OVER AND OUT
What a difference a year makes. Hollywood Reporter's article titled "UMD losing H'wood Game", 
reviews the valiant effort by Sony to leverage it's portable game player, the PSP into being much more than a game player with it's mini-DVD discs, aka the UMD (picture via Gizmodo).
As the Hollywood Reporter article notes:
"Exactly a year after it was launched in the U.S., the Sony PlayStation Portable's days as a hand-held movie-viewing device might be numbered.
Disappointing sales have slowed the flow of movies on the proprietary Universal Media Disc to a mere trickle. At least two major studios have completely stopped releasing movies on UMD, while others are either toying with the idea or drastically cutting back."
In a post last July, I'd commented on the euphoria in the air around Sony leveraging it's portable Playstation platform into being much more than a game player.
Over 4.5 million of the discs had been sold around 5 million players at the time, with most of the movie studios pumping out some of their movie catalog in the new format.
Back then, I'd speculated on Apple being a better potential partner for the movie studios with a video version of it's iPod, which had NOT been announced as of yet, but speculation was in the air.
The rationale was straightforward:
"In general, a rival content provider has to balance their support for the next, great content distribution platform with supporting a content rival (in this case Sony, which also owns a movie studio).
If they had their druthers, they'd rather partner with an Apple, who has no content ax to grind, or even prefer to do nothing and wait, than support a verticalized rival. It's an open secret that Apple is on the cusp of announcing a video iPod soon."
The Hollywood Reporter cites another reason for the lack of popularity of the platform amongst movie studios.
"No one's watching movies on PSP," said the president of one of the six major studios' home entertainment divisions. "It's a game player, period."
It's not often I find myself nodding in agreement with a Hollywood "suit" when it comes to digital media, but this is one of those times.
Technology often races ahead of mainstream audiences' ability and desire to absorb new ways of doing some old, favorite things. The current rage of releasing feature length movies video iPods and the like, may also be a flash in the pan, cool during the novelty phase, but not practical in the long run.
This is not to say video of other type (shorter clips and features, etc.) may not be popular through the mainstream phase. It's just that we're still in the wild and woolly, experimental phase of all this. And it's important to keep reminding ourselves of that.
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