Just tell me how difficult this is? You are Sony. You own three major US studios, and you are buddies with all the others on a huge number of business fronts. You also own half of the world’s patents on DRM to protect content and everyone else knows that if you license their content you will protect it as well as your own. You also own a major gaming franchise and a major handset franchise and have business relations with every pay TV service on the planet.
And from this vantage point all you need to do in order to totally own online film content is write two pieces of software, one to sit on every client out there ‘ the PSP, the PlayStation 3, the Bravia TV sets, and the PC, oh and of course the new breed of video phones ‘ and secondly a major piece of server side software to deliver films to every one of these devices over the internet, and through the air. Then you have to market it.
And you have from 2004 until now to do all this and license all the content you could want.
Why would you not have a single branded film delivery method which dominates globally, instead of still be in a state of putting your basic content rights in order.
So when stories appear such as this week’s item that Sony Computer Entertainment America will get its hands on NBC Universal films and these can be rented or bought through Sony’s PlayStation Network, we just wonder how much longer a unified global film service of this type will take (this is one US studio, just in the US). Films from Universal plus TV programs from NBC will now be available for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable in the United States.
Microsoft built a system like this a full two years ahead of Sony, but even today Sony appears not to be rushing. This deal means that Sony has 1,300 movies and 4,500 TV episodes. How come a tiny business like Netflix has managed to reach 12,000 video items online without all of those huge head starts which Sony has.
Sony says that its PlayStation Network now has 9 million registered accounts in the US and 20 million globally, but of course this film service is not global, because Sony hasn’t even begun to unravel rights outside the US. So what has it been doing for the past five years while companies like Apple and Amazon have begun to eat its lunch? And what about making this available on its Bravia internet connection or on its PCs or on specialist portable media players, or through any number of sets tops in any number of countries? No wonder Sony is in such a mess.