Sony Kills UMD Movies and Moves to Memory Stick Entertainment Packs
By David Walker |
July 17th, 2006
Comments (1)
Oh Sony, what hath thou done? Is the past not here for us to learn from? Betamax? Mini-Discs? And now UMD, according to Gamespot, is on the heap of formats you’ve created for profit, but turned over to misfortune (via Real Tech News)? Really, this is not a good omen for your next format, Blu-ray. It’s not that UMD is completely dead – after all, you do still have games to release for the PSP – it’s just that Target, Wal-mart and Best-Buy have told you to take your over-priced, over-hyped mini-format movies and take a hike.
So, what’s your solution Sony? Well, it looks like you want to sell consumers over-priced memory sticks with the option to transfer a top tier Sony Pictures title to the stick. Titles like the Academy-snubbed XXX, the mis-understood S.W.A.T., the emotionally riveting The Grudge and the performance showcase Hitch are sure to lure buyers into buying, especially since the movies are only in a dumbed down resolution of 320×240 (we’ll try not to remind readers that the PSP is capable of handling 480×272 resolution). I may not be a top-tier Fortune 500 executive, but I think your new strategy is somewhat lacking in effectiveness and may be ill-fated. But what do I know – I used to be a Mini-Disc owner.
Everyone says it, if the UMD was packaged with the original DVD for 5 bucks more, they wold have made a fortune. Those silly discs cost about 30 cents to pump out in bulk anyway. DVDs cost about 17 cents each including marketing costs per disc.
What a joke. My last MD player is picking up dust and I was able to jump ship and sell a buch of MD portables and decks before they killed themselves by adding all these stupid offshoots of MD, like netmd and hi-md.. all good ideas, but don;t marginalize your fan base.. I had like 4k invested in my lovely MD world.
UMDs are slow as heck too, have you tried loading a full game from a MEM-stick.. night and day.. geez..
F.