According to reports this morning, Toshiba has announced a Media Player add-on for the Game Boy Advance that will see animated series available to buy on a per-episode basis in Japan.
Carrying the name Game Boy Advance Animation Player on several newswires, the device will play up to 24 minutes of cartoon footage on SmartMedia cards of 32MB capacity. These cards will be released episodically, and are expected to be quite cheap. The basic idea is that consumers will buy new shows on a weekly or monthly basis, in a business model alarmingly reminiscent of the one debuted by GamePark several years ago.
As to whether the device gets a release over here is still in question, though the concept, at least to our kitsch-fuddled anime-obsessed brains, is one we like.
Toshiba will however have to be careful that it doesn’t open a cheap gateway to GBA piracy with any middleware release of this nature.
We’ll keep an eye out and bring you any updates.
Carrying the name Game Boy Advance Animation Player on several newswires, the device will play up to 24 minutes of cartoon footage on SmartMedia cards of 32MB capacity. These cards will be released episodically, and are expected to be quite cheap. The basic idea is that consumers will buy new shows on a weekly or monthly basis, in a business model alarmingly reminiscent of the one debuted by GamePark several years ago.
As to whether the device gets a release over here is still in question, though the concept, at least to our kitsch-fuddled anime-obsessed brains, is one we like.
Toshiba will however have to be careful that it doesn’t open a cheap gateway to GBA piracy with any middleware release of this nature.
We’ll keep an eye out and bring you any updates.
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