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Sony Says UMD Is Here To Stay
PlayStation Portable senior marketing manager John Koller spoke with the Pocket Gamer site about the much-maligned UMD format. The disc used in the PSP for both games and movies, few stores carry UMD movies any more. Just the same, says Koller, Sony supports it 100%. From the interview: "'UMD possesses many strengths, from size to form factor to portability,' he says. The same can easily be said of the UMD's cartridge counterpart on Nintendo DS. However, ease of UMD manufacturing is seen as a winning benefit. 'Duplication of UMDs is much easier, cheaper than cartridges,' Koller adds. 'We've really optimized time and cost by going with a disc-based format.' On the topic of UMD weaknesses, Koller is candid: 'There's no question the biggest weakness is related to porting games from other platforms. Publishers are concerned about the size of UMD because they can't cram a DVD game on to it.'"
I just did a quick search for UMD on CircuitCity.com and found 0 movie discs. On Bestbuy.com, I found 79 movie discs, all sold out and with the last one having a release date of 11/25/2005. The movie format is dead, it has been for a year and 1/2. Where does Sony come up with this stuff?
Easy to copy both to and from, great for homebrew & pirates, crap for content producers.
Can't charge through noise for the writers.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I tried to mod you funny, but accidentally clicked on overrated. Unfortunately, the new mod system doesn't wait for me to hit the moderate button, so sorry about that. But by submitting this, I undo the mod. Neat!
The difference is - as you've implied - that Apple generally tries to solve a problem that has no open solution (there were no alternatives to AppleTalk or ADB, for example). Sony often just tries to control markets with its proprietary formats (there really was no need for Memory Sticks). Which is probably why Apple is changing, and Sony isn't: Technology has caught up with Apple, so they don't need to rely on proprietary formats anymore. Sony, on the other hand, still tries to control as many markets as it can.
Sony could have owned the removeable media market in the '90s. Around the time that Iomega was raking in big bucks from their expensive Zip disks, Sony had made and was selling (but not pushing) a PC drive that could write to cheap 120MB Minidiscs. Unfortunately the drives were expensive at the time. That shouldn't have lasted long since the mechanisms and support electronics for reading and writing Minidisc aren't that much more complex than a CD-ROM transport.