UMD Format's Death Rattle Begins

Next Generation reports that Wal-mart is dumping the UMD format, because no one was buying movies with the media. Above and beyond that decision, the studios are unimpressed as well. From the article: "One unnamed president of a major studio is quoted as saying, 'No one's watching movies on PSP. It's a game player, period.' Universal Studios Home Entertainment has ceased UMD production. One exec told Reuters, 'Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb.' Paramount is also considering its future with PSP's format. An exec said, 'We are on hiatus with UMD. Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them.'"

Nobody's buying?

[gEvil (beta)]

Nobody's buying them? But I thought Sony said that they'd sold 8 million UMD movie discs, [slashdot.org] and that they couldn't even keep up with demand. And that was over six months ago. Are you saying that they weren't being honest?!?

This is what annoys me.

[Lave]

I hear stories like this all the time, and from my friends with PSP's they say the same things (hmmm, anecdotal), but when I go into any GAME/Virgin/HMV etc the PSP UMD section outstrips the entire DS section. A console with comparable success*. This was particularly annoying when I was walking to every shop in town desperate for a Nintedogs Mulitpack, which had sold out everywhere.

It makes me wonder how much Sony (and now MS with the 360) are paying to make their brands look popular.

And I don't think it's untrue when I say that a sizeable amount of the hate for Nintendo comes from the way these shops are set up.

* Most evidence suggests the DS far outstrips the PSP in sales, but I avoided saying that because that's not the point I'm trying to make.

Really ... what a shock.

[WidescreenFreak]

You beat me to it. Why anyone would consider the PSP to be a portable movie player is beyond me. Another cost for a different media, a typically Sony proprietary format, with a screen that's a lot smaller than most portable DVD players. For crying out loud, I recently bought a DVD player with a 7" 16:9 screen that could double as a portable video game display (I/O cables were included) for less than $100 -- and I don't have to purchase the same movie again on UMD!

The fact that Sony actually expected people to double-dip for an inferior format is staggering. Of course, this comes from the same people who brought us Beta, MiniDisc, and music CD rootkits.

No Special Features

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

Blockbuster Video's UMD cases have slots for two UMDs for a reason, you know.

If they would start including the same special features as found on DVDs, using two UMDs to do it if necessary, I would buy more UMD movies.

PSP is an ideal travel device

[rockmuelle]

I found this story about 18 hours after watching the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on a PSP on a plane. So, there's at least one person watching movies on the PSP. Of course, I ripped it to a memory stick and didn't watch it from UMD (in fact, I've never watched a UMD movie).

I'm really disappointed in Sony for their positioning of the PSP. It has so much more potential than as a vessel for movie sales. I take it with me whenever I travel and use it as my primary entertainment, Web, and email device (using a home-grown Web mail app with a UI designed specifically for the PSP - one of a few Web apps I've developed to deliver content in PSP-sized Web pages (sorry, no links as my server can't handle the /. effect)). In fact, at the conference I just attended, there was "contention" for my laptop and I was stuck with just the PSP. It actually turned out to be adequate (though a chat client would have been nice). Text entry was a little annoying, but that's about it.

I really wish Sony would get on the ball with a suite of productivity/connectivity apps. They don't need to be complex, just enough to talk to IMAP/Exchange/iCal/Chat and get me the info I need one the road (I'm not in sales, so my needs are modest). Or even just offer an open development kit so those of us with fulfilling day jobs can hack together little PSP tools.

Productivity + Games + (non-UMD) Movies + Music in one small device is great for travelling...

*sigh*

-Chris

Betamax was NOT superior

[sirwired]

This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades, and has become "accepted wisdom". Betamax did have higher-quality output (though not by much), but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO. The true test of any technology, is "does it meet the consumer's needs?". In the case of Betamax for a long time, the answer was "not as well as the available VHS machines", not even close for "regular folks". For the extremely limited market of Videophiles, Beta may have been better, but that couldn't sustain the market.

In technology, a common axiom is "Cheap, Fast, Good, pick two." VHS was Fast (shipped worthwhile features MUCH faster than Sony did), and MUCH cheaper. Beta only had "Good".

For starters, there were too few makers of machines and the price was too high. In addition, the first Betamax player was quite feature-poor. The damn thing didn't even come with a clock. You had to buy that as an add-on feature. VHS was ruthless about exploiting this.

2nd, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity was too low. It took quite some time before Sony shipped a tape that could run longer than ONE HOUR. This was colossally stupid. Sony KNEW how to extend it, but the morons in Sony design thought one-hour was an acceptable limit. VHS shipped the 4-hour capable T-120 right out of the gate, with quality that was acceptable. While the quality at the lower tape speed wasn't as good, it was doable for just recording soaps, or whatever. When Sony got wind of the VHS's recording time, they shipped a two-hour Betamax machine, using of course a slower tape speed to extend the time. Of course, this also eliminated most of Betamax's quality advantage.

Time and time again, all Betamax had was slightly superior video quality (VHS and Beta both made continuous improvements to the machines, so Beta wasn't THAT far ahead.) Also, Betamax decks kept the tape threaded at all times, which put a LOT of wear on the tape during Rewind/FF operations. To top it off, Sony made a LOT of mistakes about simple features. VHS was first to ship a pause button on the remote, the first with the longer recording time, the first with a standard programmable timer, the first with an infrared remote, the first with front-loading, the first with a camcorder that didn't suck, feature-wise, the list goes on.

In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn. This was compounded by colossal errors in finance, OEM relations and marketing.

SirWired

Re:Betamax was better

[Bagels]

Actually, UMDs store video at the same resolution as DVDs - 720*480 - but the PSP's screen (with a resolution of 480*272) is incapable of displaying said resolution, and Sony's dragged their heels on releasing a stand-alone UMD player.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[/ASCII]

I agree with the main point of your post, but the part about MD and Beta seems off to me. Beta came out about the same time as VHS, so it was anyones guess which one would win, and MiniDisc was a pretty good replacement for tapes in walkmans until they where pushed out of the market by MP3-players.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[EggyToast]

I think there were issues with MiniDisc, but I do think it was an issue of marketing. They were marketed as a replacement for CDs, but they really sucked in that regard. However, they're fantastic as a replacement for tape -- easy to record to on the fly, smaller, digital, etc. But they were never sold as thus.

Re:Also at Walmart, though

[Anonymous Coward]

"Huh. Well, the PSP may be trailing the DS in total market share and trailing the GBA in day-to-day sales, and it may have a game library roughly as vibrant as the Jaguar, but I guess those UMD sales must be really popular. After all, if they weren't popular, why else would Wal-Mart be giving then so much well-placed shelf space?"

That's thinking backwards (though, admittedly, retailers think backwards all of the time, so I can see why you might think that way). Why push inventory that's already selling through? Why expend the effort to get something out in front of people that they're already buying in mass when you have backstock of stuff that isn't moving? You get the stuff that isn't moving out in front of people to get them to think about it and try to get them to buy it - because you don't want to be stuck with leftover inventory (even if its returnable - it costs money to ship stuff back). If the stuff in the back has good sell-through, there's no reason to push it at all - people are looking for it and buying it without your pushing it on them, so burn through the crap that isn't selling, then move that stuff back to the front once you don't need to worry about your inventory of non-selling crap.

Plus, another thing to think about in "big box retail" is that deals are often cut between manufacturers and retailers. Sony was pushing a new format - they probably gave Wal*Mart a sweet deal in exchange for a prime selling point in the stores. Wal*Mart would then be obligated to live up to the contract, or break the contract with a penalty. If Wal*Mart thought that the PSP and UMD movies were going to be hot, I can see why they'd agree to such a deal.

Betamax was superior by the time it mattered

[metamatic]

That still doesn't explain the Betamax failure, though.

By the time I saw my first home video recorder, the early problems of Betamax had been eliminated. The machine had a timer, multi-hour tapes were available, there was even a multi-load option to put 4 tapes in a stack and have it use them all while you were on vacation. The tape was automatically unthreaded once a certain threshold of FF/RW was hit--and in fact, many VHS decks had started to keep the tape threaded initially, because a 1 second pause to thread or unthread the tape each time you hit a button is damn annoying when you're skipping around trying to find a particular point.

Video stores were about 50/50 Beta/VHS. There were other manufacturers selling Beta decks. And Beta still had far better video quality--maybe you couldn't see it on lousy US NTSC TVs, but on PAL systems it was very obvious.

Yet VHS still won. So I don't buy the argument that alleged early deficiencies of Betamax account for its failure.

Re:I'm not surprised.

[powerlord]

Ditto. I also work and live in NYC. I use my PSP to/from work to play games. I've also been able to start listening to music and watching video (transfered from TiVo and re-encoded/downloaded to PSP memory stick). The thing that held me back before was ambient noise. In the subway, the ambient noise in a train car can be pretty loud. I finally stumbled on the ER6 ear-buds from Etymotic [etymotic.com]. Their great, I can listen to music on an iPod or PSP with the volume down at the half way mark (instead of having to crank it to max to compete with ambient noise). As an added bonus, the buds are black so their less of give-a-way vs. the white "I have a high-tech gadget" ones.

I'm amazed at the number of PSPs I see while commuting. Yeah, the number of iPods dwarfs the PSP number, but I've yet to see more than a handful of DS or GBAs. When I do, their usually low teens. The majority of the people I see with PSPs are high-teens and adults.

My favorite is was a three piece suit type using a PSP right next to a teen on his way to high school. Made me wonder if they were running a WiFi matchup :)

All that said, UMD just was not marketed right to work, and I've never known anyone who had a UMD movie, since there was little incentive to buy them instead of DVDs, especially once the 1GB and 2GB MemoryStick PRO cards came out.

Re:Really ... what a shock.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of Sony, but I totally agree with you.

But here's what really gets me-- I program games for the PSP, and it is a pretty sweet little gaming device. The one huge gaping flaw is that damned UMD drive! The streaming speed is slow, seeking is slow, and it eats battery life like a demon in a garden planted with the souls of small children.

And (I think) the whole reason for UMD was to play movies! ACK! It's so frustrating how artificially limited games are by that drive.

At least Sony opted for a hard drive on PS3 or it would have been the same thing again. Here's some numbers just for perspective-- With a good estimate of 10MB/s off Blu Ray, it would take 51 seconds just to fill main RAM and VRAM from disc. Now let's stream in a dungeon: "Loading........"

I watch plenty of movies on my PSP...

[dannycim]

... Just not on UMD. I've been disappointed by the catalog, so I just convert my DVDs to MP4 PSP format, put them on my 2G stick and watch them anywhere I go. I prefer video files anyway, because they start in an instant, whereas UMD movies require spin-up and seeking. I think Sony should have made all media downloadable, including games (with DRM of course), put emphasis on larger flash storage (maybe 1G standard), and they could have saved a lot on the hardware costs. Plus, the units would have been much thinner.

I've had a PSP on me since the launch. It's replaced my MP3 player and given me lots more stuff to do. I got Daxter yesterday and it's fun!

The new high capacity batteries mean that I have to charge it only once every two commute days now.

Re:Betamax was better

[SetupWeasel]

Nintendo keeps game costs down by keeping cart capacity down. The current maximum DS cart size is 256 MB, and Resident Evil DS was the first to use that size. Most games use smaller carts, because studios have to spend less per game to print it.

Development costs for the DS are also much lower than a console game, so game makers need less of a profit margin to recoup the costs of their games.

The PSP needs space for all those textures and stuff to make a game that fully utilizes the hardware. All those extra polygons have to be coded into the game, and that takes space.

Re:Betamax was NOT superior

[(Score.5, Interestin]

>In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn.

Actually it could be argued that Beta didn't even have video quality going for it. In the initial market, the US, the quality of NTSC video is so poor that you could barely tell the difference between the initial Beta and VHS recordings. By the time Sony got their act together, the VHS side had also made some advances, and the quality difference didn't really exist any more. (In the PAL market it was more noticeable, but by then Beta was already set on its downhill spiral).

I think one of the reasons for the persistent legend that Beta was higher-quality was that a lot of the advertising at the time pushed this factor really hard, because there was nothing else to push - early-generation Beta was, as you point out, inferior to early-generation VHS in almost ever aspect. Because of this the marketing guys concentrated on "Beta is better quality" even though almost no-one could see it with an NTSC signal. It's a bit like the photocopier company that ran a series of ads proclaiming how quick their service guys would be on-site when their copiers broke down, which was a lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that their copiers broke down ten times more often than anyone else's.