by Playfuls Staff |
19th December 2006
iTunes, beware! Sony is ready to take the movie world by
storm with a new download service designed to work with its PlayStation
Portable. According to Financial Times Sony is already in discussions with
major [more] 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.
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.
Officially, Sony said for GameSpot: "As we have
stated in the past, we are exploring a number of options to supply such
content, including working very closely with all the entertainment divisions
within the Sony family. At
this time, we have not confirmed any further news regarding a potential movie
download service for the PSP. You can expect to hear more about downloadable
content for the PSP and the PS3 in the coming year."
