Online Video Coming To Your Living Room

Four months ago I commented on the victory of Blue-Ray over HD-DVD, coming to the conclusion the actual winner might be an on-line, on-demand movie delivery system. Last week there were two important events worth mentioning here, both clearly favor the Sony PlayStation 3 as the heart of the next generation living room entertainment center.

The first event was the presentation of Sony strategy by CEO, Howard Stinger, on June 26th, 2008. On slide 22 you can see the Video Service rollout strategy. Video Service will launch this summer and will deliver online premium video content do PS3's. Later on (2010) the service will be extended to cover other Sony products like Vaio laptops, Bravia TV sets and even SonyEricsson mobiles. The choice of PS3 as the delivery platform is very clear and obvious. It has all the attributes needed now. High definition (HDMI) output, WiFi Internet connection and a local hard disk, necessary today, as usually the "broadband" speed is not enough for the video content to be delivered on-line without any significant buffering. PS3 is also a great and safe investment here from the consumer's perspective - it plays games and it plays Blue-Ray discs (and standard DVDs too).

The second event was the introduction of the Google Media Server Gadget. The gadget allows you to play multimedia on your TV (including YouTube videos) by means of a UPnP device (the Sony PS3 is a UPnP device). Google - style, this is only a beta now (so it may or may not survive in this form), but still it clearly shows Google is looking for a permanent place on your TV screen and considers the PS3 as one of the vehicles to get there.

Both developments also demonstrate how a well designed and widespread hardware platform, such as the PS3, can be continuously enhanced by new software releases to deliver more and more functions and services. I have had a PS3 console for over a year now. And it is really hard to find any flaws in its hardware. On the other hand the software has been changing every month or so... It is now much more capable and considering the facts above, it will be even more capable in future. I keep my fingers crossed....