Film studios cut back on UMD titles

I feel the same way about UMD that I did about minidisc. There useless, unless you have the one overpriced device needed to play them, and there is another format that contains better features, is more widely supported, and costs less. (i.e., UMD-DVD, MD-CD)

I'm sorry, but as long as I can pickup a portable DVD player for around $100, that allows me to view the same movies on the go and at home, I'm NEVER going to buy a PSP. Not to mention it has no good games.

Here's what Sony SHOULD do!

http://kamalot.blogspot.com/2006/02/portable-movie-sales-dry-up.html

Here's a snippet:
"If people could buy a DVD and use the PS3 to watch it on their TV as well as use it to copy the DVD to the PSP, people would see a greater value in both the PSP and the PS3. It would solve the problem consumers have with buying two copies of the same movie, an understandable complaint."

And I thought UMD would save PSP! No more... The only UMD I own is Napoleon Dynamite, and I haven't finished it on the handheld. I have watched my DVD several times, however. So while UMD flounders, Nintendo adds TV to their DS... In the same day!

This decision will probably shed doubt on the future of Blu-Ray as a movie format as well, though I am sure PS3 will make good use of it for gaming. HD-DVD is the logical choice, anyway. The only PC's likely to use Blu-Ray are Sony's Vaio's, and they haven't announced anything about that yet.

It was bound to happen. Kids are a fickle audience, and the bulk of those buying UMDs are kids. Sony was too slow to acknowledge playing UMDs outside of the PSP, which limits potential sales. Also, there's no UMD player or burner for a computer, which would have helped. Lack of special features limited sales. And the pricing sure didn't help. Why would anyone buy a UMD when they could buy a DVD with more features? Just how many times are you really gonna watch that movie? In the end, Sony created a passing fad.

Kamalot:

that idea sounds great and all, but what would stop me from going to blockbuster, buying a DVD, and then copying it to my PSP to have forever? I know it talks about DRM stuff like limiting the number of times a DVD can be copied, but as long as it can be copied at least once, that's all that is needed for piracy to take place. Unless maybe rental movies are encoded differently so that they cannot be copied. I guess if the DRM was setup properly, and sony could find a way to stop people from being able to take the movies and share them over the net, sony could have done it.

Good find, those were some good ideas on that blog you found. Personally though, I think UMD, and all other proprietary formats like this are doomed from the start due to the lack of mainstream support. Soon enough though, you'll simply be able to have on-demand movies through a subscription service of some kind on devices much like the PSP. Hell, I can already watch cable TV channels like CNN on my cell phone.

I hate to say I told you so, but....

So much for the great UMD movie marketing machine hype.

I've said this before a long time ago on the Engadget blogs, and I say it again, this was a cheap gimmick that costed studios nothing to try, obviously was not going anywhere. And the format was worse than MiniDisc because it can't be used as recordable media by consumers. Between DVD, VHS, next-gen (BluRay & HD-DVD), there was NO way UMD was going to fly as a movie format. I remember stupid fanboys and other pompous people claiming that UMD movies were the greatest thing since sliced bread, and UMD sales were great and all, without any figures to back the claim. And I can't see how bundling will help a company, since it will just cut into already reduced margins, so they'll probably conclude it's not worth it later in the year.

What I really hope that they make the PSP LocationFree tv some sort of CHEAP subscription feature to great content off a server, though. Then we wouldn't have to buy stupid base stations, and have someone else do all the work of storing and distributing content to us. Honestly, there's no practical way the mass market can use LocationFree outside there home, because they just wouldn't have the required outbound bandwidth.

and BTW, you might think it's silly to watch content on smaller screens, but what probably will sell ipod videos more is it's ease of hook up to a real tv. and Europe is rolling out TV content on people's mobile phones already, because alot of people have 3G mobiles (for free). It's nice to get the news and weather on your phone live. Where picture quality doesn't really matter. God, people think portable TV is only good for mindless entertainment.

actually, with this announcement, I just realized that bundling might be a way to burn through the remaining inventory. hmmm.....

Well what do you expect? The PSP has been, all along, means to get us to buy the same product twice.

• Buy UMDs of DVDs you already own!
• Buy PSP ports of PS2 games you already own!
• Buy music for your PSP from Sony Connect! (don't bother ripping your Sony artist CD's, we've disabled your computer with our rootkit) Buy it again!

Sony's motto lately has been.

Have they not figured out the reason they're getting beaten by the DS? It's not loaded with ports of existing games. There are NEW games and NEW concepts on the DS that you simply couldn't pull off on any other hardware.

Personally I love the UMD format and they're no more expensive than DVDs were in the first few years of their release. A few points...

1. Special Features - a lot of DVD special features are a waste of time and disc space, eg. deleted scenes - there's a reason why they're deleted. In some cases the special features are great - eg. Lord of the Rings, but you have to have the time and the interest level to watch them - UMDs are for portable use and most people won't even watch the entire movie in one sitting.

2. Image quality - the image quality of the UMD format is simply superb, the compression is actually superior to DVD quality. Only the resolution is lower but still more than adequate for the size of the screen, which by the way is comparable to sitting 2m from a 50" screen when held at a comfortable viewing distance of about 20cm.

Movie's that are transferred to memory stick don't even come close to UMD quality (even with the highest bit levels). The only movies that really work well on memory stick are animated ones, because they have much less detail, anything with high detail and fast movement looks pretty awful and often suffers from colour bleeding.

3. Playback on a TV - because of the reduced resolution and the lack of 5.1 surround this probably isn't very practical except perhaps on smaller home TV setups that only use stereo. I think most people would prefer to own both the UMD for portable use and the DVD/Blue-Ray version for home use (when Blue-Ray/Hi-Def DVD come out most people are going to want to replace their entire DVD library again too I would think).

4. Dual DVD/UMD sales - I agree this should have been done from the start, it makes sense for film companies to bundle a movie in both formats for a relatively small increase in the price (especially since DVD media is so cheap now).

The biggest problem with UMD is not that it offers less than DVD does for more expense, it's that film companies are too greedy/short-sighted to bundle UMD and DVD media together at a reasonable price and people are too cheap/short of memory to recognise that UMDs are no dearer than DVDs used to be and that even with their short comings they're still worth every penny the film companies are charging for them.

I'm a little confused by everyones responses. They act like a portable movie player is stupid, or that Sony made a bad one.
Portable DVDs sell like hotcakes.
Here is my take.
1. There has been rumor that the UMD video is DVD quality. I know the screen on the device can't display that, but there is no reason to believe it is not downsampled. I say this because I know from first hand experience that 1.8GB (the capacity of a UMD) is MORE than enough for an AVC(h.264) encooded (the codec PSP uses) DVD quality video plus surround sound audio.
2. If they were cheaper (And could REPLACE - by being the same quality - your DVDs) then what's not to love.
3. If I could watch this DVD quality movie on my TV...
4. if I could WRITE MY OWN UMDs....

The media is fine, so is the player. Sony just needs to get thier act together on Pricing / licensing / etc.

P.s. Of course if they had used Dual layer mini DVDs instead, we could all be happy right now.