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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."
Not with the expensive memory stick duos or w/o a umd burner it won't.
I doubt movies formatted for the little PSP with it's 480x272 screen would be popular targets for piracy. Especially when the movies are already released as DVD's which are presumably much higher quality and easy to rip.
some quick clues to get you started:
1. Apple's AACs don't *need* an iPod to work
2. don't make the download more expensive than just clicking on Amazon next-day delivery
3. don't only make new films available to download 6 months after general availability
If Sony locks their movies down as tight as possible, this service will be dead before it hits the water.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
...top 500 movies?! Who gives a rat's ass about their top 500? You can buy those at the store anyway. How about a huge backcatalog of obscure and indy films (kinda like iTunes has a large catalog on non-Britney music)? They might actually get some money from me then.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I've read some comments saying "Oh the PSP screen isn't big enough, memory sticks are too small"
My guess is that sony will make this as an option for the psp via an addon accessory. Some kind of cartridge connected to a base unit that connects to a hard drive that snaps onto the bottom of the unit.
It will probably have video out, stereo out via a Y cable plugged into the headphone jack.
Also folks aren't taking into consideration the modern codecs we have availiable to us these days. As an internet broadcaster, I know just how nice on2's vp6-7 series codecs look at low bittrates. I'm able to push out a full D1 res stream (720x480) at 15 FPS with stereo AAC 64kbps sound(cd quality). Altogether the stream runs at 360kbps, or about a CD for 4 hours of video.
1) Sony's format won't be DRM free at all, so people will continue to make their own DRM free versions.
2) Jon will break the DRM about a month after it's available
3) Sony will sue Jon under DMCA (even though it's not applicable where he lives)
4) Napster will try to get in on the act
5) Apple/Sharman/Somebody will sue Sony for patent infringement
6) Sales will be great but copyright infringement won't take a dent.
7) Retail sales will take a dent and Sony will blame that on P2P instead of their own better-than-retail sales mechanism.
Am I missing anything?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Sony's Connect store has had rather poor success.
But regardless of that, the iTMS didn't hit until AFTER the iPod was a success, and controlled most of the HDD MP3 player market. The PSP came out... tuesday.
I'm all for downloadable movies, or heck, extended trailers or synopses, but people don't buy iPods so they can go buy music from the iTMS -- they use the iTMS because they already have iPods.
The PSP will not have market saturation for a while, even if it tramples Nintendo's market. And as said above, the thing comes with a 32mb memory stick. Are users really going to shell out another hundred for a 512 stick just so they can watch a heavily compressed movie they purchased online? Or will they simply rip the DVDs they already own?
Music is great because you can buy just one song for a buck, and it's an aggregate like that -- you get a selection of songs. Movies need to be enjoyed on the whole, in usually a full sitting.
There just seem to be so many things already stacked against such a service's success. Now, if they were selling TV shows for a buck that would fit on cheaper memory sticks, I could see this having some impact. But, uhh, no, not for the PSP, and not without a device to play them on separate from computers. People buy music for entirely different reasons than they do movies. The fact that you can play both on a computer do not mean that they are consumed in the same way.
Here is the problem with having too many pots cooking. As many people have said in related (iPod Video) threads, music is a background thing you have going while you do x, while watching video is something you *do*. Now, the only market segment this portable video model can really work with is children and public transit commuters. People who use a passive mode of transportation. But the PSP is well outside of "buy it and shut the kids up" pricing. This could have worked really really well for them with kids movies, but how many kids will get a PSP for good grades or whatever? Sony seems to be trying to straddle the success of Apple and Nintendo here, and a whack in the nuts is a quite possible outcome.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
It would get cheaper and bigger, if Memory Stick was not a propriatary format that is only manufactured by Sony and a few other companies. This monopoly makes it so that Sony doesn't have to compete by offering larger cards. That is why Sony Memory Sticks enjoy almost no market share, outside of Technophobes who purchase Sony Cameras not realizing that they will be extorted for storage. Apple has not "moved" from hard drives to flash. They now have two flash based iPods, and six hard drive based iPods. In some situations, flash does make sense. For movies, it does not. A full length movie of decent quality, in MPEG4 (or equivalent) compression, is about 700 MB. My latest casual search of Froogle reveals that 1 GB Memory Stick DUOs go for $120 US (1 GB CompactFlash cards are $60 US). That means for every movie you want to take with you at a time, that is $120. Sony's new UMD Disk is not really an option, since there are no blank media or drives available, and we are at the mercy of Sony and the MPAA to extort money from us to rerelease a limited selection of titles we already own on DVD, but have to purchase again.