In case you don’t know or have been living in a cave for some reason, the PS3 is the hot item this holiday season. I have an opinion on this and here it is: Let’s Get Ready To Rumble. it seems there are many, many, many reports of fights breaking out in lines across the country (ok, mainly New York and San Francisco because they have Sony Stores, who each have about 800 PS3’s I might add) The fighting seems to be stemming from the fact that when the lines grow to a certain size the security guards move the line and people try to cut in line. So then fights break out, as soon as I find a YouTube video of a PS3 fight I will post it here, until then good luck to all the PS3 warriors out there and Godspeed!

Oh, one more thing, the entire country of Taiwan is getting only 500 PS3’s, can you really call that a launch? Good Luck to them as well.

Well, my suspicions about the craptacular nature of the cheapo PS3 have been confirmed. In an article on GamesIndustry.biz Sony confirms that the HDMI on the cheaper PS3 is not upgradable. This confirms what I figured would happen all along: Sony is going to screw consumers one way or another. It was bound to happen I suppose.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the hype Sony’s machine will do 1080p(sometimes), but you need to spend thousands on a tv that supports it and it needs HDMI. Ok, so how are consumers getting screwed? Well standard HD resolutions are either 720p or 1080i. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray DVD have this nasty problem of using HDCP-HDMI content protection to “stop piracy”. The way it works is that if the consumer doesn’t have HDCP-enabled HDMI, then movie won’t be shown in high definition. It will be shown in 540p. That’s right, if you don’t have HDMI on your HDTV, then the $30 Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies you are buying might not actually display in HD.

Now, there are two problems with this. One, this method of content protection doesn’t stop piracy. Real HD-DVD and Blu-ray pirates will just use specialized equipment to get the HD signal. The equipment can already be bought on the internet. Two, most HDTV’s don’t have HDMI. Even many newer and cheaper HDTV’s don’t have HDMI. So, the sweet HDTV that you bought on Black Friday at BestBuy last year or the year before probably doesn’t have it. Mine doesn’t. In fact, of the millions of HDTV’s that have been sold in the last decade, most don’t have HDMI.

So, in short the $499 PS3 is not going to support HDMI and thus, in a few years when everything downrez’s consumers will be out of luck. Sorry charlie, the Blu-ray thing is a bit of a scam and in a few years when the cheap PS3’s are disappointing customers, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Accoriding to Reuters Sony plans on its game division losing 100 billion yen, or roughly 900 million dollars. Most of this has to do with the PS3 launching this year. Now, this begs the question: how much does Sony plan on losing per console? (more…)

Right now everyone is trying to figure out the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle before any products even hit the market. Ironically, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have seen endless delays. Sure, techies and journalists love to blog about the virtues of both formats, but do consumers care? (more…)

According to a report in Next Generation, Wal-Mart will soon stop selling UMD movies and most of Hollywood is also backing out of Sony’s portable movie format. Why? Sales of UMD movies have died completely. None of the UMD movies are making any money. Chalk this one up as another Sony format failure.

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I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…

It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?

In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.

So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.

Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.