Sony's Format curse continues!....

The bad news concerning Sony’s UMD video format keeps rolling in. According to a post over at Joystiq, Target has just announced that they will be removing all UMD Movies from their store shelves. This doesn’t come as a surprise to those in the know, but general consumers may wonder why this is happening. Sony, when will you learn that proprietary formats die a horrible death 9 times out of 10. Users will not pay $25 for a UMD movie when they can buy a DVD for $15 and play it on more then just their PSP.

Betamax, Minidisc, UMD.....

Okay, so tell us which format Sony should have gone for when planning a handheld multimedia device?

Anything solid-state.

It's fine to say that now, but you have clearly forgotten that when the PSP was released, the largest solid state removable media was 512meg.

I can't understand why anyone sold UMD movies in the first place. They are loathesome overpriced and low quality. Anyone with a brain and a computer would buy the DVD and rip it to Memory Stick for watching on their PSP, and no matter how much the RIAA/MPAA try and claim that doing so is criminal, they are simply wrong and trying to protect the commercial interests of their members rather than the best interests of the public.

But their well deserved failure for movies does not mean that they are not an idea, and viable format for mobile gaming.

Is that true of all sold-state media at the time, or only Sony Memory Sticks?

The UMD films was just another way of Sony trying to squezze more cash out of you, anyone with half a brain would simple rip there exsiting film collection on to a memory stick, plus 18.00 quid 4 a film on a media u can only watch on a portable device - no extras? when dvd's are as cheap as they are you thought Sony would of put the price of UMD's somewhere near them....

And expensive. That's fine when you're talking reusable storage and you roll your own movies, but if every movie was on such a large ROM, that's way too expensive. Much, much more expensive than UMD.

DivX movies runs to about 750MB, so you go for stock 1GB ROM. Then you've got to tool up to burn the ROMs on a relatively short run (compared to, say, the run length for regular flash RAM)

Why do you think everyone laughed at Nintendo for sticking with carts on the N64? Solid state is (and will be for some time) many times more expensive to produce than optical storage.

Given that DVD is too large for a handheld, and there are no other standard optical formats that you can buy your music/movie media on, the only option was to create a new compact optical format.

???

Tig, I don't know the material/production costs of solid state and optical ROMS, so I'll have to use the purchase prices of RAM formats;

Cheapest generic 1GB USB flash RAM I just Froogled for was £13.99 (from eBay)

You can pick up a 10x blank DVD-RW for about 4 quid.

Okay, so movies aren't going to be sold on flash RAM, and I'm sure flash costs sustantially more than ROM. And there's no doubt that UMD costs more than DVD to product, just because they're not a popular format. Either way, you're still looking at a massive difference in price.

a) DS games = 1gig
b) DIVX movie = 750meg
c) DS games from nintendo retail for $30 new
d) DS has been out just as long (longer actually no?) than the psp and nintendo isnt broke yet from manufacturing costs.
e) DS games are much smaller than big anoying umd's
f) solid state = happy battery
g) retrofittign manufacturing plants to make UMD's "PROBABLY" cost alot more than settign up DS cart manufacturing
h) sony = stubborn asses who wanted to leverage there gaming brand to get a foot hold on the emrging portable media player market and have failed.

I could go on but then id just be setting my self up for even more of a lashing than i'm allready sure i'm in for. ;)
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When a user buys a 1GIG Memory Stick/Compact Flash/SD card, they are expecting 1 GigaBYTE.

DS Games MIGHT be one Gig. But it's one GigaBIT - this is EIGHT TIMES SMALLER.

Actually:

Ridge Racer DS 256 Mbit - 32M BYTES
Catch! Touch! Yoshi! 128 Mbit - 16M BYTES
The Urbz - Sims In The City 256 Mbit - 32M BYTES



In our experience a DivX movie at PSP resolution is about 160Meg (MegaBYTES). Making it about three times bigger than the biggest DS game. But Sony did not use DivX compression, they used MP4 - but the sizes are comparable.



Going on wouldn't open you up for a lashing nearly as much as getting your leading "facts" so comprehensively wrong.

I know I've mentioned this before in reference to UMD's failure in the marketplace, but I'll mention it again...

In the US at least, UMD was almost NEVER identified as such in adverts. It was always "availible now on DVD or PSP"... I seem to recall one where "DVD and UMD" was onscreen but the voice over said PSP. I would think that if they were serious about establishing UMD as a format they'd bother to let the movie-buying public know.
Anywhoo, its all emblematic of the culture of arrogance that Sony's success has spawned. For no other reason than this (not that its not a great reason) I'm hoping (probably in vain) that Blu-ray fails spectacularly, as anything else would only encourage Sony's belief that

But those adverts are (were) run not by Sony, but by retail outlets and/or movie studios. Those companies are not interested in pushing a platform, all they care about is people going out and buying the product.

If you tell people that it's available on "UMD" and they don't know what ther f**k that is, you'll sell none. Since the PSP is the only device with a UMD player, and since it had a succesful launch in the USA, remaining sold out or in short supply for any months, it makes good marketing sense to tell people a given product plays on PSP. I suspect that if any other company had launched a UMD compatible and very popular product their marketing tack would have changed.

Sony is arrogant, but far less so than people like to make out.

BLAST!

i always though it a bit extreme but never bothered to actually look it up myself and took a friend on his word :/

lesson learned... i'll try and get atleast a week without spouting off about incorrect information next time ;)
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Perhaps, but their persistence only amplifies their arrogance. People can be forgiven for feeling a little bit s**tty about Sony's state of play after consumers were faced with Betamax, Minidisc, SonicStage, UMD and now Blu-Ray... none of which were forced down people's throats per se, but were either recommended or sold as just about your only option if you purchased a Sony product.

It can be argued that if you purchase a Sony product then you're obviously obliged to invest in their own bespoke media formats, but does it really have to extend to things like PC connection and device compatability? Particularly when, for the most part, Sony's software of such things are so toilet it's unbelieveable. The recent news of Sony offering a DVD and the ability to bung it onto a Memory Stick is a little better, but you're probably looking at compatability for ONLY Sony Memory Sticks for starters, and a crappy conversion program for seconds.

Hell, weren't Sony going to bundle music videos into UMDs and sell them off with the inclusion of music, thus presenting itself as an indirect alternative to CD and HDD music players? (Thinking about it though, had Sony followed through and did the music video thing they probably would have hit something there).

It doesn't change my opinion of UMD as a game format though, of which it is a good one. Hell, the ability to effectively have a CD/DVD medium playing with the anti-shock bonuses of a cartridge has got to be commended at least.