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Sony to Make an "iTunes for Movies"
dAzED1 writes "After years of complaining that the RIAA and MPAA were missing the boat, and should have embraced things like Napster instead of supressing them, we got iTunes and the like. Now, Sony has announced it will 'make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year' according to a report on the BBC, with Sony's iPod replacement being the PSP."
Whataver, ATRAC was the shittiest perceptual encoding algorithm I ever heard in my life...
"Apple's AACs don't *need* an iPod to work"
That's because AAC is a product of Dolby, Apple just licensed it.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
They don't HAVE to be expensive... YOu can get even better Memory Stick Duos from people like Sandisk, like this guy (http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=2 61293) did. Sony is inherently going to expensive because they're Sony and they like to drive up the price on their own stuff other than their consoles.
Who wants to watch a movie on a 3" screen?
Actually, I bet that a lot of people do (or will).
It's like audio. Back in the day, we had huge hi-fi systems, speakers, amps, the whole lot for the ultimate enjoyment of music. But then the industry brought out a whole bunch of miniature radios and players, culminating in the Sony Walkman (and OK, the iPod) and people found a whole new way to enjoy music: on the move, outside, inside, wherever they felt like it.
Now substitute "huge hi-fi systems" with "home theatre systems" and "Sony Walkman" with "Sony PSP"...
One of my friends has a Dell Axim (that's a Pocket PC) with a 640x480 screen, and DivX playing software. It's awesome, you can watch ripped TV shows literally where you like, on the bus, in the park outside, etc. etc., and the quality is brilliant. I could get used to that. (Not that I advocate ripping TV shows.)
I'm a bootlegger with a large collection of MP3s and .avi's, and I can tell you that 64kbps isn't anywhere near CD quality audio, and 360kbps video at 720*480 looks like shit.
You hit the nail on the head there. Sony's decision to offer the top 500 shows that they really don't understand what makes ITMS so successful at all.
If there are any Sony folks reading, you should click through and read the following articles immediately:
Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):
Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.
If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.
Read my blog.
It should be noted that Sony has just released a 2GB Memorystick Duo (with 4GB approaching). Likelyhood is that by the time that the PSP and this service is at its maturity flash memory prices in GB capacity should be relatively affordable.
It was not too long ago when 64MB and 128MB flash memory was considered massive. I remember spending ~$150 for a 64MB SD just a couple of years ago. Now, 512MB SDs and MS Duos are going for less than half that. It's not unresonable to think that we could be seeing 1GB MS Duos at bargin prices by christmas, or affordable MS Duos that are significantly larger than UMDs in the near future.
And by the time the PSP is apporoaching the end of its life cycle cheap flash memory in the dozens of GBs should be out by then. And hopefully the PSP would be at a price point similar to a GBA SP. If you consider this as a buisness model that will be around at least as long as the PSP it starts making more sense.
If someone managed to combine the Starz Ticket pricing and DRM model with the movie collection of the others, that would be close to a winner.
After having been a Netflix subscriber for 5 years, I realized that this is really the future, once people start getting it. (The vendors AND the consumers need to get it)
Umm, no. AAC is a bytestream format. As with MP3, most encoders just dump the bytestream into a raw file with no container at all. Since AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification[1], the official container file format is based on Apple's .mov format. Apple's .m4p files are not standard AAC files - the DRM is entirely Apple's and is in no way part of the AAC or MPEG-4 specifications.
[1] Some profiles are also part of the MPEG-2 specification, and so could be wrapped in MPEG-2 container files or transports.
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The small screen on the psp is actually quite stunning. At the distances you hold it from you its big enough to enjoy the movie as well. I showed mine to some coworkers who commented that it was like holding their plasma screen in their hands.