Universal Media Disc 'another Sony bomb' | Tech News on ZDNet

Betamax!! I see I have your attention. Anyone from the 80s knows this dead format as previously being the sole competitor to the VHS format. Anyone familiar with the format knows that it was much better than VHS. So why did it lose the fight? Sony would not license the format in a way that vendors could truly benefit from it; JVC, the VHS creator, did. Sony made the format restricted to five and a half hours maximum; JVC started at six and eventually went to eight hour tapes. Sony's machines were bulky and expensive; JVC, and its licensees, made slightly less bulky but far less expensive machines available to the masses. Sony screwed up; JVC thrived and made money hand over fist.

So, did Sony learn its lesson after this fiasco? Nope. Since then we had the Walkman (arguably, its only open-format success), the Minidisc (only recently licensed out, but pretty much dead), the Trinitron monitor (someone made an almost as sharp, less expensive rival technology), and my personal distasteful favourite, the Memory Stick (also recently licenses to the likes of Lexan and Sandisk, amongst others, but still essentially only for Sony products). That last one, the Memory Stick, is particulary offensive because it shows Sony's continued insistence to a) not listen to its customers, b) not think about lowering the cost for the customer and c) not use accepted industry standards that are proven, available and cheap. For example, the Compact Flash format is already at 8GB and growing; Memory Stick is rumoured to have a 4GB model but all you can readily buy currently are 2GB units. Compact Flash (CFI and CFII)and Secure Digital (SD), plus to a lesser extent xD, are used in almost every digital camera, expandable MP3 player and PDA on the planet; the Memory Stick is used in basically Sony products and not a whole lot much of anything else.

Which brings us to the PSP. As much as my LB loves his unit (no pun intended), even he would have to admit that it would have been a whole lot more useful if he were able to write his own discs and it used industry standard memory. In fact, Sony was warned that they were doing themselves a disservice by insisting on hoisting proprietary formats on the buying public; AGAIN. Hiding behind DRM (Digital Rights Management) is just a smokescreen for wanting to hold it all close to the vest. And that is okay as they have a right to protect their property but there has to be a balance. I'll talk more to that in a moment. For the PSP to have the longevity it deserves it should have adhered to current industry standards to lower its price, allow people to use hardware (i.e. flash memory) they already own in this new toy they bought and they should have made it possible for people to record their own UMDs (allowing the annoying viewing and display of home movies wherever they went).

Instead, Sony closed their UMD format so that a consumer could not record his/her own information for displaying on the wonderful PSP screen; there are no blank UMD discs available, no recorders or adapters to write your own UMD. Then, they decide to use ONLY their own memory format instead of allowing the consumer to utilize memory that they probably already owned for their PDA, MP3 player or digital camera. And finally, a really dumb move on their part, they do not make it possible for the PSP to natively display output onto another device like a TV or monitor. Why would I want to buy a movie for the PSP and then have to buy another copy (for the same price or less) to be able to watch it on the TV at home? It just doesn't make sense. So, what you end up with is a very capable game machine that has some multimedia capabilities instead of the must have multimedia unit that the PSP should have been, could have been.

Added to their woes is the constant slapping they receive from the Archos and Apple players in the market. Sure both of these units are different, more expensive and larger or smaller than the PSP; and not as much of a game machine as the PSP is. So, why consider them instead? Both the Archos and the Apple units are hard drive based so there is ample room to store content. Both units allow you to sync content from your computer (DRM and non-DRM) to the built-in hard drive. The Apple iPod video is simply the must have MP3 player on the planet. Rivals have come and gone and come again and no one has been able to knock it off its pedestal. The iPod has now added the ability to download (or compress with a utility) video from iTunes; the one service that really works the way it is advertised. There is a dock adapter that allows the iPod to show video on the TV. The reason that the iPod is rock solid is that it has always and continues to be drop dead simple to use and operate. The interface has yet to be bettered by ANY other competitor. Is it the most-featured unit available? No. Is it the best buy for the money? No. But this is the year 2006 and people do not have a lot of time. When someone buys something, they simply want it to work and the Apple series of products do exactly that. When Apple's rivals figure that out, maybe I will take a look at them; right now, it is iPod all the way for me.

The Archos unit is a different breed of animal. I will ask BT of MTL to give me a review, once she finishes reading her manual and actually uses the AV700 for a while. This unit is a 7" viewing monster (2.5" for the iPod video and 3.5" for the PSP). The iPod video has 30GB and 60GB models; the Archos AV700 unit can has a 40GB and a huge 100GB model. There are attachments that allow your USB-enabled digitsal camera to dump its pictures onto the internal hard drive of the Archos, a mini-camera that strapped onto a helmet or your arm for video recordings of your whereabouts (or other activities) and even the ability to add yet more external USB storage to feed content to the unit. It has the ability to record from TV and satellite and obviously the ability to display on the TV; it also plays about fourteen games, compared to the three on the iPod and the several gazillion on the PSP. It also plays for four hours on video, more than the PSP or the iPod Video (only about 2.5hrs a piece); you can also buy additional batteries, like the PSP but not the iPod series.

And all of this brings us to the next fight that Sony has on its hands: HD content. There are two formats battling it out and it brings up the nightmares of the DVD format wars (you remember DVD-R against DVD+R against DVD-RAM). In Sony's camp is the Blu-ray and in Toshiba's camp is HD-DVD. Besides a serious hate on for the way Sony does business, I like the HD-DVD version because it means machines that can be made backward compatible to current DVD formats since it uses the same basic components. What this means for avid DVD collectors like myself is no immediate need to scrap the thousand-plus library that they have amassed; a daunting prospect with the rival Blu-ray. Everything I have read says that if the two sides really got their heads out of their asses, they could combine the formats, lower the entry price on the first machines and make a ton of money right off the start. Instead, most of us will sit back and wait for the movie theatres to choose sides and either buy a machine that offers most of the movies we want or, and this is my route, tell them all to go f**k themselves until they catch a clue and deliver a single, unified format. Until that time, my money will continue to amass boxed sets for the library (as DW allows).

Ciao.

Universal Media Disc 'another Sony bomb' | Tech News on ZDNet