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Nintendo DS to Play Movies?
swisener writes "An article at CNN speculates that the Nintendo DS could have multimedia playback, making it more of a competitor to Sony's PSP. If true, it will be interesting to see whether or not the big N can be successful with something other than a pure gaming machine."
two-hour movie (fit onto a 128 MB flash cartridge
That's roughly 1MB a minute, not too shabby compression though probably really tiny resolution. Considering that the cartridges for the DS are likely to be proprietary, don't get your hopes up that you'll be able to toss your own movies on the system. In addition, Nintendo will have to scare up some relationships with hollywood to get movie rights.
All in all, it sounds like this one will likely sputter out due to the (likely) proprietary nature of both the cartridges and the movie compression and the difficulty of getting studios to sign onto a new format (does anyone remember how FEW 8mm hollywood movies were released (meant to compete with VHS late in the game)).
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
I agree completely. That's why I think that this quote, from the article, is a buch of hooey.
"The lack of a DVD player hurt GameCube sales tremendously when the console was first released."
Says who? Where are the industry statistics on this one? I consider the lack of a DVD player a strenght in the product. I already have a DVD player, and so do many people. Keeping DVD's out of the GameCube meant that it stayed nice and small and cheap, exactly what I was looking for in a gaming device.
seriouslyexcited.net
Here's some hypothetical plans:
1. Make a handheld that plays GameCube games.
2. Make a handheld that supports reasonable 3d games and wireless gaming.
3. Make a portable system that plays GameCube games and DVD's.
4. Make a portable system with two screens (increasing cost/size), don't say why, don't release any information while PSP eats your mindshare lunch, don't give any re-assurance about specs/capabilities, and have vague, horrifying rumors that it plays movies in some wacky, proprietary format
Please, Nintendo, don't kill your fanboys like this. Have some mercy. Or shame. Or something.
My dream advice? Co-brand the next X-Box with MS (call it XCube) - it's new architecture should make it easy to make it GameCube backwards compatible. Then make a handheld that's GameCube compatible. You can sell the great new software for the XCube, while also making money on GameCube/PortaGameCube/Also-Playable-on-XCube games.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The $399 price point would definitely kill the PSP, which is why Sony is likely to sell it at a loss to eat into the GBA share. Although, more likely, the PSP is going after a nearly completely different demographic than the GBA. The GBA caters to the under-16 crowd almost exclusively, the PSP will likely cater to the over-13 crowd. Some sizeable overlap to be sure, but the crazed Pokemon GBA players aren't likely to be interested that much in even a $299 PSP, whereas the people able to drop $399 on a PSP aren't interested in playing Pokemon, either.
The portable GameCube player made sooooo much more sense, and would actually give Nintendo owners what they want. Natural, then, that Nintendo isn't planning to do it. More than likely, the next GameCube generation won't be backwards-compatible either.
Sony's PS3 is going to kick the crap out of both the XBox2 and the next Nintendo console, if for no other reason than at launch they'll have thousands of playable titles already, and it is a natural upgrade path for the millions of PS2 owners. It doesn't even really matter if the PS3 is more powerful than the XBox2 or next Nintendo console, or even if it offers better first-, second-, and third-party games at launch or not. Being backwards compatible and a natural upgrade path... gee, that didn't hurt Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2K/XP, did it?
MORTAR COMBAT!
would do well for themselves to build a nice, portable GameCube-compatible gaming device, including mini CD-R MP3 player into it, and mini-DVD video player (or just bite the bullet and increase the form factor slightly and play regular DVDs and CDs, or, just forget both CDs and DVDs entirely and focus on GameCube compatibility).
A subnotebook-sized GameCube device would be pretty durned successful, one would think? Complete with broadband adapter and GameBoy player compatibility? Heck, you could probably do fairly well hacking up used GameCubes and re-selling them after remanufacturing.
MORTAR COMBAT!
It would be interesting that the DS could also function as somethign simple, like an MP3 player. For Nintendo's purposes, its probably not very hard to add in mp3 support, but it could go a long way in marketing. Perhaps They could also use it as an extension to a digital camera; multimedia is a very broad term. They really just need to avoid falling into the same pitfall that N-Gage did. While it would be interesting to see what they come up with, inside, I hope it stays a gaming machine.
...then the whole DS thing might just make sense. People have speculated that the PSP will be priced around $199. Of course, they'd be a public outcry if the next Game Boy cost anything more than $99. So they might need something higher-end to compete with the PSP. If they do add video and music playback, then it will be the same "handheld media center" thing the PSP is. I still don't get why they're putting two screens on it, but hey...maybe it's just an excuse to charge more for it (people have gotten used to Nintendo's portables being much cheaper then consoles, which defies all Laws of Technology ;-))
All along, people here have been saying that the DS is not supposed to compete with PSP. But, maybe the DS is closer to the Walkman of the New Millenium then people think.
Or maybe, it's just one big tech demo.
The only thing for sure is that nothing's for sure. (Whoa.) Just some speculation...