Much to my own chagrin I really can't help viewing the competition between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to make their respective consoles the most popular as anything but a war; a naval war in fact, complete with epic warships and ragged flags flying from the mast. It is in this imaginary war of mine that Sony, with the announcement of details regarding their PlayTV service, has possibly dealt a crushing blow to their enemies.
We all knew that Sony had some kind of set-top service in the works, but considering the disappointment that is Microsoft's set-top system and the current state of intellectual property and copyright law, it would have been a reasonable assumption to make that Sony's set-top system would suck right alongside Microsoft's. It appears that Sony may have been misjudged.
A recent demonstration of the PlayTV service revealed that not only will it allow you to record and store media from your TV, but that this media (saved in a standardized format) will have no copy-protection whatsoever, granting users the ability to move content as they see fit without instituting a time limit in which the media must be watched. Granted, this kind of thing is already possible with TV tuners, but none of the producers of those peripherals has had the publicity that PlayTV will almost certainly get by dint of being associated with the PS3 and Sony.
The demonstrator of Sony's soon-to-be set-top, Mark Bunting, echoed the sentiments of opponents of copy-protection the world over when asked about the potential legal ramifications of this service.
"We've talked to our legal department about it," said Bunting. "All we're doing is moving it out of PlayTV and to the cross-media bar as if it was any other recording. So hopefully users won't do stuff they shouldn't do with it.
"If I'm prohibited from getting the recording off and storing it somewhere else because some other dude is making money out of selling it, then I'd rather they brought the law in to catch those people,"
If PlayTV is all it's cracked up to be (and the PS3 game library sees some rapid, quality growth) Sony stands to give Microsoft a serious run for its money, especially when you consider today's announcement that Sony is releasing a Metal Gear Solid 4 80GB PS3 bundle. Even if the introduction of PlayTV doesn't shake up the current console power structure, you can be sure that it will have some interesting effects on the current system of distributed digital media.
[Via gamesindustry.biz]
Contest:
6:14 PM on 02.26.2008
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This IS an entirely seperate division of Sony than BMG, so I'm going to hold out hope that it is true. They did get awfully burned over that, so maybe they honestly, truly learned their lesson?
That said, who knows when or if PlayTV will come to the USA because most everybody in the States has cable/satellite and PlayTV is Over-The-Air.
I thought i was an Xbox fanboy, this post confuses me greatly.
Now....... if only Sony decides to bring back the PS2's EE chips for fully working backwards compatibility instead of the stuttering software counterpart, all would be right in the world.
Yes, I believe that's what the world is missing.
NOT a good idea. I'll stick to my games thank you.
Firstly, the signals this thing can receive are called Freeview here in the UK; they are DVB-T digital transmissions designed to replace free analogue TV. There's a number of ad-supported channels (around 30) but no premium content; it's not like the US's cable or DirectTV systems. So it's not like there's going to be a dizzying array of content for this thing to grab.
Secondly, the lack of DRM isn't that special; the DVB-T transmissions are plain vanilla MPEG-2 with no DRM on anyway, and existing ways of recording it like using Windows Media Centre also produce files with no protection that can be burnt to DVDs, copied, given to people, copied onto iPods, etc etc. So it's not that stunning that Sony are doing this.
Thirdly, the thing can't record TV shows whilst you're playing games on the PS3. Having to quit my game of Uncharted so my better half can record Big Brother does not strike me as an elegant device. Combined with the fact that it costs about as much as an entire cheap twin-tuner PVR, I struggle to see who's going to buy it.
Can't believe I said that.
Lol way to destroy all these people's dreams!nice to see at least a few people posting information that is actually usefull to the topic.