Sony, you suck, and your sucky formats suck even more…
With Target and Wal-mart scaling back or ceasing to carry Sony's UMD format Sony is planning to distribute formats on memory sticks...
Let's see why the death of this format was inevitable:
1) Create a proprietary format called Universal Media Disk
2) Don't let third parties release movies for said format with signing piano-wire agreements to publish to the format
3) The only player for the format is the PSP
To tell the truth, I can't see the Memory Schtick-formatted movies being more successful...
Comments
it's an evolution of the south park gnomes business plan:
step 1
take old crappy movie,re-encode with mpeg 4 to 320x240 (or what ever the tiny screen res is) ,write to mini dvd in weird disc caddy
Step 2
.....
step 3
profit ,because EVERYONE will want to re-purchase their entire dvd collection in umd format
that is one of the best comments ever!
Stupid South Park gnomes stole my business plan. I should sue SONY for making a proprietary format that came to me in a dream minutes before they released it.
I think SONY was trying to make another BETA. First, they make VHS and lease it to other companies in an agreement to cease release of this format themselves for the duration of the lease. Next, create a new format that's better and sell it to idiotic Americans because of the name "SONY". Finally, make the format just created obsolete the moment that the lease runs out by selling the original format under the name "SONY" with a couple of snazzy features the other guys hadn't thought about.
It still works with the SP Gnome theory, except that you're profiting because you're SONY and Americans are stupid mainstream zombie consumers.
I'm hoping blu-ray meets the same fate as umd, myself...
fyi: Beta is not dead.it's the gold standard in the film industry...it's 20+ years old and STILL like 20 times the quality of everyday video recording media (except high definition tapes,35mm and 16mm film) the reason it never caugh on was/could be it's so damn expensive,we had to buy a betaSp tape for one of the films i worked on and it was $50 for a 30min blank tape (compaired to $7 for a 1 hr miniDv tape)
fyi 2 (why is there no edit comment button) additional comparison: 16mm "el chepo brand x" film costs $1200 for a 400 foot roll which is approx 10 minutes of footage.we had to buy 2 of them for a film class,and incase your wondering processing is NOT included in that price...
i'd hate to think of what the film costs of a hollywood blockbuster are...
Beta might not be dead in the film industry, but we're not talking about the film industry here -- we're talking about mass-media released to a wide consumer audience.
Beta's cost is one of its most severe drawbacks. The fact that it was overwhelmed by the existence of cheaper, more easily-licensed VHS players and longer-playing VHS cassette.
The reason that Betamax tape is so expensive is that Sony controls the standard...
$7000-8000 per hour of footage shot is peanuts for a hollywood movie budget, what with millions of dollars being paid to a *single* actor in one of them. Hell, the salaries of a typical film crew for a single day of shooting probably cost more than that.
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