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...

[vslashg]

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

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Re:Blu Ray?

[3770]

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.

I predicted this from the start

[cualexander]

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:Blu Ray?

[Xzzy]

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.

Proprietary vs. Non-Proprietary

[Bonker]

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

[Crashmarik]

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

No Surprises

[CaptainCheese]

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

[hsmith]

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"

[acomj]

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

[acidblood]

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.

Re:Blu Ray?

[heli0]

"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]

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the more intelligent way would've been to just rip your movies to Memory Stick.

Re:I predicted this from the start

[madstork2000]

Yeah, and you can now buy a portable DVD player (with a larger screen) for under $100 bucks, that plays regular DVDs that can be bought, easily rented (at both ends of a trip and even at the airport).

I personally would rather bring 2 gadgets, along with my existing movies, rather than *BUY* expensive movies for essentially for a single trip.

-MS2k

 

Loss leaders would save the day

[H_Fisher]

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?

Sony's viability

[failedlogic]

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

[PhunkySchtuff]

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?

Re:Who didn't see this one coming?

[IANAAC]

Not to mention overpriced.

Also take into account the fact that you can use a free program like PSPVideo9 to automatically take those DVDs you already own and create mp4 files to put on memory sticks.

Nobody's going to want to shell out money for a different format of the DVD they already own.

Maybe not such a bad idea...

[stlthVector]

...It's a small disc that holds 1.8GB of data...this is more than the physically larger in diameter disc that nintendo uses (1.5GB) in their gamecube. When the system came out flash memory wasn't available at a resonable price - and actually, you still can't find a 2GB cf or sd card for $50 I don't think. So, for a game system, which is normally propriotary anyway, I'm not sure it was such a bad idea. Also, since the psp does have excellent hardware mpeg4 playback why not make movies for the thing since you can do very high quality video with mpeg4 at only 480x272 resolution and have tons of room on a 1.8GB disc for a movie.

I think the place where sony made a bad choice was on the price. I think if the movies were $5 to $15 dollars they would have continued to sell at a good rate - I may have even bought some...but at $15 to $30 when you can get the same move for $10-$18 on dvd for playback on a much bigger screen and with more extra's on the disc, who would want the umd!?!?!? I think the price is what killed the umd movies.

Re:Blu Ray?

[zerocool^]

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

Beta...

[PhYrE2k2]

First, I still use Beta, and have a great professional-grade late 70s early 80s beta deck. I love Beta.

Many Beta lovers (like I used to) tout the "Beta is better quality than VHS" line, and this was 100% true. Beta lost due to marketing ploys and buying off video distributors/publishers into VHS, ultimately killing the technology. Also killing the technology was Beta's choice to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours, sacrificing quality. Beta fixed this with Beta II and Beta III record modes, so it was only in the initial recorders, plus of course additional extensions like SuperBeta, Hi-Fi Audio, and so on. Beta offered more luminance detail and a cleaner image.

Can any modern late 80's or higher VHS VCR run circles around beta? Damn straight! The technology has since evolved in all recorders, in film, in the filters on various images, in audio and video pickups, etc.
Had Beta still been evolving today, they're be pretty close BUT Beta was defeated in '88 (officially).

-M

Sony == KOD

[fm6]

Isn't this kind of akin to saying that the CD format was dead in 1980?

The CD format, as I recall, never faced any serious competition, mainly because it was invented by Philips, which has always been good at getting its formats accepted by the industry. The Blu Ray format, by contrast, is facing a nasty format war, at least as bad as the one between VHS and Beta, even before its launch.

But although your comparison is wrong, you're still right — one shouldn't judge a race before it's over, never mind before it's started. I think a lot of folks are looking at the fact that Sony is a member of the Blu Ray consortium and saying, "That settles that! Sony formats always fail!" Hardly logical. But of course if enough people buy that theory, it doesn't have to be logical.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck modded this informative? It's more like completely wrong.

You've actually proved yourself wrong.

DVD is 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL), whereas UMD movies are 480x272.

That makes UMD movies roughly one third of the resolution of a DVD, and indeed at lower bitrates. H.264 is a good codec, but it's hardly better than high bitrate MPEG2 (MPEG2 sucks for small files, that's where MPEG4 shines; but on pressed DVDs bitrate isn't much of an issue). 1.8GB vs 9GB is about 5 times as much space - even given the 3x higher resolution of the DVD, that's more bits per pixel than UMD. And DVD movies can be as progressive as anything else (3:2 pulldown).

So no, UMD movies aren't low quality only because of the shitty player, but very much so because of the low resolution and lower bitrates too (excluding the issues of DRM and all). Not comparable whatsoever.

I'm no fan of the DVD format (much of a H.264 fan actually), but UMD discs sucks. Really. Big time. Enough that anyone who isn't blind wouldn't have issues seeing the difference on the average 27" standard def TV. The UMD has less resolution than crappy SVCDs - more like along the lines of VCDs or VHS tapes.

I recommend you see an optician sometime soon...

Re:absolutely right, except for one thing

[Sycraft-fu]

Ummm, you don't know what you are talking about. You are right no DVDs are stored at 720p, that being 1280x720. That's an HD format and DVDs predated it. However all NTSC DVDs are stored at 480p (if from film) or 480i (if from TV). Now please note that the designator is the second number in the resolution pair. 480p isn't 480x272, it's 720x480. Go look it up if you don't believe me. That's the resolution of SDTV. That makes it about 50% higher resolution than UMD.

As for progressive vs interlaced, doesn't matter. DVDs from movies are all progressive since the orignal is progressive. If you've a player and TV that supports it, they display progressive, if not the player interlaces them and converts the frame rate for you.

So UMD is a good deal below DVD quality, at least assuming the orignal poster was correct about it's resolution (I don't own any UMDs). As I said, probably somewhere in the VHS to SVHS arena.

Re:Blu Ray?

[johansalk]

I would want a minidisc over a cd because it's far mre durable. That said, I had a minidisc recorder and it more than anything made me hate sony; it was crippled with stupid artificial limitations, such as the inability to upload recordings to the computer, or that stupid DRM nonsense, or that crazy ATRAC conversion.

Re:Loss leaders would save the day

[payndz]

(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...)

Re:Universal? Hah

[nofx_3]

Better yet, how can it be a Universal Media Disc, if it only plays on one system and is a completely proprietary format?
 
-kaplanfx

Re:Interesting...

[mgblst]

Bonus stuff on a DVD just annoys me. When I get a movie, I just want to watch the movie. I have no interest in how it was made, or feel like hearing the cast and crew talk themselves up. Now, with a DVD, I just want to stick it into the machine, and the movie starts playing - but no, I get all this crap instead, telling me not to pirate and dolby sound commercials, etc... Then, when it is finished, I have to tell it to play the bloody movie - why doesn't it just play it straight away - ridiculous.

Re:Sony's viability

[bri2000]

My complaint to Sony have really neglected me as a customer. Damn right. They don't think things through at all either. In the last 10 years I've had five Sony MD players (one of the orginal S/PDIF only units, a couple of NetMDs, a Hi-MD and a rack size unit I foolishly bought back in 1998 - it still sits in my rack, I don't think it's been switched on in 5 years) and, because my CDs had mostly been ripped to ATRAC to be transferred to NetMD, the MZ-HD1 hard disc Walkman.

Last week I finally bought an iPod. The catalyst for this was that, upon upgrading my PC, I discovered that my ripped music collection, despite being backed up to an external HD, could not be copied back to my new PC because of the DRM Sony applied to MY CDs. So I figured if I was going to have to spend months re-ripping my collection I could at least learn from my mistake and shift to a DRM free portable format.

In my conversations with Sony technical support about this I could not understand why they would set up their proprietary formats in such a way that even long time users would be presented with the opportunity to (and caused so much inconvenience they would be strongly incentivised to) switch formats when changing their kit.

The Reason Why

[TheLogster]

Sony - "Hey lets make everyone buy two copies of a movie one on DVD and the other on UMD"

Consumer - "What ?! The PSP has no facility to play a UMD movie and output in a TV?! Well screw buying two copies - I'll buy the DVD, rip it, put it on a memory stick, and still get to watch it on my PSP"

Enough said really.

Re:Blu Ray?

[paedobear]

Had achived - it's dead now and they've totally failed to make any inroads into the Japanese MP3 player market.

Especially true for kids' movies..

[debest]

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!