by Playfuls Staff |
18th December 2006
If you got bored to just playing around with your PSP, Sony prepares a surprise for next year: a video download service, similar to Apple’s iTunes.[more]
According to Financial Times Sony is already in discussions with major movie studios in Hollywood to bring their movies online and available for download. What is extremely important concerning the new service is the fact that the PSP is already capable of playing those movies at a decent resolution (considering the gadget’s dimensions), so Sony doesn’t need to create a new portable console. It would have been very difficult to sustain a new financial effort in this direction, since the craved PS3 encountered so many problems with the expensive Blu Ray drive and Sony is already producing the console with considerable losses.
The Japanese electronics giant is now boasting with more than 20 million PSPs sold worldwide, but it lags enormously behind its home ground rival Nintendo, which sold more than 7 million Developers’ System (more popular the DS or Dual Screen) only in Europe by November 21, 2006, and more than 6.63 million units in the United States by December 1. The overall sales of DS are estimated at more than 35 million units, with DS surpassing the PSP in Japan by a factor of 1 to 5.
The video service for the PSP is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2007. It will be a direct rival for Apple’s iTunes, which also offers movies apart from the billions of songs enlisted. PSP owners will be able to download on their PC the videos they want and then easily transfer them to the PSP’s flash card. Sony is already distributing a 4Gb memory stick capable of storing 10 feature films.
Don’t expect the PSP to get a firmware update that should make it compatible with iTunes though: Sony is renowned for aggressively promoting its standards. This is why it engaged in such fierce battle with Toshiba for the next DVD standard, and this is why movies shall be played from Sony’s Memory Stick proprietary flash card. According to The Wall Street Journal Sony is also preparing a more easily method of download, directly to the flash card.
Amazon.com and existing movie download sites such as Movielink and CinemaNow are in talks with Sony to use the service, which will launch in the first quarter of 2007, the newspaper reported in its online edition.
From the beginning Sony intended to make the PSP a portable media center, with the gadget being capable of running games, playing music and even movies on the TFT LCD screen that measures 110 mm (4.3 in) diagonal with a 16:9 ratio and a 480×272 pixel resolution capable of 16.77 million colors. Specifications state that the PlayStation Portable is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate.
