an MTV special on the cards. They said that they're also licensing the technology out to game developers so they can create some FMV footage for their GBA games. (I THINK the Kingdom Hearts GBA game is using a technology similar, but don't quote me on that...)
As for what it's good for, I'd think of having kids in the backseat of the car on a trip watching cartoons on their GBA. The cartoons came out better than the live action stuff, obviously, so I can see more use for distributing two episodes of a cartoon on a cartridge than distributing any live-action shows.
How about instructional videos like home improvement or cooking?
Of course to keep in line with your thread, you could always have sex instruction... =P