Sony Puts Network at Center of Mid-term Strategy

[Plaupius]

Feniris said:

Plaupius said:
It does seem likely that they actually mean PSP and PS3 sales combined, but that is not what the article is saying. Actually, the wording in the article is pretty clear on that:

"The PlayStation 3, which shipped with an Internet connection from launch, is one of its most widely used network-capable products beyond PCs. Around 50 million of the consoles are in the hands of consumers [...]"

Maybe it's a mistake by the journalist, or perhaps the article was cut shorter and this error got overlooked. Anyhow, if Sony wishes to make Blu-Ray a success, it seems poor strategy to undermine that goal by offering a directly competing product. It sends a message to the market that even Sony thinks the future is in downloading content and not in physical media, so why would others enforce Blu-Ray in that situation?

 

For right now,  the level of content on Blu-Ray and the Quality of content is not going to be matched by any service.  It would be too much of a radical change for most consumers.  But, I agree, this does conflict with the Blu-ray, to an extent.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean with the level of content, and if by quality you mean image and audio quality, that's obviously true. However, the situation for Blu-Ray, as has been noted many times before, is not as clear cut as it was for DVD, and in the foreseeable future download rentals are going to grow and take a bigger piece of the cake. After the loss of HD-DVD, the competition for Blu-Ray is DVD and digital distribution, and in that light it is strange strategic positioning to enforce so heavily two directly competing offerings. It is, however, understandable that Sony does not want to be left out of the digital distribution, as it is inevitable that it will grow, it just seems they haven't figured out a way to do it in such a manner that would actually work with their current strategy with Blu-Ray.