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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.'"
"Sales in Japan, however, have been astronomical - in autumn of last year, UMD movies underwent a 1000 per cent jump in the region as a result of deep discounts by retailers." Well, yeah. That's an easy way to get sales. My local Circuit City blew their discs out fast when they were discontinued and marked down to $2 each. Last I knew, most movie distributors other then Sony had stopped releasing UMD movie titles due to poor sales. Sony just needs to let the format die, everyone else has.
Minidisk, Memory Stick, and now this. Sony seems to have its mind set on producing a medium that is more expensive than any of the competition, doesn't add anything significant feature-wise and is totally incompatibile with the rest of the world.
In one hand, this is kind of lock-in, buy ours, not the competitor's. In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
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"I just don't understand why they even need to, are there any advantages that other formats don't (and wont) have?" Yes, it has one big advantage for Sony. They can collect fees on UMD discs. If another format is used, they don't get paid for it. It is all about them trying to push their proprietary format so they get extra income. It is the same reason they want Blu-ray to take off. Nothing is better then getting paid for simply controlling the underlying media format.
Every time I saw UMD movies, they were more expensive than the DVD version. This probably hurt sales of the PSP as well.
It's typical Sony. Make your own format and charge extra for it. They never learn.
They forgot to mention that's quite insufficient. Stores don't support it. Content producers (except Sony) don't support it.
And not to mention, consumers don't support it. Who'd pay almost the full price of a movie just to watch a downscaled version on his psp.
Allow me to add one more bullet:
Anyone have a guess about tomorrow's headline?...
Not only that. It's also rather small, its dimensions are less-than-huge, it fits inside a reasonably sized box, not much space is generally taken by these disks and you can put many of them in one standard shirt pocket. Not to mention it's engineered not to be very big and there are lots of objects that take much more space. Geez, know your product's strengths man.
"Sony says UMD is here to stay; consumers not buying it."
The biggest fault is deciding to put a shrunk DVD drive into a handheld. Manufacturing may be easier for them, but the DS cartridges are selling a bajillion times more and there doesn't seem to be a problem keeping up there.
The problem with the PSP is that it tried too much to be as powerful as a home console. Most of it's games are therefore not seen as better than DS games, but as stripped down versions of home console games.
In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
Add to the list the format of the battery. My first digital camera was a SONY. Two lessons learned.. Interchangable parts are a must. Otherwise you are required to overstock seldom used items.
One memory card and one battery is OK for the occasional shot of the kid but useless when taking in an auto show, wedding and reception, parade, etc. Either I had a full memory with lots of useless CF cards nearby, or a dead battery with lots of NiMH and alkaline batteries nearby also useless.
I have standardised as much as possible. Everything uses either CF or SD cards and AA or AAA batteries. I have enough of both to get the job done. For a big job, the cards get pulled out of the MP3 player, the GPS and the hand held computer. A 2 week vacation to Hawaii did not mean running out of supplies. When I ran out of batteries at the cultral center, I broke open some alkaline batteries and kept shooting. I was not held hostage to a propritory battery format. It's nice that my flashlight and camera share batteries.
The truth shall set you free!
I used MD (and HiMD) for my portable music needs about 9 years for the period between the death of cassette and me finally succumbing and buying an iPod last year out of sheer frustration with Sony's arrogance. While I liked the format and owned four portable players a micro system with built in MD player which I had at work and even a rack size stand alone recorder/player and I really don't agree that it was ahead of its time. The original players were conceived more as a direct replacement for cassette than anything else. They did not integrate with computers at all and you had to record directly from your CD player in real time meaning that making a compilation disc was as time consuming as making a mix tape used to be (and you couldn't adjust recording levels to equalise volume over the disc without introducing unpleasant digital distortion) and maximum play time was 74 minutes. Notwithstanding that I preferred them to portable CD players, which were the only alternative at the time.
Sony did not introduce NetMD with its PC integration until 2002, sometime after HDD and solid state mp3 players had started to become popular and (I always felt) as a grudging and half-arsed response to them. Looking back now I can't believe I stuck with NetMD as long as I did, I guess it must be true what they say about vendor lock-in - I had spent a lot of time recording MDs and I didn't want to start again on a new format. NetMD offered little over regular MD (a couple of long play modes of which only LP2 was seriously usuable for music and the fact your music was now also stored on your PC) Amongst the numerous problems the NetMD software (orginally called OpenMGJukebox, later SonicStage) had were:
1. The fact it would only let you export a track to a maximum of 3 MDs. This was a blaket prohibition and, perhaps, the earliest example of Sony's draconian approach to DRM. This limitation became a real problem for me when I had a bag with most of my MDs in it stolen.
2. If you had to do a system restore it would break the DRM and you would not have to access your music library at all. There was supposed to be a tool which fixed this. I could never make it work for me. It was when this happened for the second time (and Sony support claimed that this wasn't a bug but a feature) that I decided to buy an iPod.
3. The NetMD could only read ATRAC format files meaning that any MP3s etc had to be converted. This resulted in loss of quality and would not work at all with WMA files (I think this may have finally been fixed recently).
HiMD was actually a big advance I thought - 1GB discs, the ability to record PCM - but it was too little too late. When it was released it sold for the same price as as an iPod and just couldn't compete, especially given the awful software. I probably didn't help that spare 1GB discs weren't available until months after the players were launched)
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