Sony execs have been lining up licensing deals with the other major studios for a video delivery service on the company’s Playstation 3 game console that could launch as early as this summer, the LA Times reports today. This would go head-to-head with Xbox Live, which already offers a video download service, and if only for that reason, it’s a smart move — PS3 continues to trail behind the 360, with no killer app in sight.
But regular NewTeeVee readers will note the keen irony of the news as it was just a few months ago that Sony was bullying the studios into rejecting the HD-DVD high-definition standard in favor of its own Blu-ray disc standard. As I wrote back then, “broadband connection…will route around the need for any disc format.” I just never would have guessed that Sony would be the one to undermine its own format.
To twist the irony knife one more turn, the Blu-ray was once billed as the PS3’s top feature, the thing that would make gamers give up their Wiis and 360s. But that was 2006. By now, Sony executives must finally embrace broadband’s inevitable supplanting of old media.
The real curiosity is how they’ll deploy it. The Times quotes Sony’s Peter Dille as saying, “[I]t’s already been confirmed that we’ll be offering a video service for PS3 in a way that separates the service from others you’ve seen or used.” I think that hints to video downloads via the PS3’s upcoming virtual world Home, which is supposed to enable a user to play videos from their avatar’s house.
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