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

[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

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

[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.

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.