When I reviewed the Sony PSP for its movie and music prowess I was stunned by the clarity of Spider-Man 2 as I viewed it on that unit’s small, but sharp, widescreen display. The movie was delivered on Sony’s Universal Media Disc (UMD), a new proprietary format that in several weeks Sony put into the hands of 1.2 million users. I said this in the review
Well, the numbers are starting to come in on UMD movie sales and the results are excellent.
Since the introduction of the PSP two Sony titles have hit the 100,000 mark in unit sales, Resident Evil 2 and House of the Flying Daggers. Both titles shipped on April 19th, reaching these numbers within a month of release. To put that in perspective the first DVD title to reach 100K was Air Force One and it took 9 months to reach it.
Hollywood has taken notice on these numbers and all but one are jumping in with select titles that they feel will best play to the PSP’s target audience of teens and twenty-somethings. The only studio sitting out right now is Warner Brothers and the reason is because they have a competing technology called mini-DVD. With the success of UMD sales Paramount, Fox and Universal, who previously agreed to support mini-DVD, have dropped it.
The first casualty, mini-DVD shows that the movie industry is not going to support too many different formats as multiple formats increase shipping and warehousing costs. This is why twenty years ago the studios dropped support of Sony’s Betamax format, leaving only VHS behind. One format is simply more cost effective.
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