last100 » PlayStation

Sony PlayStation video store coming to the UK, France, Germany and Spain this November

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:57:26 +0000

While the U.S. version launched all the way back in July 08, it’s been a long wait for users across the pond. Along with announcing a new slimmer version of the PS3 and a bunch of other service enhancements, yesterday Sony revealed that the PlayStation video store will be opening its doors to parts of Europe from November this year.

From gamesindusty.biz:

Film companies Lionsgate, Paramount, MGM, Walt Disney, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros have been signed up by Sony, which will result in the delivery of “hundreds of movies straight to your PS3 and PSP,” Sony’s Andrew House has confirmed at the Gamescom Sony press conference in Cologne. These films will be purchasable using the usual wallet system, and the store will be rolled out in other territories throughout 2010.

While Sony will get there in the end — the company was already playing catchup in the games console delivered online video space even in the U.S. — the hold up is likely to be the usual issue of content licensing. Striking deals in one territory doesn’t guarantee speedy success in another.

In related news, Sony also announced that in the UK, the version of the BBC’s iPlayer TV catchup service for the PlayStation 3 will be promoted through the console’s ‘What’s new’ section being introduced as part of a new firmware update.

---
Related Articles at last100:

Hulu explains its lack of love for PlayStation 3

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:28:44 +0000

It’s for your own good

Users who are complaining that they can no longer access the online video site Hulu on through their PlayStation 3’s web browser are being given an official explanation. The short version: it’s not Hulu’s fault per se but the result of keeping content owners, who don’t want the service to compete with revenue generated by traditional television distribution, happy.

(It’s worth pointing out, however, that Hulu is the property of many of those same content owners – so they kinda are to blame, albeit indirectly.)

Moreover, in the short term at least, it’s a price worth paying, says Hulu, as they help wean the studios off of the release windowing system – “a movie starts in theaters, then moves to pay-per-view and DVD, then to pay-cable channels, later to broadcast, and so on down the lin” – that has proved so lucrative to-date.

… in the near-term, the windowing strategy is still dominant in the business. Billions of dollars flow in across these different windows, and entire companies are organized around them. Nothing productive comes from flouting that reality…

That business model, however, isn’t sustainable in the long term, says Hulu, due to “the rise of the web, increased broadband availability, the ease of digitizing video, and the increase in the computing power of devices like gaming consoles, set-top boxes, and mobile phones.”

We do, however, expect these windows to converge over time. There’s no way around that, and we’re working hard with all of our partners to guide and participate in this important transition in the business.

Everything we do is with an eye toward achieving our long-term goal of maximizing the content you can access as conveniently as possible in a way that “works” for the content owner.

In the short-term that may require us to make some tough decisions, but we only do so when we believe it improves our long term prospects to build a more enduring, legal solution to that same problem.

(via Gizmodo)

---
Related Articles at last100:

Hulu really hates the TV, PlayStation 3 blocked

Steve O'Hear — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:17:26 +0000

Based in the UK, I don’t have access to the US-only video site Hulu. But if I did I’d no longer be able to access the studio-backed Internet TV service on my PlayStation 3.

That’s because, following the Boxee fiasco, the game console has become the latest means by which to conveniently watch Hulu content on a television to be blocked, reports Engadget.

Users who try to visit the site via the PS3’s built-in web browser are being greeted with the message: “Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

For those of you who aren’t up to speed on this story, Hulu, which provides a way to watch content that mostly originates from the TV, online, doesn’t want you piping that same content back to the TV. (I know that sounds counter intuitive but bear with me.)

The reason is because that would upset the television and cable networks who fear that being able to do so might be the final push viewers need to dump their TV subscriptions altogether.

While it can’t – yet – stop you hooking up your laptop or any PC to your otherwise dormant wide screen TV, any software or device that makes it more convenient to push online content to the TV is a no no as far as Hulu is concerned.

---
Related Articles at last100:

YouTube relaunches TV-friendly version of the site, Android ‘remote control’ debuts too

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:31:06 +0000

YouTube XL

It’s not the first time that YouTube has rolled out a version of the video sharing site designed specifically for viewing on a television but the application’s been given a polish and a new name to boot.

Now called ‘YouTube XL‘ the new version of the site features a ‘ten foot’ User Interface designed for viewing on a TV or large screen monitor, which despite running in a web browser, TechCrunch describes as having the look and feel of a ‘native application’. Like the previous version of YouTube optimized for the living room, XL is supported on both the PlayStation 3 and Wii games consoles, though the video quality is compromised on the Wii due to its limited processor and support for an older version of Flash video.

More interesting, however, is the release of an accompanying Android application:

YouTube has created an application called Gmote for Android phones. You can scroll around menus, and also input text if you’d like to search. It’s only on Android so far, but because it’s open source you can potentially develop for other devices as well. The input is sent over your Wi-Fi network.

This is very similar to existing ‘remote control’ apps on Apple’s iPhone to operate the AppleTV and Vudu set-top boxes, Sonos’ multi-room audio system, and the VLC desktop media player, to name a few.

---
Related Articles at last100:

Sony considering PSP game rental and music download services

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:34:36 +0000

It’s looks like Sony may finally be getting serious about its download service for the PlayStation Portable (PSP), with the company considering a subscription-based game rental offering and a la carte music downloads akin to the iTunes Store.

The computer games blog Joystiq reports on a survey being carried out by Sony soliciting consumer apatite for an on-demand gaming service whereby PSP owners would pay a monthly fee to access a set number of titles on a rental basis.

You are now going to see a series of different possible rental download services which could be developed by PlayStation. Each service described will provide access to an extensive existing catalogue of PSP games that can be downloaded.

The service will enable you to download a fixed number of games during your subscription period (the subscription might renew weekly, monthly, or some other period), you will be able to change the games you have chosen for the download once your subscription term renews. At launch there will be an extensive catalogue of games to choose from, with more titles being added to the catalogue each month.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated report from CNET, Sony is said to be in talks with at least some of the major record labels about launching a music download service for the PSP (and possibly, PlayStation 3?). If the company does so, it’s likely that the service will embrace an industry standard format, such as the ubiquitous MP3 or AAC, without the use of DRM. This would be inline with both the music industry trend of abandoning copy-protection technology for a la carte downloads, and recent comments from Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer that moving forward the company plans to take a more open approach:

“If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple,” Stringer told Nikkei Electronics Asia recently. “Sony hasn’t taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its Connect music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads.

“This approach, however, created a problem,” Stringer said. “Customers couldn’t download music from any Web sites except those that contracted with Sony.”

---
Related Articles at last100:

One more thing: Flip Mino HD playback on the PlayStation 3

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:52:54 +0000

Sony PS3 and Flip Mino HD

Since publishing my hands-on review of the Flip Mino HD ‘point and shoot’ camcorder, I’ve discovered a really neat feature: the ability to play High Definition video shot on the Mino on a PlayStation 3, directly from the camera itself.

Simply plug the device into one of the PS3’s USB ports via the Mino HD’s flip out USB connector, and any videos stored on the camera show up in the PlayStation’s XMB User Interface under ‘Video’. From there it’s just a case of selecting the video you want to watch and hitting play. No need to worry about cables, networking or transferring files to the PS3 beforehand. Instead, you can pretty much instantly watch your home made movies on your High Def TV via the PS3 (unedited of course, unless you’ve saved your final edit back onto the camera’s internal flash drive).

Hat tip: I discovered this feature after talking to a PR rep from Western Digital who make their own High Def media player. Apparently, the Mino HD and the WD TV HD Media Player (review coming soon) also play nicely together.

---
Related Articles at last100:

Netflix prepping PlayStation 3 and Wii support suggests job ad

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:38:34 +0000

While Netflix streaming has been an XBox 360 exclusive for quite a while now, we’ve known for a long time that the video rental company harbored greater games console ambitions. CEO Reed Hastings said as much all the way back in October 2007, and Netflix has sinced followed up with a number of customer surveys exploring demand for PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii support.

More proof that Netflix is serious about widening support beyond the XBox 360 emerged today after a recent job advertisement on Monster.com was spotted seeking a lead engineer responsible for the company’s “gaming platforms” – plural.

The gaming platforms team is responsible for prototyping, testing and building the Netflix experience for gaming consoles. We’re tasked with bringing the latest generation of movie discovery and delivery technology to the gaming console platforms our growing subscribers use every day.

Nokia’s DLNA goodness – N85 to PS3 streaming

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:35:40 +0000

A much overlooked feature of Nokia’s Nseries smartphones is their ability to share media with other DLNA-certified devices. In fact, DLNA certification in general is marketed very poorly considering that it goes someway to reaching the holy grail of home media whereby various devices – computers, cellphones, games consoles, hard drives, media streamers and other hardware – can all play nicely together to share and stream media around the home. That’s the aim anyway, although in practice not only is DLNA’s messaging underwhelming, but issues such as copyprotection and varying support for different file formats have held back the technology, which, as I’ve previously noted, offers so much promise. Anyway, back to Nokia.

This afternoon I decided to put the N85’s DLNA support to the test by attempting to stream music, photos and videos stored on the phone to a PlayStation 3. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was all pretty straight forward.

I simply fired up Nokia’s ‘Home media’ application (located in the tools > connectivity folder) and toggled the phone to “visible” so that any DLNA certified device on the same local area network could now connect to the N85 (over WiFi), including my PlayStation 3. After which a Nokia icon popped up in the PS3’s XrossMediaBar Interface. I then needed to tell the N85 which files to make ‘public’; in this instance that would include all music, photos and videos stored on the phone.

After going through these two steps, I was able to browse to the music, photos and video folders respectively on the PlayStation 3 via the Nokia icon labeled N85 (see above screen shot) and stream any of the phone’s media onto my widescreen TV, with one caveat. Although both photos and videos that I’d shot on the N85 played back fine (the PS3 has good support for MPEG4 video, for example), as did MP3 and AAC audio, copyprotected content – a BBC TV show that I’d downloaded via the N85’s iPlayer application- refused to stream.

---
Related Articles at last100:

Rivet 2.0, another Mac to PlayStation 3 streaming solution

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:22:50 +0000

My PlayStation 3 gets used on an almost daily basis but, surprisingly, not usually for gaming. Instead, the PS3 sits at the center of my home media setup, permanently plugged into my High Definition TV, giving me access to photos, DivX files, video podcasts and music streamed from an iMac in the room next door, along with the ability to play movies on Blu-ray and browser-based video from YouTube and the BBC’s UK-only iPlayer.

To get the Mac to talk to the PlayStation I’ve been using Nullriver’s solution, MediaLink, which, aside from occasionally needing to restart the application, has worked a treat. At the time I purchased MediaLink it was the only viable solution (Elgato’s EyeConnect, by the company’s own admission, wasn’t really up to the job). However, as of this week, Nullriver has some competition. Cynical Peak Software have updated their Mac to XBox 360 offering with support for the PS3.

Called Rivet 2.0, the software enables users to browse and stream media from any folder on their Mac from their PS3, with support for all file types that Sony’s games console supports, including AAC, MP3, WMA, H.264 and DivX (AVI).

Although I haven’t had a chance to test Rivet yet (I’ll try and source a review copy), one feature that the software supports, which MediaLink lacks, is the ability to limit access to specific DNLA-certified devices — the media sharing protocol that the PS3 uses — without which, any supported device that sits on the same local network can access the media that’s being shared. To achieve this, Rivet enables filtering by IP address.

---
Related Articles at last100:

BBC iPlayer lands on PlayStation 3 – could Hulu be next?

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Now that the PlayStation 3’s web browser supports full screen Flash video, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we’d see the BBC finally roll out a PS3 version of iPlayer. But boy was that quick.

Available in Beta, as of today PS3 owners can now access the Beeb’s seven day TV catchup service (UK-only), joining their Nindendo Wii brethren, along with specific versions for Nokia’s N96 and Apple’s iPhone. In fact, the BBC now lists compatibility with a whole bunch of portable media players, presumably via a generic mobile version, including the Archos 605 WiFi and Creative Zen X-Fi.

The BBC always said it had a version of iPlayer for the PS3 in the works but that development was being held back due to the limited way in which Sony’s console supported Flash video. Now that’s been addressed, there’s no reason why other Internet TV services, such as Hulu, can’t follow in iPlayer’s footsteps.

---
Related Articles at last100:

How big of an impact is Internet-delivered video making in consumer living rooms?

Daniel Langendorf — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:32:36 +0000

I’ve often wondered this, but my math skills suck. How big of an impact is Internet-delivered video really making in the consumer living room?

Dan Rayburn, the EVP of StreamingMedia.com and the blogger behind BusinessofVideo.com, crunched numbers in a post for GigaOm today and decided that the impact is not nearly as large as we think.

“While it is good to see more content options coming to consumers, adding up all of the install numbers for these devices gives a stark picture of just how small the install base really is,” Rayburn wrote. “The market is still too fragmented, with too many different devices, all limited by a lack of premium content.”

Rayburn bases his analysis on market penetration rates. His point is that the best technologies don’t always win — it’s what consumers adopt. The numbers for TV-connected devices are interesting.

From Rayburn:

Xbox 360: 10.5 million units sold in the U.S.
Netflix: 8.2 million subscribers
Netflix Player by Roku: 10,000 units sold (estimate)
TiVo Series 3: 250,000 units sold (estimate); 750,000 Series 2 and Series 3 units are connected to the Internet via broadband (two-thirds are estimated to be Series 2 devices).
PlayStation 3: 4.9 million units sold in the U.S.
AppleTV: 350,000-400,000 units sold in the U.S. (estimate)
Vudu: 15,000 units sold in the U.S. (estimate)

Adding up the numbers, Rayburn estimates that 19.3 million Internet-to-TV content delivery devices have been sold. Rayburn breaks down the numbers further and concludes: “The real number of consumers capable of getting these content offerings is much smaller — so small, in fact, that they barely register.”

What Rayburn failed to supply is perspective. These numbers are rolled up since when? The Netflix Player by Roku is new. The TiVo Series 3 is relatively new. AppleTV and Vudu are about a year old. PlayStation 3 and Xbox are in the process of rolling out Internet video-to-TV services.

How long did it take other technology advances like the color TV, the fax, the telephone, cell phones, or cable TV — to name just a few — to reach critical mass? Their market penetrations and adoption rates were probably not that much better in their first years.

The fact that Microsoft, Netflix, TiVo, YouTube, Roku, Sony, Apple, and others are rushing to market all sorts of Internet-to-TV products is a sign that they believe Internet-delivered video will be making a big impact in the consumer living room — maybe not now, but soon enough.

---
Related Articles at last100: