What Sony's Latest Move Really Means

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Well, physical media is officiallydead. This week, Sony announced that it is closing its last remaining optical drivemanufacturing plant. Let me repeat that. Sony, the company that had more proprietaryphysical media sticks in the fire than Medusa had head snakes, is getting out of thephysical media business. While Sony cited stiff competition as the main reason that it isjumping ship, it’s safe to say the future of burning discs is not so bright.Don’t panic just yet. You’ll still be able to get a Sony-branded Blu-rayplayer and the unintentionally funny sequel to Priest on Blu-ray -- they justwon’t be made by Sony anymore, and it’s safe to say that Sony’s out ofthe custom media game. For those needing a littlebackground, here’s a primer on Sony’s love/hate relationship with proprietaryphysical media. With almost every generation of music, home video and games, Sony hastried to make a new standard of physical media that would let it get a leg up onmanufacturing the latest and greatest before anyone else could catch up so that it couldlicense its (hopefully) popular format for added dough and to avoid piracy. Sony madegreat formats, so it should have worked in theory. No Sony format was more revered thanBetamax, but the higher-quality video format still failed to beat VHS in thehome. But even before Betamax, there was the U-Maticvideo cassette format, and Sony’s been trying to replicate the market dominance thatU-Matic achieved. But since then, it's been in a long proprietary media tailspin.Sony’s MiniDisc was loved by musicians but a complete flop as a replacement for tapecassettes. Despite my love for my Criterion Blu-rays, the format is a flop from afuture-proofing standpoint. Laptops have been outselling desktops since 2008and have been shedding their optical discs -- and that’s a good thing. Blu-ray in alaptop was the worst idea ever. The demanding decoding of the video, combined with thepower consumption of spinning a disc, meant that you couldn’t watch a single movieon a flight without running out of juice. Meanwhile, the guy next to you just finished thewhole last season of Breaking Bad in HD and he was playing it on hisless powerful iPad, which uses hardware decoding for power efficiency. You can bitch allyou want about quality but that’s not going charge the battery of your hefty manwichof a laptop. Sony’s flirtation with media hasactually left it less able to compete -- Blu-ray was partly responsible for the hugeinitial cost and scarcity of the Playstation 3. Just look at the home media-box success ofthe XBox 360 -- it shipped with an infamously loud DVD player that even scratched discs.Sony has learned that, if it couldn’t beat the media player equivalent of AIDS, thenit's obviously been fighting the wrong fight. Still,without physical media, it will be interesting to see how the next-gen game systems workto minimize download time for cloud-stored games. We’re already pushing 15 to 25GBgames on PSN because they are just online versions of Blu-ray titles. There may need to bea way of streaming the first level while the rest of the game downloads as you play.Waiting on a 50GB game is going to be murder, especially considering that I just got thisrad 56K-baud modem last week. Continue Reading

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