UMD Format's Death Rattle Begins

Next Generation reports that Wal-mart is dumping the UMD format, because no one was buying movies with the media. Above and beyond that decision, the studios are unimpressed as well. From the article: "One unnamed president of a major studio is quoted as saying, 'No one's watching movies on PSP. It's a game player, period.' Universal Studios Home Entertainment has ceased UMD production. One exec told Reuters, 'Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb.' Paramount is also considering its future with PSP's format. An exec said, 'We are on hiatus with UMD. Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them.'"

Comments

Betamax was better

[b1t r0t]

At least Betamax had some technical reasons for people to consider it better than VHS. UMDs cost the same as (or more than) DVDs, with less resolution.

Re:Betamax was better

[Cy Sperling]

Also, for as much flack as Betamax still gets- people don;t seem to realize that Betamax later evolved into BetaCam and Digital BetaCam. Those 2 formats are still the standard for 95% of all profesional broadcasting (pre HD of course). Beta may have failed at the consumer level, but the technology paid back in spades in the pro market.

Re:Betamax was better

[Keith Russell]

I sometimes wonder if Sony's R&D money would have been better spent on a read-only Memory Stick variant for games. With some clever engineering, they could prevent "PSP Sticks" from being read by any old schmuck with a 6-in-1 card reader, ROM chips would be cheaper, and load times should improve.* I wonder how much the UMD drive's motor has on battery life?

*: Based on my own anecdotal evidence. Maybe my sample set is too small, but every PSP game I've played has been slower than dirt.

Re:Betamax was better

[Bagels]

Actually, UMDs store video at the same resolution as DVDs - 720*480 - but the PSP's screen (with a resolution of 480*272) is incapable of displaying said resolution, and Sony's dragged their heels on releasing a stand-alone UMD player.

Re:Betamax was better

[Lord Kano]

The lesson here is to never pick a Sony backed video format.

LK

Re:Betamax was better

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

or more simply: never pick a Sony backed format

or simpler still: never pick a Sony

Re:Betamax was better

[SetupWeasel]

That's called a cartridge, and they abandoned it in favor of the optical disc for a couple of reasons:

1) Optical discs hold more data.
2) They are far cheaper to make.

In doing so they sacrificed a few things:

1) Loading speed
2) Energy conservation
3) Durability of the read drive

I think of it this way: Sony had a certain set of priorities for the PSP.

1) PS2-esque graphics
2) Portable size
3) Games $50 or less

That could not be achieved with anything but a UMD-like optical disc. They would have to sacrifice graphics or price to use carts.

Was it a good idea? Depends on what your priorities are for gaming.

Re:Betamax was better

[G-funk]

How do you figure? The DS uses carts, and they're well priced. All the graphics rendering happens outside the cart anyway.

Re:Betamax was better

[SetupWeasel]

Nintendo keeps game costs down by keeping cart capacity down. The current maximum DS cart size is 256 MB, and Resident Evil DS was the first to use that size. Most games use smaller carts, because studios have to spend less per game to print it.

Development costs for the DS are also much lower than a console game, so game makers need less of a profit margin to recoup the costs of their games.

The PSP needs space for all those textures and stuff to make a game that fully utilizes the hardware. All those extra polygons have to be coded into the game, and that takes space.

Re:Betamax was better

[Fallingcow]

They must be compressing them way more, then. Probably sacrificing some quality in the audio department, too (stereo instead of 5.1, higher compression there, as well)

UMD: Maximum (dual layer) capacity, 1.8 GB
DVD: Single layer, 4.4GB; Dual layer, ~9GB

The shortest (time-wise) and smallest (disc-space-wise) movies I've ever seen on DVD have still taken well over 3GB.

Unless they're encoding in some codec that's better at compression for small file sizes (like Divx or XVid or H.232) we're talking some serious loss of quality here.

Re:Betamax was better

[NeMon'ess]

Well really the only reasons to bother with MPEG 2 would be using fewer computations to decode it, and a near-negligible increase in video quality. I'm fairly sure though that H.264 is designed to look just as good, but at a lower bitrate by being more computationally expensive.

Re:Betamax was better

[Lord Kano]

Sony products based on widely accepted standards are usually pretty good. Sony VHS VCRs and Camcorders were of top notch quality.

LK

Re:Betamax was better

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Blu-Ray right? Both that and HD-DVD are setup for failure.

Re:Betamax was better

[Anonymous Coward]

increase in video quality? MPEG 2 is artefact city, bluuurgh. The only thing it has going for it is the low computational requirements (i.e. battery drain), which in a device like the PSP are likely offset by having to stream more bits off the disk.

I suppose using MPEG 2 would save them the trouble of recompressing it from a master, they could use the DVD version. But that's not much effort.

Re:Betamax was better

[NeMon'ess]

Yes, increase over xvid or divx. By definition re-compressing a DVD with divx is going to be lossy, but even at very high bitrates I've seen clear blocking that wasn't in the source, and yes I had post-processing turned on and up.

Re:Betamax was better

[b1t r0t]

Like Blu-Ray right? Both that and HD-DVD are setup for failure.

Sony was behind SACD as well.

And we might as well mention ATRAC here, too... Minidisc had minor success, but ATRAC was a failure everywhere else.

Re:Betamax was better

[NiceGuyVan]

ROM chips are NOT cheaper. That's why Sony went with UMD

Re:Betamax was better

[NuShrike]

Of course you h264 directly from the source that was used to make the MPEG2 instead of going MPEG2 -> MPEG4. Then you end up with quality just as good, or better, than the MPEG2 without the blocking or size.

Re:Betamax was better

[Lehk228]

minor success is marketroid speak for "not quite complete failure"

Re:Betamax was better

[Anonymous Coward]

so

compact discs

have any?

Re:Betamax was better

[az_bont]

The largest Nintendo DS card to date is 128MB (1 Gigabit), which has been used on a handful of games, including Resident Evil. The first game to use a card of this size was The Rub Rabbits!, released shortly before.

I'm not surprised.

[Slime-dogg]

Seriously. The PSP is niche at best, and the media price isn't all that cheap, I imagine. Add in the fact that the UMD flicks were rather pricey at retail, and you get a flop.

I'm surprised that the studios actually did release movies on UMD. I'd have waited to see how that whole PSP market panned out first.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[thesaint05]

Maybe if the PSP also played mini discs...

Re:I'm not surprised.

[sgant]

Yeah really. I don't think it will be long before stores stop stocking PSP games! I'm just not that impressed by it, nor do I even know anyone that has one.

My son and all his friends all have Nintendo DS systems. That seems to be the rage now.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[EvilSS]

It is great if you fly a lot. I know several people, including myself, that bought the PSP mainly to watch movies on when flying. Smaller than a laptop, easy to use. I bought several PSP movies when I was flying all the time. Unfortunately that's not a large enough market to sustain it as a format, and there is not any compelling reason to use them outside of traveling. Since I stopped traveling for work, I haven't bought a new one or touched the old ones.

Of course if you are technical you can just rip and compress a DVD then shove it on a memory stick. Not as convenient but cheaper since you get the DVD and get to watch it on the PSP. If (when) I start traveling again I'll probably just do that instead of buying UMD's (even if they are still available).

Re:I'm not surprised.

[radish]

Well I don't know anyone with a DS, but I have a PSP and know at least 4 other people who do also. Isn't it fun how non-indicative of reality personal experiences can be? As it happens, according to a recent article on 1up, the PSP and DS are roughly level in the US market (not so in Japan however, the PSP is at about 50% of the DS installed base there).

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Austerity Empowers]

I like my PSP, it's great on a plane or when i'm stuck somewhere I don't want to be and do not wish to pay attention. (Ex.: Almost any social gathering I'm suckered in to). Features that are nice: great display, good sound, movie-video, kick-ass joystick, wireless Design decisions that detract from the product: UMD format, Expensive Games, no USB storage (WTF!?!) The system could have been good if Sony had let engineers design this product instead of marketing executives. Sell the thing with a hard drive and let users iTunes their games/video onto the thing. Who wants to carry catridges around anyway?

Re:I'm not surprised.

[fistfullast33l]

The PSP is niche at best

I live in NYC and commute via subway every day to work. I am surprised by the number of people who actually play a PSP, watch movies, and even listen to the music (the lame headphones give them away - the left side is shorter than the right). I personally just use it to listen to music because I'm a little wary of holding it out in the open to be snatched away. I wouldn't say I've seen as many people with a DS or Gameboy. Lots of iPods, obviously, and many cell phone gamers and crackberry addicts. But the PSP definitely has a nicer chunk of representation than the other handhelds.

As for the UMD movies, I'm not surprised myself either. I stayed away from them because they were more expensive than DVDs. I always thought that the best way to utilize the UMD movies is to rent, but Sony just didn't seem to get that. If Blockbuster had UMD movies to rent I'd be all over it for when I travel. Great idea, poor execution.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[powerlord]

Ditto. I also work and live in NYC. I use my PSP to/from work to play games. I've also been able to start listening to music and watching video (transfered from TiVo and re-encoded/downloaded to PSP memory stick). The thing that held me back before was ambient noise. In the subway, the ambient noise in a train car can be pretty loud. I finally stumbled on the ER6 ear-buds from Etymotic. Their great, I can listen to music on an iPod or PSP with the volume down at the half way mark (instead of having to crank it to max to compete with ambient noise). As an added bonus, the buds are black so their less of give-a-way vs. the white "I have a high-tech gadget" ones.

I'm amazed at the number of PSPs I see while commuting. Yeah, the number of iPods dwarfs the PSP number, but I've yet to see more than a handful of DS or GBAs. When I do, their usually low teens. The majority of the people I see with PSPs are high-teens and adults.

My favorite is was a three piece suit type using a PSP right next to a teen on his way to high school. Made me wonder if they were running a WiFi matchup :)

All that said, UMD just was not marketed right to work, and I've never known anyone who had a UMD movie, since there was little incentive to buy them instead of DVDs, especially once the 1GB and 2GB MemoryStick PRO cards came out.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

It might have been a good idea if they let you copy DVDs to UMD format to watch on your portable. But then they wouldn't be able to charge everyone a second time for movies, and the movie studies would have hissy fits about these pirates copying their movies to a lower quality format.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[pixel_bc]

> Seriously. The PSP is niche at best

There are over 10 million PSPs worldwide in the hands of consumers... hardly niche.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many of those 10 million actually get used? I know of 2 that never get used.

How many games have been sold for those 10 million units? Not even a 1/4th of the games that have been sold for the DS.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Slime-dogg]

Niche, in that the platform itself is niche. There may be so many PSPs out there, but the actual usefulness of the UMD makes it niche. If I head over to Target/Walmart/etc, and look in the A/V department, how many inexpensive UMD players am I going to see? Odds are, I'll just find the PSP.

Now, the regular old DVD has a plethora of cheap players. It also has a gigantic library of content available. UMD is a solution to a nonexistant problem. You can get a portable DVD player for around $60-80 USD. You can also get two DVDs for the price of one UMD.

So, yes, the PSP and UMD is niche. The expense of the PSP, the UMD, and player for home makes it that way. It makes no economical sense to ship movies on that format.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[fireman sam]

Why didn't you pay $90 (Australian) for a portable DVD player. I picked up one for train trips (over 2 hours per day). It is smaller than a laptop, 7 inch screen, plays DVD, VCD, mpeg4 (avi), MP3, CDDA. It has not region encoding (region free players are legal here). Most importantly, it can play my backups so I don't risk damaging the originals on the train. The only thing it doesn't do is play games.

BTW, for comparison the PSP is still over $300 here and the DS can be purchased for $150.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[HAKdragon]

Hardly accurate either. Sony's 10 million number doesn't refer to units sold, only units shipped.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Australia and I've never seen anyone anywhere with a PSP. I don't know about other countries, but they're certainly a major flop here - the PSP is too expensive, the games are too expensive, and the movies are too expensive. Gameboys are all you see here.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

I watch movies on my PSP. But I refuse to buy UMD because I can easily rip my DVDs and recode the video for the PSP. With the USB cable, I can transfer a movie in a few minutes. With a 2GB media stick, I can usually put two or three movies on it and the battery generally lasts long enough to watch them both.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[MotorMachineMercenar]

So, let me get this straight: you have a PSP ($199), iPod ($200+) and ER6 earbuds ($139) yet you still have a sig that says "help a _poor_ college student." It really must be a tough, rough life missing that AIBO and a Hummer.

Fucking entitlement generation.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[EvilSS]

I thought about that but the PSP had a few advantages for me. First, it's smaller and the battery life is a bit better. Second, GTA:LCS. Third, it's just a cool little device. I also played games on it when flying, just not as much as watching movies when I traveled. Now I do play games on it still, just not movies.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[CrackedButter]

Class post, you are a star sir!

Re:I'm not surprised.

[ImaNumber]

I know of 5 people with a DS, and only one person who *wants* to get a PSP....so we even each other out.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[LordVader717]

The only two people I know (one I personally know, one's a friend of s friend) who own a PSP are people who just started work and instantly had money to burn.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[powerlord]

Good point. Set up that sig about 4 years ago. Been meaning to change it since I graduated and enjoyed getting a pay check, thanks for the reminder. :)

Re:I'm not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

but I have a PSP and know at least 4 other people who do also

I think that's the point. People buy what their friends buy. This way you can play games over the wireless and swap games/UMD movies. If 4 of your friends had a DS, you would probably buy a DS too.

never...

[advocate_one]

well stone the crows... the format was effectively dead, in that it required you to have a PSP... whereas you could go out and purchase a portable DVD player that took your existing disks for a fraction of the cost of a PSP... the only people who were in the market for UMD then were those few PSP owners who were stupid, or else didn't have an existing DVD player and TV to watch them on...

novelty purchase

[iocat]

I think studios saw sales spikes from novelty purchases ("Hey, my PSP can play movies! I should try one") and quickly flooded the market with the same kind of crap they were able to sell at the begining of the DVD market. But no one wants to rebuild their catalogs on UMD like they did on DVD. I think there really is a UMD movie market, but assuming it's a duplicate of the DVD market is probably a bad idea.

Re:novelty purchase

[djdavetrouble]

Excellent point, but the real issue is that the studios insist on not distributing media via networks.
Of course noone wants another freakin physical format. Just let us download content finally. Like iTunes.
but without DRM.

Useless

[Wootzor von Leetenha]

I have a PSP but own no movies. It's like the only people that would buy movies for PSP either fly on airplanes or are frequent passengers on long car trips. The percentage of those people is like .0002 of every PSP owner, I'd imagine. Even then, I don't think the battery life lasts more than 2 movies (?). It's practically useless. Bad, very bad, business decision on Sony and the movie industry's part.

Re:Useless

[tepples]

It's like the only people that would buy movies for PSP either fly on airplanes or are frequent passengers on long car trips.

A lot of people must live or work under conditions that preclude commuting on a bicycle (harsh winters, hip or knee arthritis, no affordable housing within 20 miles of the office, etc). Many of these people rely on a bus or train, and they can watch one act of a movie for each half hour trip.

Big surprise....

[ShyGuy91284]

A proprietary format that is similar in price to a DVD but (I'm assuming) a fraction of the resolution is failing. Mean while, you can purchase the full resolution DVD, Buy a Memory Stick (which aren't terribly priced now as I rexcall), and convert the movie to a PSP format and put it on the stick. I for one am not surprised. With the push for GPU companies to support hardware encoding, the conversion time may eventually not even be a problem for those that do go this route.

Re:Big surprise....

[rsborg]

A proprietary format that is similar in price to a DVD but (I'm assuming) a fraction of the resolution is failing.

Not to mention your other (very good) options:

1. Netflix as a source is great, and convertible as you mentioned, to PSP format.
2. thepiratebay.org is very popular these days for someone who doesn't mind a few minutes searching...conversion is easy also
3. Video podcasting and iTMS downloads are quite usable, and although the screen and quality is smaller, it's much easier than converting DVD/download > PSP compatible. I already have my iPod sync going, now I just buy or subscribe to a podcast, and it works.
4. Or... I can just not watch movies, I mean jeebus, the PSP is a GAMING device, why would I want to watch something when I can be more interactive?

Nobody's buying?

[gEvil (beta)]

Nobody's buying them? But I thought Sony said that they'd sold 8 million UMD movie discs, and that they couldn't even keep up with demand. And that was over six months ago. Are you saying that they weren't being honest?!?

Re:Nobody's buying?

[Kyrthira]

A huge megacorp lying about its profits in an attempt to bolster the market? Never.

Re:Nobody's buying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, Sony reports "Units Shipped" (What THEY have sold to retailers), not "Units Sold" (How many the retailers have sold).

They probably weren't lying, per se, just misleading. Remember, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics...

Re:Nobody's buying?

[mjeffers]

Exactly. I read this as "Sony sold 8 million UMD's [to Walmart and other retailers who can't even give them away]"

Re:Nobody's buying?

[supabeast!]

Sony probably did sell eight million UMD discs - to retailers all over the world, who still have them collecting dust andare now either going to dump them below cost just to get shelf space back, or, if they have the clout to do so, send them right back to Sony.

Re:Nobody's buying?

[porcupine8]

You could probably get that if every PSP owner bought one or two UMD movies just to check it out.

Then they all said "Eh" and went back to playing games. No more UMD sales in the past six months!

Re:Nobody's buying?

[rohlfinator]

Could it be time for another landfill?

Re:Nobody's buying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. Sony and the studios are not going to let this thing drop to $1.00 a movie. They'd rather burn the UMDs and bury the ashes.

I expect they will ship them all back to some central warehouse and hold to see if Sony comes up with a brilliant scheme to get people buying again. Sony is supposed to be showing off a PSP to TV adapter soon. Too little, too late methinks.

This is what annoys me.

[Lave]

I hear stories like this all the time, and from my friends with PSP's they say the same things (hmmm, anecdotal), but when I go into any GAME/Virgin/HMV etc the PSP UMD section outstrips the entire DS section. A console with comparable success*. This was particularly annoying when I was walking to every shop in town desperate for a Nintedogs Mulitpack, which had sold out everywhere.

It makes me wonder how much Sony (and now MS with the 360) are paying to make their brands look popular.

And I don't think it's untrue when I say that a sizeable amount of the hate for Nintendo comes from the way these shops are set up.

* Most evidence suggests the DS far outstrips the PSP in sales, but I avoided saying that because that's not the point I'm trying to make.

Re:This is what annoys me.

[DMoylan]

walk into a super market. all the staples that you will search for to buy are at the back. except bread. thats usually near the front as the smell brings people in. people will search for milk, beans, cereals. to get there they have to walk past things they might buy if they see it.

i've been playing games since the 80s and recently bought a nintendo ds. my second nintendo device. the first was the original gameboy. cool games machine. add opera when its released and i'll use it at work to talk to a wiki.

every game store i walk into has nintendo ds at the back. xbox 360 is almost out the front door. windows are stuffed full of offers for xbox. tells me all that i need to know. i stongly suspect the nintendo revolution will be at the back as well. i know its going to sell very well! :-)

Re:This is what annoys me.

[Guppy06]

"but when I go into any GAME/Virgin/HMV etc the PSP UMD section outstrips the entire DS section."

"Sony is shelling out more money for more shelf space in stores (or using their clout from CD and DVD sales to wring it out) than Nintendo is" doesn't mean "Sony is outselling Nintendo." Most stores I've looked in, if you looked at shelf space alone, you'd never imagine the GBA was outselling the PS2.

duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with an ounce of brains could have predicted this. I realize we're talking about movie studio executives here, but surely at least one of their assistants qualifies?

This is a preview of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for movies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a preview of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for movies.
Normal people will not bother for a high-def, high-priced, super-DRM'd version of a movie that is available on regular DVD.

I predict it will sell like bonkers for backup media, though.

Aww, poor Sony

[vslashg]

And they had such a good track record going into this too, what with the MiniDisc, MicroMV and its predecessor Digital 8, BetaMax...

UMD was invented by a can't-miss tech company and supplied the market of people who wanted a second full-price, lower-resoultion copy of hit movies for their myriad of UMD players. So, you know, I'm shocked.

Re:Aww, poor Sony

[generic-man]

They also created the 3 1/2" floppy diskette, which (thanks to AOL) was my primary medium of cheap storage for several years. Sony working with Philips developed the CD standard and that really took off.

/me twiddles his Sony eMarker nonchalantly

Re:Aww, poor Sony

[NuShrike]

Notice those two successful formats are open formats. Walkman was built on the open-format tape.

Makes you wonder what Sony missed from that to now ....

The bullet and the gun

[steveo777]

I was pretty sure from the moment I heard about the UMD movies that they wouldn't be likely to succeed. I was 100% sure after I found out that sony pointed the gun at their feet, and gave consumers the bullet when they provided the tool to convert movies to watch them off the memory stick. Hmm.. Free vs cha-ching? Then there's the battery power issue. Flash memory takes a fraction of the power that a spinning motor does.

It's still a cool machine. I'd buy one if they opened it up for indie development (I can't develop, but I'd pay for original games). I'd even consider it for multiplayer if the thing would charge (or even just run off the A/C adaptor) with bluetooth enabled.

Re:The bullet and the gun

[radish]

I'd even consider it for multiplayer if the thing would charge (or even just run off the A/C adaptor) with bluetooth enabled.


PSP doesn't have bluetooth. It does have wifi though, which you can (unsurprisingly) use while charging.

Re:The bullet and the gun

[steveo777]

My bad, wifi. You can use it while charging, but it drains the battery even when the charger is plugged in. You even get a warning on screen warning you that it drains the battery. Pretty sick.

Re:The bullet and the gun

[radish]

Wow - you're right - I didn't know this. A quick read of the PSP manual states that you can't charge while the WLAN is in use. Weird. Oh well, you learn something new every day :)

Re:The bullet and the gun

[LordVader717]

I heard that to update your firmware you also have to have the system fully charged, which was pretty annoying for someone I know when he was burning to play his brand new game.

Really ... what a shock.

[WidescreenFreak]

You beat me to it. Why anyone would consider the PSP to be a portable movie player is beyond me. Another cost for a different media, a typically Sony proprietary format, with a screen that's a lot smaller than most portable DVD players. For crying out loud, I recently bought a DVD player with a 7" 16:9 screen that could double as a portable video game display (I/O cables were included) for less than $100 -- and I don't have to purchase the same movie again on UMD!

The fact that Sony actually expected people to double-dip for an inferior format is staggering. Of course, this comes from the same people who brought us Beta, MiniDisc, and music CD rootkits.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[/ASCII]

I agree with the main point of your post, but the part about MD and Beta seems off to me. Beta came out about the same time as VHS, so it was anyones guess which one would win, and MiniDisc was a pretty good replacement for tapes in walkmans until they where pushed out of the market by MP3-players.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[EggyToast]

I think there were issues with MiniDisc, but I do think it was an issue of marketing. They were marketed as a replacement for CDs, but they really sucked in that regard. However, they're fantastic as a replacement for tape -- easy to record to on the fly, smaller, digital, etc. But they were never sold as thus.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[Rimbo]

What's truly staggering to me was not Sony's expectation that they would, but the surprisingly large number of folks who actually did.

Not large enough, of course, but still...

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of Sony, but I totally agree with you.

But here's what really gets me-- I program games for the PSP, and it is a pretty sweet little gaming device. The one huge gaping flaw is that damned UMD drive! The streaming speed is slow, seeking is slow, and it eats battery life like a demon in a garden planted with the souls of small children.

And (I think) the whole reason for UMD was to play movies! ACK! It's so frustrating how artificially limited games are by that drive.

At least Sony opted for a hard drive on PS3 or it would have been the same thing again. Here's some numbers just for perspective-- With a good estimate of 10MB/s off Blu Ray, it would take 51 seconds just to fill main RAM and VRAM from disc. Now let's stream in a dungeon: "Loading........"

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[Shadarr]

Any number greater than zero is surprising. But I guess if you're already paying $300 to play Lumines, an extra $20 to watch Spider Man is just a drop in the bucket.

If they would just bundle them...

[Evanrude]

The problem with the UMD adoption has been the freaking price! I am not going to pay $20-$30 for a UMD movie when I can pay $15 for the DVD and rip it to my memory stick.
The approach they should have taken would be to bunlde the UMD with the DVD for an extra $5. When you buy the movie, you have paid for the rights to view it privately. The UMD is just another piece of $5 media.

Oh well, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

Re:If they would just bundle them...

[Rimbo]

you realize that by doing this you're an EVIL PIRATE! HARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR MATEYYYYSSS...

Sony Ninjas will soon be coming over to your house to chop you in half for attacking their precious flawed business model.

Re:If they would just bundle them...

[cornface]

The approach they should have taken would be to bunlde the UMD with the DVD for an extra $5.

If only they had thought of this!

Pretty much figured this out months ago

[The Faywood Assassin]

No one's watching movies on PSP

I figured it was the beginning of the end when I saw JOE DIRT for the PSP. Now there's a movie I wouldn't even pirate, much less buy a second time for a PSP (if I had one

Beny

London Bridge is . . .

[Profcrab]

Really, who didn't see this coming? Movies that required a $300 device to play and were lower resolution than DVDs? Sony did not push the format any further. They didn't make cheaper players for the UMDs to make them an alternative mobile option to larger, and easier to scratch, DVDs. They also, of course, didn't license the technology to anyone else to expand the market. What do they say about people that repeatedly do the same thing but expect different results each time?

Re:London Bridge is . . .

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

" Movies that required a $300 device to play and were lower resolution than DVDs?"

Resolution isn't the problem. The resolution of the PSP is fine. The problem is the inability to play it on TV. No video out on the PSP, no Sony DVD player with a UMD slot. Frankly, I'm amazed that Sony is this stupid. With 1.5 gigs of storage, they could not only have stored a DVD quality MPEG 4 (or related) version of the movie, they could ALSO have provided a PSP optimized version of the movie on the same disc. (Assuming this is even necessary considering the PSP's ability to resize imagery etc.) If Sony had gone in this direction, the purchase of UMD media would have been based on different factors. It would ask people to buy their format instead of DVD, as opposed to buying it along with a DVD. The PSP would have been a nice touch to get people to 'invest' in their new movie purchases.

Would that have worked? Elephino. At the very least, though, more thought would have been put into the whole UMD purchase decision.

Surprise, Surprise

[Digital Vomit]

Honestly, who didn't see this coming? PSP UMD had all the earmarks of a failure waiting to happen: overpriced, proprietary, underpowered (battery-wise), tiny screen.

Here's what could've made the PSP *the* device to own: the ability to burn your own UMDs with photos or videos or whatever without the need for any proprietary hardware or software. A disc-based, portable image/video sharing device -- properly marketed and with proper competition from other companies -- could have created a new "must have" device that would be almost as ubiquitous as cell phones.

This mega-corps are gonna have to stop thinking about what they want (expensive, proprietary, restricted devices) and start thinking about what consumers want (afforable, open, and easy-to-use devices), or else I will continue to write angry rants!

Re:Surprise, Surprise

[radish]

Errr....this is about UMD movies, not the PSP. You can do everything you mention on a PSP now by using a memory stick instead of UMD. That's really the problem with UMD, I watch video on my PSP all the time but I do it from MS not UMD.

The PSP itself really isn't a failure - go read the article on 1up the other day, they say that in the US it's essentially level with the DS in sales. That's not bad for a market newcomer.

Re:Surprise, Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

"or else I will continue to write angry rants!"

megacorpsv("No! Not that! Anything but that!");

Re:Surprise, Surprise

[Rimbo]

Outside of the US, it's getting its clock cleaned by the DS. Both are getting their clocks cleaned by the different GBA models. What about iPod video vs. PSP? There's a comparison I'd like to see.

Re:Surprise, Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nowhere near the DS in sales. Sony's numbers are the numbers shipped to retailers, not the number sold through to customers. And when it comes to software sell-thru, the DS is absolutely obliterating the PSP in the US market.

Re:Surprise, Surprise

[filterban]

Here's what could've made the PSP *the* device to own: the ability to burn your own UMDs with photos or videos or whatever without the need for any proprietary hardware or software. A disc-based, portable image/video sharing device -- properly marketed and with proper competition from other companies -- could have created a new "must have" device that would be almost as ubiquitous as cell phones.

You mean, like a video iPod?

Oh sorry, you meant disc-based, not disk-based - presumably so people can continue to participate in the fun task of carrying around their entire media collection everywhere they go.

IMO, the best part about this era of audio compression is that is has allowed people to carry around what previously was a 500 pound alphabetized case of CDs in their pockets.

A disc-based movie player would be a step backwards from a video iPod in this regard. For what benefit? Giving a disc containing your latest vacation pictures to your friend? Trust me, nobody wants to look at your vacation pictures, and if by some chance they did, you could just show them on your video iPod.

No Special Features

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

Blockbuster Video's UMD cases have slots for two UMDs for a reason, you know.

If they would start including the same special features as found on DVDs, using two UMDs to do it if necessary, I would buy more UMD movies.

Not like

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course UMD movies are not going to work. How hard is it to reencode a DVD you own into a PSP's format? It's a little more cost effective to watch it off the memory stick.

UMD - Good idea, bad implementation

[sanosuke001]

The way I see it is that they should Sell DVD's for, lets say $20 (or whatever) Now, instead of selling the UMD for $20, they should sell a DVD+UMD bundle for $25 or so. The UMD idea is great, but if the PSP is the only thing I can view it on, it's not worth $20+

stupid idea

[Intangion]

it was a stupid idea at best, i wouldnt doubt MPAA or similar groups had some part in pushing sony towards such a retarded plan in the first place, so that they could have yet another way of selling the same content

in publishers dreamworlds we would all buy all the movies in every available format ;)
watch it in theatre.. buy it on Dvd, HD-DVD, blueray-DVD, UMD, pay-per-view..

get busy consumers!

PSP is an ideal travel device

[rockmuelle]

I found this story about 18 hours after watching the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on a PSP on a plane. So, there's at least one person watching movies on the PSP. Of course, I ripped it to a memory stick and didn't watch it from UMD (in fact, I've never watched a UMD movie).

I'm really disappointed in Sony for their positioning of the PSP. It has so much more potential than as a vessel for movie sales. I take it with me whenever I travel and use it as my primary entertainment, Web, and email device (using a home-grown Web mail app with a UI designed specifically for the PSP - one of a few Web apps I've developed to deliver content in PSP-sized Web pages (sorry, no links as my server can't handle the /. effect)). In fact, at the conference I just attended, there was "contention" for my laptop and I was stuck with just the PSP. It actually turned out to be adequate (though a chat client would have been nice). Text entry was a little annoying, but that's about it.

I really wish Sony would get on the ball with a suite of productivity/connectivity apps. They don't need to be complex, just enough to talk to IMAP/Exchange/iCal/Chat and get me the info I need one the road (I'm not in sales, so my needs are modest). Or even just offer an open development kit so those of us with fulfilling day jobs can hack together little PSP tools.

Productivity + Games + (non-UMD) Movies + Music in one small device is great for travelling...

*sigh*

-Chris

Re:PSP is an ideal travel device

[Archon-X]

What mail / web program do you use for your PSP?
I've been hanging out for a decent one for a very long time - the ones that are rips of game browsers are nasty.

It all depends on your FW version too - I am sticking to 1.5 just because I like the freedom of it - homebrew etc

Re:PSP is an ideal travel device

[rockmuelle]

I use a custom Web app I wrote in Python using IMAP to talk to our mail server. It's great for reading email. I also use Yahoo mail from the Web browser for my Yahoo account, but lately they've added a lot of Javascript features that use up the available memory and make the experience less enjoyable. Of course, this is all using the Web browser in the 2.x firmware. :(

We initially intended to do a homebrew version of the Mail app (the Web app was supposed to be a UI prototype), but upgraded our PSPs to 2.x before realizing the problems the upgrade caused. Of course, there was also the catch 22 with the browser - we needed 2.x for the browser to prototype but that made homebrews difficult.

Cleaning the mail app up and posting it online is on my short list of projects. It'll show up on my Web page sometime in the next few months (www.osl.iu.edu/~chemuell/downloads.php).

-Chris

Re:PSP is an ideal travel device

[Archon-X]

Thanks - Great to hear homebrew coding isn't dead - but it's definitely harder with 2.X firmware :)

PSP is dying

[HalAtWork]

The PSP is dying, not just the UMD format. I've got a PSP and one of the launch games and that's it. Liberty City Stories, the only big PSP game, is hitting the PS2, but even if it didn't, I wouldn't have bought the PSP just for that. Me & My Katamari got cancelled. It's dead, Jim.

Re:PSP is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Me and My Katamari was not cancelled.

Re:PSP is dying

[demon]

"Me & My Katamari" cancelled? Uh, you might ought to break the news to Gamestop and other retailers - they seem to be under the delusion that they have copies to sell. Did they just imagine them?

Re:PSP is dying

[ivan256]

Uh, actually it came out last week.

The $40 price tag on games that cost $20 for the PS2 is what's killing the PSP. Who wants to pay $40 for something you can get cheaper elsewhere?

Re:PSP is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Me and My Katamari in my hand, picked it up at the shop last night.

jeff

Re:PSP is dying

[apoc06]

liberty city stories the only big game? what about syphon filter? burnout legends? winning eleven 9? socom? daxter? lumines? street fighter alpha3? wipeout pure? me and my katamari? if you look at the charts, the PSP and DS titles are scoring pretty evenly. the consoles have been selling about evenly here in the US. [the DS redesign effect hasnt hit just yet...]

theres a version of metal gear solid in the works thats action based like the console version. theres a version of killzone on the way. there another verion of GTA on its way. field commander. a metal slug compilation. monster hunter. a resident evil title, and a silent hill title. theres even talk of a portable god of war. the PSP isnt dead just yet.

Re:PSP is dying

[buffer-overflowed]

Hardware sales aside, here's a software sale analogy for you: The DS is a big 600 pound olympic weightlifter named bubba with a penchant for violence and a belly full of hooch, the PSP is a skinny 100 pound effeminate white guy. The setting is the HBO series oz.

Re:PSP is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are all sequels of existing PS2 games or ports. Guess what... the PSP is not worth $250 to play games for an aging $150 system. Battery life also sucks for the PSP. Sony should either scrap the PSP and get out of the handheld industry or release new and original games.

Betamax was NOT superior

[sirwired]

This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades, and has become "accepted wisdom". Betamax did have higher-quality output (though not by much), but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO. The true test of any technology, is "does it meet the consumer's needs?". In the case of Betamax for a long time, the answer was "not as well as the available VHS machines", not even close for "regular folks". For the extremely limited market of Videophiles, Beta may have been better, but that couldn't sustain the market.

In technology, a common axiom is "Cheap, Fast, Good, pick two." VHS was Fast (shipped worthwhile features MUCH faster than Sony did), and MUCH cheaper. Beta only had "Good".

For starters, there were too few makers of machines and the price was too high. In addition, the first Betamax player was quite feature-poor. The damn thing didn't even come with a clock. You had to buy that as an add-on feature. VHS was ruthless about exploiting this.

2nd, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity was too low. It took quite some time before Sony shipped a tape that could run longer than ONE HOUR. This was colossally stupid. Sony KNEW how to extend it, but the morons in Sony design thought one-hour was an acceptable limit. VHS shipped the 4-hour capable T-120 right out of the gate, with quality that was acceptable. While the quality at the lower tape speed wasn't as good, it was doable for just recording soaps, or whatever. When Sony got wind of the VHS's recording time, they shipped a two-hour Betamax machine, using of course a slower tape speed to extend the time. Of course, this also eliminated most of Betamax's quality advantage.

Time and time again, all Betamax had was slightly superior video quality (VHS and Beta both made continuous improvements to the machines, so Beta wasn't THAT far ahead.) Also, Betamax decks kept the tape threaded at all times, which put a LOT of wear on the tape during Rewind/FF operations. To top it off, Sony made a LOT of mistakes about simple features. VHS was first to ship a pause button on the remote, the first with the longer recording time, the first with a standard programmable timer, the first with an infrared remote, the first with front-loading, the first with a camcorder that didn't suck, feature-wise, the list goes on.

In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn. This was compounded by colossal errors in finance, OEM relations and marketing.

SirWired

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Rimbo]

Top marks, although I'd claim that keeping the tape threaded was an advantage for Beta. It never wore out any of our Beta tapes at the time, and it made player operations much, much faster: You pressed play, and the tape played immediately. My first encounter with a VHS machine, I was wondering, "What the hell is taking the damned thing so long to play?" I thought it was broken.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Ransak]

Cheap, Fast, Good, pick two.

I think you mean "Cheap. Fast. Reliable. Pick two." This was a mantra back in the heyday of Battlebots.

But you're right, it fits just about any technology.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Odin_Tiger]

Betamax was NOT superior
This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades

but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO

(Emphasis Mine)
I just want you to know how much I appreciate that you blatantly contradicted yourself within 3 sentences (counting the title.) It saves so much reading when fools make the effort to out themselves early, and I applaud you for the courtesy.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a bit off on a few points, but I'll only correct one as I've got to make a lunch date.

JVC has never officially supported 4-hour LP. Only later did they include playback support, but sometimes features were disabled. T-120 officially supports 120 minutes or 360 minutes in SP and EP modes, respectively.

I'm a huge fanboy of the VHS format, its successive variants, and its development history at JVC, BTW. I agree with you that it is a superior format than any form of consumer Betamax, and always has been. (However, I did prefer Hi8 very much to SVHSC.) I've mastered a few broadcast-quality VHS beauties. I'm weird, I guess. Lunchtime!

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Anonymous Coward]

If everything about it was better (smaller size, better quality) how was it NOT the superior format?

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Talondel]

Betamax was NOT superior This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO (Emphasis Mine) I just want you to know how much I appreciate that you blatantly contradicted yourself within 3 sentences (counting the title.) It saves so much reading when fools make the effort to out themselves early, and I applaud you for the courtesy.

What an assinine post.

So because he choose to include the too often used expression "IMHO" in his post the entire thing can somehow be discounted? Here's a little information for you. Almost ALL posts are opinion. They sometimes cite facts, or contain references to facts, but the conclusions drawn from those facts are opinion. The GP's assertion that Beta was not superior, and that this common perception is a myth is his opinion. He then goes on to support his opinion by citing several relavent facts. This is a common method for constructing an argument, and one that you should be familiar with. Claim > Support > Summary

He need not have included the IMHO in order for us to ascertain that it was his opinion, as it should be obvious to the reader. My english teacher used to doc points from anyone that included "In my opinion" in an essay as the statement is usually redundant. Generealy speaking it should only be used to clarify to the reader when we've stopped citing facts and gone back to making supposition.

The GP did not in fact contradict himself in the opening three lines. He stated two opinions, and then unnecesarily reminded his readers that this was his opinion. Criticize his writing style if you like, but claiming he's a fool or that he's contradicted himself is an incorrect assesment.

IMHO.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[7Prime]

I totally agree, although I don't particularly like your tone.

BUT, Beta is totally superior for professional-level recording. I work for a local TV company. We're in a rural enough era, and small enough that we still use Beta as our standard (sadly). Now, it kills me that we haven't gone to a digital format already, but if I had to use VHS, I would shoot myself. Now, we're using BetaCam, and I'm not sure the exact differences (I think the tapes are essentially the same, though the players/recording format is higher quality), but the quality level between Beta and VHS is no laughing matter, especially in my field. It isn't a small difference of quality, it's a fairly huge one, actually. Especially for audio, Beta runs VHS totally up the ass. In fact, before Alesis came out with the ADAT digital standard, Betas were the highest quality magnetic tape audio format. Not only that, but Sony created converters to use the visual track as another two audio tracks, allowing for four-channel recording... again, the ADAT replaced that, but only much later. On the video end of things, Betas are much more robust, they don't degrade nearly as quickly with use, their control tracks hold up surprisingly well, and the video quality is greatly superior. The other day, I had to record a VHS tape for a client, and my coworker and I were in awe of just how shitty it looked compared to Beta.

Now, that said, Beta was totally the wrong choice for consumers, for just the reasons you stated. Probably the biggest one was the time issue, since most feature films are between 90mins and 120mins, Beta was incredibly inconvenient. I can't believe Sony's stupidity on that one. If you're going to release a new form of media, at least make it sufficiently large enough to hold the standard amount of data. If CDs had been released that only played 30mins of audio, noone would have switched from LPs.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Odin_Tiger]

You miss the point. Of course posts are usually opinions. The issue is that he begins his post by stating that another person's -opinion- is a "myth". If you are going to claim that a matter of opinion is in fact a falsehood, it follows that you should prove your claim and disprove the other using -facts-, not more opinion. There is a -world- of difference between, for instance, "I think Christianity is better than Islam because..." and "Christianity is a myth, Islam is the truth." I take issue with the post because they clearly don't acknowledge that difference. IOW, they're the "my opinion is the only correct opinion" type.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[sirwired]

My tone may have seemed harsh, but I just as much of a geek as the rest of us here, and it pisses me off Beta lost, given its higher video quality. If Sony did not have their head up their tush so far, they would have trounced VHS in the marketplace. Their mistakes were legion. They blew off RCAs requests for a longer recording time and a timer, and wanted to charge them more money than JVC did. (At the time, RCA was the largest TV company.) They screwed Sears by OEM'ing a Beta model to them, and then turning around and selling the exact same model themselves for less money. When the longer recording time was released, all the early adopters got pissed off because all the movies in the store went to the new longer time, which none of the original machines could play. (If one of the things a company is going to trumpet is superior quality, it is a bad idea to annoy the exact enthusiasts that would care about such a claim.)

Your comment about the length of CDs is interesting. In a book I read on the history and technical specifications of the CD format, there was a funny story. When the developers were first putting together prototypes to get an idea of what a CD should be, one of the first that was put forward was two-sided and the size of an LP. (It wasn't called "Compact Disc". :-) The engineer that developed it boasted it could have 48 HOURS of playtime. Luckily, saner heads prevailed when it was realized how utterly useless that would be for a pre-recorded media format.

I sure hope SOMEBODY gives in on the BlueRay/HD-DVD thing soon, because it cetainly looks to be the whole same fiasco all over again. NOBODY wins when crap like this happens.

SirWired

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[(Score.5, Interestin]

>In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn.

Actually it could be argued that Beta didn't even have video quality going for it. In the initial market, the US, the quality of NTSC video is so poor that you could barely tell the difference between the initial Beta and VHS recordings. By the time Sony got their act together, the VHS side had also made some advances, and the quality difference didn't really exist any more. (In the PAL market it was more noticeable, but by then Beta was already set on its downhill spiral).

I think one of the reasons for the persistent legend that Beta was higher-quality was that a lot of the advertising at the time pushed this factor really hard, because there was nothing else to push - early-generation Beta was, as you point out, inferior to early-generation VHS in almost ever aspect. Because of this the marketing guys concentrated on "Beta is better quality" even though almost no-one could see it with an NTSC signal. It's a bit like the photocopier company that ran a series of ads proclaiming how quick their service guys would be on-site when their copiers broke down, which was a lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that their copiers broke down ten times more often than anyone else's.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[sirwired]

No, I did mean "Cheap, Fast, Good". And the axiom has been around much longer than Battlebots. For a Battlebot, "Reliable" may be what "Good" is, since the winner is the one stays running the longest. For most systems, including Battlebots, I suspect, reliability is only one measure of a systems quality. "Good" can also mean features, output quality, clarity, elegance, capacity, etc.

For an excellent tretise on "Quality", I suggest "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

SirWired

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[b1t r0t]

This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades, and has become "accepted wisdom". Betamax did have higher-quality output (though not by much), but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO.

And if you will notice, I never said it was. I just said that some people thought it was. IMHO, that was because back in those days tapes were expensive, so everybody used VHS in 6-hour mode, which was pretty much inferior to everything, especially Beta's long-play mode. And that's what most people saw. You just couldn't make EP betamax look as bad as SLP VHS. But they both had that crappy "color-under" technique that was totally inferior to laserdisc.

And the real reason Beta lost is said by some to be that Sony didn't want it used for porn videos.

For the other replier, really the only thing Betacam has in common with Betamax is that they use the same size tapes. Betacam records the chroma and luma in separate stripes, using up tape twice as fast as Betamax, limiting you to 30 minutes per tape. Fine for TV news reporters, not fine for tape-delaying football games on a timer. (Okay, so maybe a Betacam player can play Betamax tapes, but that's like a DVD player playing CDs.)

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[b1t r0t]

JVC has never officially supported 4-hour LP. Only later did they include playback support, but sometimes features were disabled. T-120 officially supports 120 minutes or 360 minutes in SP and EP modes, respectively.

Well, that's interesting, because as I understand it, PAL VHS never supported 6-hour mode. You only got SP and LP. I got a multi-standard VHS recorder many years ago and it took me a while to figure this out.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it could be argued that Beta didn't even have video quality going for it

It could be argued, sure, but it want change the fact that Beta picture and mechanism was technically superior. The arguement about the tape disengagement was VHS FUD justifying the annoying delays any time you wanted to play, rewind, or fast forward. He's also got a lot of other small details wrong. Each technical advance on the VHS was matched by Beta and vice versa.

the quality of NTSC video is so poor that you could barely tell the difference between the initial Beta and VHS recordings

NTSC video is still in use around the country. It may not compare to HiDef, but blaming the poor quality of early VCR's on NTSC is foolish. Blame poor quality connectors, blame early over the air broadcasts, blame poor tape formulations, the quality of the TV sets themselves. Trust me, I could see the difference fairly easily, and so could others. But as others have noted, consumers valued recording length far above show quality, so long as people could tell what was going on, they were satisfied.

Blu-ray??

[rlp]

So far Sony has demonstrated the amazing ability to pick the WRONG format every time - Beta, Mini-disc, memory stick, and now UMD. What's this say about the coming Blu-ray vs. HD battle? Seems to me Sony's biggest problem is not technology but internal conflicts within Sony and external channel conflict. Internally, the content producing divisions want the consumer electronics division to cripple hardware and load it up with all sorts of DRM. Externally, content providers are wary of handing a standard to another content provider. Somehow the consumer gets left out completely. Not exactly a model for business success.

Re:Blu-ray??

[NekoXP]

http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=41 36

"Universal Studios Home Entertainment has completely stopped producing UMD movies, according to executives who asked not to be identified by name. Said one high-ranking exec: "It's awful. Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray.""

Would say a lot more if Universal were backing BD-ROM at all but having a real executive state an opinion is good.

Re:Blu-ray??

[mkraft]

UMD isn't anything like Blu-ray.

For one thing UMD wasn't licensed to any other manufacturers so the only device that can play a UMD movie is the PSP. This isn't a problem with Blu-ray.

Second, UMD is a Sony only proprietary format. Blu-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association of which Sony is just one member. The last media format that was co-developed by Sony was a whopping success. You might have heard of it, it was the DVD (Sony was a founding member of the DVD Forum).

So as you can see the UMD was basically DOA while Blu-Ray has a good chance of becoming the next standard.

Re:Blu-ray??

[apoc06]

would mean alot more if the source was actually given. the source could have been made up as far as any of us know. i mean, all journalists can be trusted to not make up quotes, right? especially coming from a source thats not direct competitor in next generation movie formats... yeah, right!

Re:Blu-ray??

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony is ignoring the 'What's in it for me' test, or is delusional that 'me' means end-consumer. It also hopes high priced incompatible formats not licenced to second sourcers will not lead to a 'make stuff-all profit' situation.

It's going to be great, when China pumps out el-cheapo good-enough junk, that will slaughter the wet-dreams of high mark-up days. Those days are gone, and sony will have to choose between making an honest buck, or letting someone else make it. Nothing will counter the consumer expectation, that 'it will be cheaper next week, prices are always falling'. Controlled, centralised distribution is dead (MS excluded).

No wonder...

[dalmiroy2k]

The problem with UMD is that only the PSP can play them, so you can't watch the movie in your tv, in your pc or in a friend's place. I mean, how many times are you gonna play the same UMD movie you just bought? 2 times max?
Most people who got the free Spider-man 2 UMD that came with the system a while ago only played the movie once, and most didn't even watched it completely.
Also, upcoming Video Ipod with widescreen and Tv out will finish UMD for good.

Also at Walmart, though

[mcc]

This is the thing fascinating me about this news: Even Wal-Mart, every time I've gone in there in the last year or so, is pushing UMD movies above the DS games. I've been to Wal-Marts in a few areas and all of them have had the UMD movies right up front and clearly visible in a big flashy display, while the DS games are just kind of unceremoniously stuffed at the back of the aisle.

This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"

I'm still wondering this. Going from this big flashy UMD pushing I've seen recently to just nothing seems like a startling 180. If the article is right that they weren't selling well, why was Wal-Mart displaying such enthusiasm about UMDs up until the moment they dropped them? Were they displaying them thus because sales were sluggish, in hopes they could actually start to move units? Were they just not thinking about things very clearly? Is something going on behind the scenes here? What?

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[homer_ca]

This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"

The obvious guess would be that Sony is paying for shelf space. It's a common arrangement in retail.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[Anonymous Coward]

"Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"

That's thinking backwards (though, admittedly, retailers think backwards all of the time, so I can see why you might think that way). Why push inventory that's already selling through? Why expend the effort to get something out in front of people that they're already buying in mass when you have backstock of stuff that isn't moving? You get the stuff that isn't moving out in front of people to get them to think about it and try to get them to buy it - because you don't want to be stuck with leftover inventory (even if its returnable - it costs money to ship stuff back). If the stuff in the back has good sell-through, there's no reason to push it at all - people are looking for it and buying it without your pushing it on them, so burn through the crap that isn't selling, then move that stuff back to the front once you don't need to worry about your inventory of non-selling crap.

Plus, another thing to think about in "big box retail" is that deals are often cut between manufacturers and retailers. Sony was pushing a new format - they probably gave Wal*Mart a sweet deal in exchange for a prime selling point in the stores. Wal*Mart would then be obligated to live up to the contract, or break the contract with a penalty. If Wal*Mart thought that the PSP and UMD movies were going to be hot, I can see why they'd agree to such a deal.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[SuperMog2002]

Probably the last option (something going on behind the scenes.) My understanding is that many stores (Wal-Mart included) actually sell the best shelf space to the highest bidder. Why is the Wolf brand chili being displayed prominantly next to the hot dogs when the rest of the chili is eight aisles down? Because the company that makes Wolf brand chili paid Wal-Mart a lot of money.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[Uncle Warthog]

This always disheartens me a little, and my response is usually just "Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"

The obvious guess would be that Sony is paying for shelf space. It's a common arrangement in retail.

The other one is that they're using the shelf space and flashy display to get people to buy them because they aren't selling well.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[PeelBoy]

Stop. You're making me hungry.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[BenjyD]

What about the lost DS game sales? Just how much is Sony paying for the shelf space if it is more profitable for the stores to put non-selling UMDs up front and hide or not stock million selling DS games?

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[apoc06]

if that were truly the case, why are ps2 games the most prominent? no matter what retailer you go to, the majority of the time you will see that the bestselling system will be most prominently displayed. in this case, the ps2.

this has remained constant with the psp. the psp gets more shelfspace and a more prominent location in stores. i vote that your second comment is probably the more likely truth. but more likely at least from my viewpoint, the psp games are usually located close to the ps2 games. the ps2 games being the most popular obviously have the most prominent shelfspace.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[Lehk228]

walmart is pushing UMD movies because they want to get rid of them, and sony pays for the shelf space. nintendo doesn't need to pay for prominant shelf space as their customers go looking for games and then buy them.

sony will never learn

[realilskater]

It is apparent that Sony is never going to learn that closed formats don't work. If they would have licensed the UMD for other uses they might have done a little better. They still might not have succeeded but at least it might appear to have a chance. When I first saw the UMD I was thinking this would be a great replacement for CDs. The mini disk floundered but with the UMDs larger size it appeared it might have a chance. Them is traditional Sony fashion they locked down the format killing all chances of wide adoption. This is the same reason I refuse to buy a Vaio. I could just as easily buy a cheaper more functional laptop that doesn't use expensive proprietary memory sticks.

Open is better.

Bring Out The Cheesecake!

[blueZhift]

Sony just cannot seem to cut a break these days. I suppose when they officially pronounce UMD movies dead, they'll blame those darn pirates who have given people the idea that they should be able download movies or rip them from their own DVDs to play on anything they like. Darn pirates! Seriously, digital distribution is the big threat to physical media of any current format.

Anyway, I suppose we should start seeing some fire sales of UMD movies to clear existing stock. Here's my own semi-lame attempt to have some fun with this! Bring on the B movies and go out in blaze of cheesecake!

Re:This is a preview of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for mov

[Anonymous Coward]

I would actually anticipate that High-definition audio formats would be similar to what you will see with High definition DVDs. The similarities are that the average person doesn't have the set-up to take advantage of the new format, the cost of the set up is massive, even if you have the set-up the difference between the current format (CD,DVD) to the new format (SA-CD/DVD-A,Blu-Ray/HD-DVD) are less then impressive, and the lack of a unified format will prevent people from buying into the high-definition format. The only thing that remains to kill these formats is for a movement towards digital distribution of content (in the case of audio MP3).

UMD died, on the other hand, because it was a niche product that was marketed poorly and was far too expensive. Portable Gaming systems, unlike movie players, are usually used frequently in short bursts (like 30 minutes at a time) thus there should have been a greater focus on television content that was inexpensive (as in 5-10 episodes of a show for $5-$10); people would have been willing to pay $10 per week to keep themselves occupied whilst taking the transit for a week.

Forward-compatibility

[mcc]

The trick here is that both blu-ray and hd-dvd have demonstrated technologies that allow for a disc to be a blu-ray disc AND a dvd disc, or an hd-dvd disc AND a normal dvd disc. The idea is that both formats are able to support the inclusion of a normal-DVD layer alongside the next-gen-dvd one, such that the next-gen-dvd player will see the next-gen layer and a normal dvd player just sees the normal-dvd layer and thinks it's playing a normal DVD.

This seems like the only hope either of these formats have, to me. It seems to me many retailers would be loath to give up shelf space, much less shelf space of the oh-so-profitable DVDs, for an unproven format-- much less two at once. But if retailers are faced with the proposition, "hey, if you buy these DVDs, you can sell them to your existing DVD customers, but they're also blu-rays or hd-dvds or whatnot", that would seem to be a lot more palatable. This means that retailers or consumers or whatnot don't have to accept the new format; they can just go on buying their normal DVDs while blu-ray or hd-dvd quietly takes over the world in the background.

I wonder which consortium (blu-ray or hd-dvd) will be the first to realize this. Last I heard, though the forward-compatible discs had been demonstrated for both formats, no one had announced plans to actually sell any forward-compatible discs for either format.

Re:Forward-compatibility

[BeerCat]

While forward compatibility might well get the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD on the shelves, if there is no additional content over regular DVD, then people will lose interest (particularly if they are more expensive than DVD.

While many feature films either come packed to the gills with extra features, they are not always that worthwhile. I mean, once you've seen the trailer, is anyone other than a completist bothered about the "slightly different trailer"? I reckon that most BR/HD will end up left blank, but one or other format will end up succeeding as an archive format (unlike the limjited success of DVD-RAM)

Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[metamatic]

That still doesn't explain the Betamax failure, though.

By the time I saw my first home video recorder, the early problems of Betamax had been eliminated. The machine had a timer, multi-hour tapes were available, there was even a multi-load option to put 4 tapes in a stack and have it use them all while you were on vacation. The tape was automatically unthreaded once a certain threshold of FF/RW was hit--and in fact, many VHS decks had started to keep the tape threaded initially, because a 1 second pause to thread or unthread the tape each time you hit a button is damn annoying when you're skipping around trying to find a particular point.

Video stores were about 50/50 Beta/VHS. There were other manufacturers selling Beta decks. And Beta still had far better video quality--maybe you couldn't see it on lousy US NTSC TVs, but on PAL systems it was very obvious.

Yet VHS still won. So I don't buy the argument that alleged early deficiencies of Betamax account for its failure.

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[hey!]

there was even a multi-load option to put 4 tapes in a stack and have it use them all while you were on vacation.

Which reminds me of the old technology adoption curve.

Early adopters want all kids of whiz bang features. Pragmatists are interested in far fewer features, and much more interested in cost. Late adopters are only interested in cost. You make the lion's share of your money with the pragmatists.

It follows that if somebody gets to the pragmatists before you do with a good enough, cheap enough product, you're heading into a dead end. In the case of UMD, I'd guess that format would be DVD; you can get portable players now for around $100, and once you have a handful of titles you're ahead of the game price wise, as the UMDs are more expensive, and you may end up buying DVDs of your favorite movies anyway.

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that you can use DVDs other places, too. Such as your living room, in your portable computer, or in your media center PC. And you can use it over at your friend's house -- who doesn't have a PSP. Work will (often) have a DVD player. Heck, some boats have DVD players (and, of course, many cars).

UMDs made no sense. I wonder if Sony made retailers buy non-returnable stock of their proprietary plastic discs just to be able to stock other Sony merchandise.

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[sirwired]

Beta was released in Europe far it was released in the U.S. So in the U.S., VHS had quite a head-start feature-wise. I am looking at a gallery of Beta models right now, and the first Beta machine with even the two-hour record time AND a timer was not released until 1979, two years after VHS was in general release. The autoloader was meant to get around the fact they still didn't have a six-hour tape.

SirWired

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[mgblst]

Video stores were about 50/50 Beta/VHS. There were other manufacturers selling Beta decks. And Beta still had far better video quality--maybe you couldn't see it on lousy US NTSC TVs, but on PAL systems it was very obvious.
 
This is not true at all, and if you could see it, then you are imagining things. The difference was really negligible. Unless you are comparing the professional Beta format...

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[metamatic]

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

Sure, and butter is really no better tasting than margarine, it's just another myth.

Re:Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[DrScotsman]

Damn right it's a myth. Margarine tastes better than butter!

UMD

[szembek]

Uncles of Mass Destruction?

Time for investing

[77Punker]

1. Go buy all the UMD movies you can find 2. Shove them in the closet and leave them for 20 years 3. Sell them one at a time to rabid fanboys on E-Bay

Re:Time for investing

[davidstrauss]

Hey, it worked for VHS, right? What are those fetching on eBay?

Consider

[Blinocac200sx]

for a moment that for the price of a PSP you can get a DS and a portable DVD player, and a movie and a game. I'm just shocked it's lasted this long.

Open the UMD Format

[relyter]

I was very excited when the PSP first came out because the premise of the UMD media was so great. I have become rather tired of scratched DVDs the refuse to play, and the premise of a smaller disk that includes a protective shield was quite attractive. I had hoped the sony would open the UMD so the consumers could use them not only for PSPs but also for data storage in general. I could see the UMD replacing compact disks and supplementing DVDs for data storage on a grand scale (they hold 1.8 gigs). If sony would permit the use of UMD as more than a proprietary format, I would think that they would have a great success. I suspect the reason that they haven't done this is to thwart pirates...

Irregardless, it would be rather nice to be able to put music videos or other movies on a tiny disc that you could watch just about anywhere.

Why do we use Digi-Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we today use digi beta in the production environment if VHS was better? Beta evolved in the video production environment where VHS couldn't reach. Beta SP, Digi Beta, Beta-SX, HD-Cam. VHS digital is not bad but not as good.

plus the rasons you explain why vhs excelled were because of sonys poor choices, not because Beta couldn't do it. It could have been done but sony tried to hold on to there baby to long and ended up smothering it in that market.

Re:Why do we use Digi-Beta?

[sirwired]

Betacam, didn't have a whole lot to do with Betamax, which was strictly a conusmer technology. They share a similar form factor, but everything on the backend for Betacam is professional-grade. Betamax was strictly consumer-grade stuff. Maybe a little better than VHS, video-quality-wise, but nothing earth-shattering.

Don't confuse Betamax and Betacam.

SirWired

The solution to all of life's problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn. Start selling porn movies on UMD, and you will turn it into an instant hit. And I'm only partly joking.

Re:The solution to all of life's problems...

[Chemical]

They do, in Japan.

same reason the milk is at the back

[Anonymous Coward]

frustrating yes, but unfortuneatly the same reason the milk is at the back, they know you have to get so maybe they can entice you to pick up something else on your way back there.

Hopefully Apple is paying attention

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Movies on micro screens just don't work, period.

Few people can really dedicate 90+ minutes to watch a full length movie. Sure, video podcasts, TV shows and music videos make sense, as people can watch them for 30 - 60 minutes without interruption, but movies are just too long for mobile formats.

Plus, I find that these small screens like PSP and iPod don't refresh fast enough, so the movies are often blurry and give me a headache. I also get a neck ache trying to bend over my PSP to watch the Spider-man 2 movie that came with it. I could only watch about 15 minutes before I gave it up as futile.

Sony's biggest mistake was offering no TV out connectivity for the PSP. UMD's might have been a marginal success (instead of a dismal failure) if Sony just decided to put a video out on the PSP. Actually, the PSP might have been a bigger success if you could play both movies and games on a TV. It doesn't have to by HD by a long shot, but standard Def playback is standard on the iPod, why not the PSP?

But Apple should pay attention before launching into full feature movie sales. At least Apple has the ability to connect to television, which may be their saving grace, but I think full length movies for portable players is a failed concept. Movies are not like music that is played in 5 minute intervals, nor are they like books you can stop and start at a later time. I prefer to watch a movie in its entirety in once sitting, and rarely do I find myself in a situation where I am spending 90+ minutes sitting down with free time on my hands, even at home.

Shortly...Useless

[White Yeti]

My 10-yr-old bought three UMD movies after he first got his PSP. He watched them on road trips and sleep-overs with his friends. Now I find the movies in a drawer in the kitchen, with the scissors and tape! This boy obsesses easily, but lately the handheld/console market has him yawning. Now he's got to have a pair of (expensive) Heely wheely shoes.

Re:Shortly...Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

He's got to have those shoes? You say he's ten years old?

DMCA

[tepples]

Of course if you are technical you can just rip and compress a DVD then shove it on a memory stick.

And to get even more technical, ripping a CSS encrypted DVD to a PSP compatible format is a tort and crime in the United States, Australia, many countries of the European Union, and other developed countries that have implemented the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

Re:DMCA

[EvilSS]

Yes but technically, since I don't care if I am breaking the law by doing it, and the chances that I would be prosecuted for doing so (for personal use from my own collection, not downloading or distributing)are exactly nil, that really does not matter.

Re:DMCA

[tepples]

technically, since I don't care if I am breaking the law by doing it

Even if you choose to disregard the law, less technical users will not know that it is possible to convert DVD Video to a PSP compatible format because software to do so is not available at retail, and this in turn is because chains such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy do care about not breaking the law.

Re:DMCA

[EvilSS]

Ah, gotcha. Sorry, I misinterpreted your first reply. Yes, you are correct. Non-technical users will be SOL if they like watching movies on their PSP and UMD goes away. The sad fact is they don't even realize how the law, even if they are aware of it in the first place, strips them of their fair-use rights.

I watch plenty of movies on my PSP...

[dannycim]

... Just not on UMD. I've been disappointed by the catalog, so I just convert my DVDs to MP4 PSP format, put them on my 2G stick and watch them anywhere I go. I prefer video files anyway, because they start in an instant, whereas UMD movies require spin-up and seeking. I think Sony should have made all media downloadable, including games (with DRM of course), put emphasis on larger flash storage (maybe 1G standard), and they could have saved a lot on the hardware costs. Plus, the units would have been much thinner.

I've had a PSP on me since the launch. It's replaced my MP3 player and given me lots more stuff to do. I got Daxter yesterday and it's fun!

The new high capacity batteries mean that I have to charge it only once every two commute days now.

Filtering within DVD players

[tepples]

A proprietary format that is similar in price to a DVD but (I'm assuming) a fraction of the resolution is failing.

DVD Video in North America and Japan is specified at up to 720x480 pixels. However, the median DVD player is connected to a 4:3 TV through a composite video connection. After filtering the picture horizontally to remove color fringes and excessive dot crawling (the hallmarks of luma-chroma crosstalk), you end up with the equivalent of 480x480, the resolution of Super Video CD. After further downsampling vertically to correct for anamorphic aspect ratio, and filtering vertically to reduce flicker, you end up with about 480x272 of actual picture information, which happens to be the same pixel resolution as UMD Video.

Sony Format failures

[fm6]

It's astonishing how good Sony is at inventing cool new media formats and how bad they are at getting them adopted and becoming industry standards. Beta video tape. 8mm video tape. Magnetic audio disks. DAT. Memory stick. And now UMD.

Of course, UMD is in the "what were they thinking" category. Not that it's a bad format. But (a) nobody wants to watch a movie on such a small screen and (b) even if they did, the DVD format is too locked in to allow a competing format with such a limited audience.

Twisting the knife

[Guppy06]

On the other hand, my local Wal-Mart still seems to be selling GBA Video carts.

4 Simple (And Fairly Obvious) Reasons for this...

[Thedalek]

1) UMDs are only playable on the PSP, which is, by and large, still a $200 minimum investment. Contrastingly, DVD players and VCRs are available for a tenth of that.

2) The PSP does not, natively, support output to a TV screen (I realize that there are 3rd party devices which allow this). Thus, if you are going to watch a UMD, you'll be doing it on a portable screen, and almost certainly watching it alone. Even the loneliest of nerds likes to watch movies with other lonely nerds.

3) Playing a UMD movie on the PSP means continuously spinning and reading from the disc, which is the most power-hungry thing the PSP does. Moving parts consume great whopping chunks of battery life, and watching a movie on the device means you'll probably need to charge the system again tonight.

4) DVDs exist. Honestly, this is most likely the biggest reason UMDs fail as a format. There is absolutely no compelling reason to purchase a more expensive UMD with lower resolution output and fewer features, when you could save money and get more and higher quality content by buying the same movie on DVD. "But UMDs are portable!" So are DVDs, and portable DVD players can be had for less than a PSP, with a much bigger screen.

UMD Movies: Dumb at launch, dumb now, and dumb when the system dies. If, instead, Sony had released video content on memory sticks, or via an iTunes-like download service, they might be making money on video content for the PSP, rather than having spent a fortune manufacturing a product no one wants or needs.

Instead, they fell into the mentality of thinking, "We need a big library of titles for the PSP. Games take a lot of time, energy, and money to develop, so in the meantime, let's convert movies. They're already made, we already own a lot of them anyway, and even those we don't own cost a fraction of game development costs." This leads to a situation where the video selection for the PSP outweighs the game selection. Not a good situation for a completely redundant product.

There's a pattern here.

[sehlat]

If you take a look, every single failure can be tracked back to the same cause: Sony's obsession with kowtowing to Hollywood rather than the consumers. Beta went down in flames because Sony didn't want people to have a recording time long enough for a movie. "One hour is enough for a TV show." Beta video tape.
8mm video tape. (By the time they did this, VHS owned their lunch.) Magnetic audio disks. (Low-capacity, hard to use, lousy recording time(again!) DAT.(OMG, perfect copies of the *sound* AARGH! Piracy!!!, Can't let this loose!) Memory stick.(Copying controls and, *really* slow load times, somebody might load mp3s after all...)

Sony's earned the failures by not having the cojones to tell Hollywood off.

Smart consumers

[Fallingcow]

The only way for a smart consumer to justify buying UMDs is if they're only gonna buy a few of them.

'Cuz you can get a good portable DVD player that shares discs with the rest of your collection for the cost of about 5-10 of those UMD movies.

I could have told them that before it came out

[sycomonkey]

...But nobody ever listens to me.

is this a surprise?

[rAiNsT0rm]

I mean, seriously. When Sony had to try so hard a couple months back to extoll the massive "success" of UMD in every media outlet known to man, that should have been your first clue. Then when they finally wised up and thought to include the UMD for free with a DVD it was too little too late. (many had been calling for this from day 1)

UMD and Blu-Ray are both losers. They are expensive, offer no real benefit to the majority of consumers, and did I mention expensive... add in the low acceptance of the PSP in general and you have a big loss. I expect the Blu-ray to shake out the same way. FTR HDDVD most likely won't blow the doors down at your local retailer either.

Consumers are speaking loud and clear, and have been for over a year with the piss poor game sales. It takes Joe sixpack a little longer to get fed up with mediocrity, but eventually they do. Welcome to that time Sony and MS... best of luck with $500+ systems and $60+games.

Re:is this a surprise?

[Lehk228]

actually the success of mediocrity is what will likely kill HDDVD and blueray. DVD looks good and most will not be willing to pay more money for a disc they have to replace all their players to use.

DVD pretty much killed VHS because VHS sucked, crappy sound crappy video and as a bonus sometimes the tape would get screwed up destroying both the tape and the VCR.

Prediction

[triso]

...'We are on hiatus with UMD. Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them.'

The market has spoken. I predict this will be the fate of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well.

Betacam is NOT Betamax

[pelrun]

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Betamax failed in the marketplace, but Betacam did very well in the professional market. Note that these are VERY different technologies. Betamax battled VHS and lost, but Betacam competed against MII (the professional version of VHS) and won.

Sure, Betamax and Betacam may have the same sized tapes, but the video signals on them are very different.

Porn killed Betamax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not exactly - the lack of it did.

Sony held some pretty tight controls on the kind of content that could be sold on Beta, whereas with VHS content producers were free to use it as they wished. And Sony didn't allow pornography to be sold on Beta.

Unfortunately (for Sony at least) the pornography industry has been shown to be a massive early driver for new technologies. The first video-rental businesses were largely pornographic in nature, and that only changed when the larger mainstream video-rental businesses appeared in the mid-80's. If you had VHS you could get your porn and watch it in the privacy of your own home. If you had Beta you were out of luck. So for a large percentage of people, Betamax wasn't even in the race.

Re:Porn killed Betamax!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's complete crap. Sony sold blank Betamax tapes just like the vendors of VHS did. Sony couldn't have prevented BetaMax from being used for porn if they tried.

No! The portable nut has failed! :-(

[Bushido Hacks]

I had such high hopes for the PSP. I still believe it can be successful if Sony can open up to the hacker community. Heck its bad enough they killed off Qrio, Albio, Clie, and there latest world band radios that the Passport to World Band Radio gave high reviews for.

Sony would succeed if they'd be more flexable.

Vaio owners should be on guard and be certain that Sony doesn't kill that next!

No Big Surprise

[melonqueen]

Doesn't surprise me one bit. I'll admit, I have 2 UMD movies (Hitch and Charlies Angels). Got them at reasonable prices too cos I bought them at a store where I had staff discount. But really, I have only used them a handful of times, and it's only been when I was travelling. Used it on the plane on the way to Vietnam when I went there in January, and then during the drive from Adelaide to Melbourne once... Apart from that the only times Ive used the UMD movies is the first time I bought them and just HAD to watch them. Seemed cool at the time, but now it sorta seems impractical (i mean, holding the PSP for the duration of a movie gets a bit uncomfortable). I think the idea and concept was good, but it wasnt marketed enough to appeal to the masses. And also cos the PSP costs about $350-$400 here in Australia, so why invest in one just to watch movies when u can buy a protable DVD for under $100 these days.

UMD movies have no point

[Criliric]

Like seriously I've watched 12 movies so far on my PSP, not a single one was a UMD movie either, I just converted movies I... uhhh... owned, yeah thats it, to play on the PSP all you really need is a big enough memory stick, and when you don't want to watch it anymore just delete it.

PS3?

[paullyjunge]

No one's watching movies on PSP. It's a game player, period.'

I wonder how long it will take people to start saying that about the PS3...

What to do with the discs?

[jameskojiro]

They could pull them back, re-label them and record games on them, and sell the PSP games for 1/2 price, sheer marketing genius!!!

I keep saying this....

[CokoBWare]

Originally posted on my blog http://pspexperience.blogspot.com/

I wrote an email to Next-Generation Magazine in regards to this article http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_conte nt&task=view&id=2626&Itemid=2. Please check it out, and read my email to them that I sent as a reaction to the article:


In regards to your article "Wal-Mart Quiting UMD Movies", I wanted to say that I
have given quite some thought to the UMD movie problem that the movie
industry is having. The problem is not that the PSP is not movie
machine and only a gaming machine. Those are statements that people
say who haven't used the device consistently every day for the last
year. The PSP is most aptly a gaming AND movie device, lesser a music
device (iPod still beats it hands down). The problem isn't that
consumers don't want to watch movies on the PSP. The problem is that
UMD movies are priced so high that a PSP owner will look at a game vs.
a movie and rather blow $40US on a game that they would probably play a
lot, rather than spend $20US on a movie they may only watch a couple of
times.

The problem I see with this is that UMD movies do not provide enough
value for consumers to purchase at the pricepoint retailers are asking
for. Granted there was market analysis done on the kinds of UMD movies
people were watching, and mostly it was comedies and action, two known
generes that have HIGH replayability factor. When you start selling
movies like "Rent" on UMD, who the heck is going to watch it more than
once? You're not going to buy a boring drama that you might only watch
once every 6 months. Granted there are collectors of UMD movies, but
they represent the minority. Comedies and action movies have higher
value than other genres, and consumers want the best bang for their
buck. UMD games currently offer this proposition.

If Sony and the other movie studios were to reduce their pricing for
UMDs to something more reasonable like $8-10US per UMD, I think
consumers would feel better about parting with their money for a UMD
movie, and probably feel inclined to buy a movie they might not
otherwise at $20US. I know when I saw a sale on for UMD movies at
Blockbuster where selected titles were $8US each if I bought 2, I
snatched 2 titles up IMMEDIATELY. Granted I wanted stuff I could watch
again and again, but you get the picture.

I write this to you because you guys get this industry. It seems that
the industry is not getting the consumer in this particular case.
Before we close the door completely on the UMD movie business, lets
look at how we can price the UMD movie back into the entertainment
market, not out of it. It might be valuable to discuss this further
from the consumer standpoint.

Regards,

Cory Koski


As you can read, its very similar to my other UMD movie blog post. The industry HAS to reduce the price of this format, or it's doomed to obscurity, just like MiniDisc and BetaMax.

Re:I keep saying this....

[Russellkhan]

Insightful and well said. I only disagree with one small part:

"The industry HAS to reduce the price of this format, or it's doomed to obscurity, just like MiniDisc and BetaMax."

Tbhe industry doesn't HAVE to do anything - they don't care if the format is doomed to obscurity. Sony cares, and maybe there's something they have to do, but I'm not sure what that would be, or even if there is something they can do to save the format at this late stage.

As a related aside, I am a PSP owner who owns no UMD movies and has no interest in owning any.

Re:I keep saying this....

[CokoBWare]

Thanks dude... I get that ALL THE TIME!

Re:I keep saying this....

[CokoBWare]

You're absolutely right. The industry doesn't have to do anything it doesn't want to. However, it loses a potential revenue stream if the format flushes itself down the toilet cuz companies got greedy. Get the consumers hooked on a media format, and they will be like flies to poop.

I myself did trade in the only two UMD movies I ever bought. I wanted the credit so I could buy a new game for my PSP :) Blockbuster gave me $9CDN for each movie that I bought for $10CDN. Pretty sweet deal actually :)

Why would anybody care?

[Anonymous Coward]

If i wanted 2 buy a systm tht would play video and audio, and I culd connect 2 my tv, I'd get an xbox. I nvr cared for teh psp's video capabilities, nor wuld i care for teh ipod's. I'm not installing leenux on my toaster, so eh.