Another Sony Format Bites the Dust

Lam1969 writes "Reuters is reporting that Universal Media Disc, Sony's PSP-only movie format, is about to kick the bucket. While the discs' novelty factor resulted in strong sales shortly after the PSP's May 2005 launch, interest rapidly dropped and movie companies are no longer interested in producing titles. From the article: "Universal Studios Home Entertainment has completely stopped producing UMD movies, according to executives who asked not to be identified by name. Said one high-ranking exec: 'It's awful. Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray."'"

Sounds familiar...

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/30/ 1626239 [slashdot.org]

Blu Ray?

How can Blu Ray be a flop? Am I wrong, or has Blu Ray not even hit the market yet? Isn't this kind of akin to saying that the CD format was dead in 1980? How can something be a flop if it hasn't even been a fully released product?

Re:Blu Ray?

The article or article summary is written by someone that wants HD-DVD to win, and uses the UMD failure to try to achieve that.

Common FUD tactics.

Re:Blu Ray?

Doesn't completely invalidate his point though, Sony is responsible for many formats over the years that didn't achieve any kind of market dominance.

Re:Blu Ray?

Betacam and Digital Betacam are used professionally... but sony has flopped (off the top of my head) Minidiscs, UMD, memory stick (sort of), and a load of other ideas.

I used to sell both computers and audio equipment, back in the 1998-2000 era, and it's astonishing to see what sony wasted. They of course couldn't jump on the standard flash memory bandwagon (compact flash or smart media, or later SD) - no, they had to invent their own thing, and of course it only worked with sony stuff. Stupid.

Minidiscs were a novelty, and were pretty cool for a while, but then... CD-R's and mp3 platers became cheap. Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25, or you can get something solid state for less than the price of a MD player? Even when a 512MB mp3 player cost $299, it was comparable to the high end MD player, in features and size. They should have LONG AGO made a minidisc MP3 player - the technology existed, and those disks hold about 480megs or so, not to mention $5 / 500MB is still a good price for media. But they didn't. Arrogance.

All the time, I see sony's marketing people put out all this shit which, in a perfect sony universe, would all interpolate, interact, and be amazing. But, in the real world, only a few people are going to buy all sony. They have yet to deal with that reality. People want their flash memory to be usable for their camera, mp3 player, and phone. They want their media to not be format locked.

It's just marketing stupidity and corporate hubris. Plain and simple. Develop good ideas, then drive them into the ground by making them proprietary.

~Will

Re:Blu Ray?

Compared to CDs, minidisc is small
You got that one allright. Although there are mini-cd MP3 players quite cheap that fit that requirement equally well, if not better.

Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better
This is just FUD, nothing else. It would depend on the player and the MP3, for sure, but trust me, I can get you an MP3 that you will be just unable to tell from the source, let alone ATRAC. In fact, many listening tests have proven ATRAC to be inferior to MP3 at equal bitrate. And you can choose your bitrate with most MP3 players, hence defining YOURSELF the perfect quality.

You can also get MD hifi units to put next to your CD player, which I've yet to see for MP3
Virtually ANY DVD player on the market will play MP3-CDs. Where have you been in the last 5 years?

I like listening to music on my stereo, not my computer
Dude, there is no comparison on hardware support. MP3 is way out of reach on this area. Most CD/DVD players will play MP3s, even at $30. You are just out of your league out here.

Lastly, you exaggerated the price for MD units
Still, it much more expensive than a an AIWA Z3C, which is a mini-CD MP3 player. $50 (although I don't think you can still find one).

My current MD portable is about the size of an Ipod nano, give or take
This is not one manufactured by SONY then... The MZ-RH10 is 80x19x84 and the Nano is 89x41x7... That's about 5 times bigger !!!! Have you ever had a look at a Nano?

I know none of these reasons are likely to hold much weight with 95% of consumers
Of course, since none of them are valid (or at least still valid). You need to look around: The MP3 world has also evolved in the last 5 years.

Re:Blu Ray?

MP3 doesn't retain the very high or very low frequencies as well, in my opinion.

When MiniDisc came out in its first incarnation of Atrak was booed by audiophiles for suffering the EXACT SAME inadequacies (lack of top-end and bottom-end frequencies) as your are describing with regard to MP3, but - just like the Atrack system has improved over the years so has MP3 and the myriad of other codec's floating around these days.

but when I'm sat in a dark room concentrating on the music, or listening to each chord through a decent pair of headphones, it's that sort of thing that i'll pay money to improve. MP3 doesn't cut it for me (yet). ... listen to what you are saying - if you heard someone else make a comment like that wouldnt you think they were a twat?

I can understand forking out for a decent music system its easy to tell the difference between a plastic midi-hifi and a decent seperates system!.But your comment is borderline obsessive. You sound so obsessed with the sound quality and the finer intricacies of the sound; Do you actually enjoy music? Good music is good music. Its a shame you judge it chord by chord or frequency by frequency. You sound like an obsessively biased audiophile fanboy who's more interested in tweaking his stereo than actually enjoying music (as opposed to listening to the inadequacies of your set-up). I cant imagine what it must be like to be so distracted by the details of the sound that i couldnt enjoy my music collection!

Nick ...

They are good at picking losers

Or rather, at helping them lose. Beta is a wonderful example. Higher quality aside, it had the advantage of compatbility with professional gear. Indeed Beta won the pro wars and Betacam SP is STILL the standard to which things are compared (you often hear DV called "Betacam SP quality"). However they totally missed it on the consumer market and mainly by locking it down and keeping it proprietary ensured it's failure.

As a more receant example take HiMD. HiMD was a wonderful extension of their neat MD format that did ok, but really failed to launch. HiMD added much better quality, more storage, and most importantly of all, high speed async computer transfers. Orignal MDs had to be dumped to computers via S/PDIF which meant no faster than realtime.

Now it would seem this format would be ideally positioned to make major inroads for recording. DAT is on the way out fast and is expensive anyhow, flash devices cost a lot and storage is pretty expensive, HD recorders are large and inflexable. HiMD would have a big market as the next DAT in essence.... Except they locked it down all to hell. You can only transfer files to your PC with their peice of shit software. Worse yet, it orignally didn't even let you transfer it to non-DRM'd formats. So you'd record your band, transfer teh recording, and then you couldn't open it in Wavelab. Wonderful.

I personally am skeptical of Blu-ray mainly because Sony is the big backer. They've a good track record with pro formats, but they have hosed thigns in the consumer market so many times I tend to predict they'll fail just based on their track record.

Makes sense.

That could be why it wasn't included in the list of failed formats. Nah, that makes too much sense. Must be a conspiracy of some sort.

Re:Blu Ray?

"The article or article summary is written by someone that wants HD-DVD to win, and uses the UMD failure to try to achieve that."

That specific quote is attributed to an anonymous exec at Universal Studios Home Entertainment, a member of the HD-DVD consortium.

http://www.cnet.com.au/hometheatre/dvd/0,39025983, 40057346,00.htm [cnet.com.au]

Loss leaders would save the day

I always thought that Sony made a big goof by not using the movies as a loss leader to sell the PSP.

Think about it:

(1) Sony is affiliated with Sony Pictures and has ties within the film and TV world;
(2) Sony uses that influence to negotiate rights for UMD / PSP versions of movies dirt-cheap - practically give 'em away. New releases at $6-$8 a disc; older stuff, $2 or $3. Enough to cover production. So what if they take a loss on the rights? They'll get it back in sales of units.
(3) The format's pretty secure, so piracy is a marginal issue - and the inexpensive price makes it hardly worth the time to rip and burn if you could, unlike discs that cost between $18-$20.
(4) The ability to use the PSP as a dirt-cheap portable movie player - and a little strategic marketing in the right places could help parents see this as a Good Deal ("it does more than play those damned games, we can watch movies on it, too..."
(5) They let other movie studios start making UMD movies also; they license out UMD to some cheap Taiwanese outfit and make some $60 - $80 UMD movie players and sell 'em at Wal-Mart. They let the format spread itself around. They keep the money in the game market and the PSP-2 or whatever the next item is.
(6) Profit - not mega-millions, but not the loss that the current situation is likely to be.

I'm sure there are some flaws in my idea and I'm sure someone will point them out. But in the end, somebody dropped the ball here big time. I love the PSP; it's a neat toy. But I've never bought a single movie for it; in fact, I saw this coming and told my friends to expect it - dropping the movies inside of a year - and I said that the first time I saw a UMD movie at a Goddamned Wal-Mart with a $20 price tag.

But, I think that if Sony came back at it, even now, and tried this strategy, it could work. Even this late in the game, with the right promotion and presentation. But it's a good idea, so, fat chance of that happening, eh?

Re:Loss leaders would save the day

(1) Sony is affiliated with Sony Pictures and has ties within the film and TV world;

(2) Sony uses that influence to negotiate rights for UMD / PSP versions of movies dirt-cheap - practically give 'em away. New releases at $6-$8 a disc; older stuff, $2 or $3. Enough to cover production. So what if they take a loss on the rights? They'll get it back in sales of units.

And they would also face a barrage of lawsuits from all the people - producers, directors, stars - who have gross profit deals on a movie and its ancillary sales (TV, DVD, etc), and would consider selling their movie at an 'artificially' low price to be swindling them out of money that's rightfully theirs. (In much the same way that David Duchovny sued Fox when it sold The X Files to its own FX channel at a far lower than normal per-episode rate - he had a percentage deal, so less money for Fox meant less money for him. Not that he was exactly starving in the street, but...)

UMD movies dead, not UMD itself

The movies are dead yes, but the format itself will live on, no? How else are they going to ship new games?

UMD sucks, use HD.

They've decided to go back to a known method that worked in the 80's. You get the games printed in books and you have to hand code the hexdecimal in before you can play the game. Of course if you turn off the unit or switch games you'll have to re-enter the game. Since the printed word is compatible with all systems it's sure to be a winner! HD-DVD of course stands for HexDecimal DVD. You'll get the fun of hand entering all the hex before you can watch your movies too. The kids will love all the family time that gives you and for porn it'll be fantastic because you'll develop such strong hands!

Interesting...

Because just this December I was travelling to Colorado in a car, and guess what I was using to watch movies? That's right, a PSP with UMD discs. I admit, they can be tedious; just like many other technologies, one piece of information (a movie, a book, an album, etc.) per storage device is starting to become obsolete (notice how companies put more and more bonus content on DVD's) because of the vast amount of space available on modern media. The UMD disc was inconvenient in this respect in that it held one game/movie per disc, and it was not writable, and not supported by practically any player other than PSP--a console which in itself isn't all that great [cnn.com].

Overall, I'm glad that this format, among others, is becoming extinct. The closer we get to a universal storage format (flash drives seem to be the popular candidate), the faster we'll get to complete integration of information. Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, said in the article, "We're hoping the format's going to be reinvigorated with next-generation capability that may include living-room or normal television playback." I, on the other hand, hope not.

Especially true for kids' movies..

When I get a movie, I just want to watch the movie.

Damn, the anti-piracy / commercials / trailers that can't be skipped on most DVDs are super-annoying. When the kid wants to see the movie, I've got to stand there and wait for a couple of minutes (pressing FF when the disc deems that I am allowed), and then finally press "play"?

I learned how to use DVDDecrypter / DVD Shrink based on this annoyance alone! Now I tell everyone about it. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, studios!

I predicted this from the start

Look at the facts. You can't connect the PSP to any other display device. Movie watching is a social thing. You aren't going to invite your buddies over and watch a movie crowded around a PSP.

Also, they had no distinct advantages over DVD. Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD so you can watch it by yourself and can't rip it to anything else.

Finally, who in their right mind is going to rebuild their collection, or even build a new one in a completely useless format that only has a single device capable of playing it.

Any moron could tell them that this was doomed from the start.

Re:I predicted this from the start

Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD

If only it things were that good!! Almost always you can by the DVD equivalent for less. More quality, more versetile, less money. No brainer. UMD was doomed to fail from the get-go.

Compare two samples, a new release and an old release:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $15.76 [amazon.com] vs $21.99 [amazon.com]
The Matrix: $9.76 [amazon.com] vs. 17.99 [amazon.com]

Proprietary vs. Non-Proprietary

A dupe? Didn't see the first one.

Ya think Sony would remember this lesson and quit repeating it. They've introduced so many formats that *would* have been good, had they not been intentionally crippled by their media division.

Memory Stick is about the only format they've introduced that hasn't been bombed into oblivion by the reality of a market unwilling to buy crippled products. It's only a matter of time, however, since MS is inferior and more expensive than just about any other flash-card format.

Hmm Lets See

Sony has its entertainment side, and its electronics side. For some reason they let the entertainment side tell the electronics side how to do its job and then they are !!! SHOCKED !!! when the electronics bomb. Hmmmm.

UMD, had little usuability because of DRM, (Crackable but who needs the headache). Also, was a low quality format because of the target device. Had a small odd media that was more expensive that its full size counterparts. And just for that final sauce releases were pretty much priced as high or higher than DVD.

Sounds like a winner

absolutely right, except for one thing

Quality of UMD is actually comparable with DVD. Resolution is 480x272 progressive, so for a normal TV you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference (if you could play it on a TV, that is). Capacity is "only" 1.8G, on the other hand the encoding is H264 (considerably more powerful than MPEG2). The "low quality" perception comes from the fact that you can only play it on the PSP.

You're right about the other aspects, but I think the main problem is that you can only play it on a PSP (the Universal part is a euphemism)

Maybe in the US

The US and possibly the British markets are small. But the Japanese & Korean markets are reportedly solid. I work at a post house, and we are still turning out quite a few versions for UMD. There must be people buying them somewhere.

One studio is not indicative of the entire market. Unless that studio is Sony itself. They own the largest catalog of movies, making up over a third of the titles produced by major film studios in the last 60 years.

No Surprises

It was always a no-brainer that the UMD format would fail in the movie arena.

It's the lack of interoperability that make the format useless - it's all very well being able to watch a film on your PSP, but there's no facility to use UMDs in your PC,PS2/3 or home cinema (unless you buy a TV adapter.)

It's the minidisc story all over again, but accelerated because UMDs aren't a home-writeable format.

It wasn't the format that was bad

The format, whatever. The price was the fucking kicker. Who the hell is going to shell out $30+ for a god damned movie you watch on a 3" screen? If they would have priced them more like $10 a piece at least, you would have seen better sales. $30? no way.

Should have used "Mini Disc"

Sony should have put MD into its PSP gaming device instead of comming up with a "new" UMD disc format. I think it probably would have been cheaper to have a recordable MD instead of developing a new disc format that from all accounts is failing at everything except psp games.
Also the 1 gig storage capacity of the mini discs would have been usefull and at 6$ dollars a pop pretty cheap compared to gum stick media.

Now both stagnate...

Full-res video

Hope they enable full-res H.264 playback from memory stick now. I guess they were holding it back in a futile attempt to make UMD videos more attractive.

"Next generation technology"

FTA:

  But next week, Sony Computer Entertainment executives will begin making the rounds of the Hollywood studios to discuss plans for making the PSP able to connect to TV sets.

"We're hoping the format's going to be reinvigorated with next-generation capability that may include living-room or normal television playback," he said.

Since when is being able to play video on a television "next-generation"? These people are removing features, realizing that people won't buy without the features, and then adding the features back claiming they're innovative and new.

Why oh why

I don't know why these companies just don't pay me on retainer to tell them things suck beforehand.

Sony's viability

Usually in big companies, when a few products totally flop, heads roll. I don't seem to be seeing this with Sony. Its obvious in my mind that there's a huge collusion between their Media and Electronics devision (guess who always wins).

The Blu-Ray standard, I don't even know why they're even trying it. Look at how well their Memory Sticks are going once Flash memory has become commoditized (its 30 or 40% more). The UMD format is going to work because its linked to the PSP. Just not for movies. I don't see Nintendo trying to sell movies on Gameboy cartridges (they won't fit) but they just make the unit for gaming.

I have an MD player, and I must say its completely unusable. Not the hardware. The software. Everyone complains about SonicStage. I've thought of buying another MP3 player (I have one w/ bad sound quality right now), but I'm really hoping they can pull off the next MD software (and get it working on my Mac). Nothing, even flash MP3 players have been able to beat the Minidic for sound quality or battery life that I've been able to find. The quality in the MD player is gained from the audio processor I'm sure.

My complaint to Sony have really neglected me as a customer. I'm still satisfied with the product. Hopefully someone at Sony who has a clue will read this Slashdot thread and fix it. I'm sure they're putting off more people from their products then they think. IMO, PS3 is really the hit or sink product (esp if they will be losing as much money as predicted per unit) and they want the Blu-Ray stuff to succeed.

UMD Movie Resolution

Apparently UMD movies are encoded at DVD resolution (720x480), 16x9 if appropriate, and the PSP re-sizes the image down to 480x272 for display on the LCD.
Now, why do sony waste the space on the UMD, and processing power to scale video, if they don't have to.
I would have expected to see, by about now, a set-top UMD player. Sony's stated design goals are to reduce the size of a media player device to the size of the carry case for the media. See MiniDisc players for an example.
How cool would it to be to have an iPod sized DVD player that plugs into a TV?

Which exec again?

Funny that that high ranking exec was from Universal Studios.... now where have I seen that name before. Oh yeah, front and center on the HD-DVD roster!

Is it not simply sad to see a high ranking executive reduced to trash talking? How desperate is he?

Let's be clear about what the issue IS, okay?

UMD is not dying, UMD _movies_ are. And when I say UMD _movies_ I mean _US/UK_ UMD movies.

And with good reason. No one's going to pay $25 for a movie they already have in a higher quality format, when they can just rip their DVD and transcode it for PSP playback. UMD video probably isn't going to fail as spectacularly in Japan though, where most of the time, you can get a UMD _with_ your DVD purchase (For a little extra) I should know, I have a couple. And I certainly wouldn't have bought them seperately, since I could have just as easily put my videos on the memstick for free (Though that is one of the two advantages of UMD video; it's encoded better than you could possibly do transcoding, and it doesn't take up any space on your memory stick.) As for this 'cavalcade of failed Sony formats'... Seriously, drink the koolaid. No one else is buying that crap.

Betamax? Still the top choice for many professional video applications.

Minidisc? While MP3 players have their advantages, the latest generation of MD player/recorders are still going strong, even outside of Japan. Also, minidisc recorders are pretty much the #1 device for bootlegging live performances for its blend of small size, and high fidelity.

Blu-Ray? Let's skip past the part where it ISN'T EVEN OUT YET, and get down to the facts. The Playstation 2 cemented DVD in Japan. It hadn't caught on until then, they were still using VCD! So, considering that the Xbox 360 had such an abysmal launch (Usually what happens when your product can't withstand the rigors of...well, WORKING), which do you think is going to win in Japan? HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray? And don't forget, a growing constituency in the US and abroad care more about the outcome of that battle than what format Universal is going to put their latest summer blockbusting crapfest on.

UMD was about putting software in the PSP, first and foremost. The fact that they nev