Slashdot Mirror
Sony To Launch PS3 Video Download Service
An anonymous reader points out a Los Angeles Times report that Sony is planning on making movies and TV shows available for download through the PS3 "as early as this summer." Sony hopes to make use of the roughly 4 million PS3s already sold in the US to compete with similar services such as XBox Live, which began offering video downloads over a year ago.
"One of the service's greatest obstacles may be Sony's own culture. Sony Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Stringer has been battling a corporate silo mentality in which divisions within his company work in isolation, undermining new initiatives. The PlayStation group in Foster City, Calif., has been notoriously aloof. Once, a former executive said, it scuttled plans for a movie subscription service for the PlayStation Portable even though Sony Pictures had supported the initiative. What is more, the company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, often, critics suggest, at the cost of technological innovation."
This might be the service that finally puts net neutrality into perspective. Previously all the arguments about bandwidth availability and the ethics of throttling have conflated legitimate use with piracy. But the crux of the argument has been mostly hypothetical up until about now; A legal, widely deployed IP video-on-demand service will put the TV content providers into a very clear conflict of interests; it will be interesting to see how they plan on treating this traffic.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Why would bandwidth be any more of a problem for the PS3 than it is for Xbox Live, iTunes Store, Netflix, Amazon Unbox, or any of the other contenders in the space?
FWIW, most large Japanese corporations try to silo their divisions as much as possible. Often, large companies will silo a division, until it becomes 'self sufficient' with it's own P&L, and then the parent company will spin it off into quasi-independence. This forces middle managers to be as efficient as possible, but obviously costs somewhat in corporate-wide leveraging-- leveraging usually comes in the form of cheap capital and maybe shared real estate, but not much beyond that.
davejenkins.com |
The PS3 has an officially licensed DivX decoder, along with support for generic MPEG4 (think Xvid) video.
It can play those files from over the network via a UPnP server, from a USB hard drive, various memory cards (if your PS3 is so equipped), or from a optical disc.