Sony Video On Demand This Summer, News Globe and PSP Store Later

By Paul Munn | June 26, 2008

Sony has revealed in a business meeting that their long-assumed-was-coming video on demand service will debut this summer in North America for PS3 and PSP users. Surprise, looks like they’re actually going to deliver a video store. No mention of any affiliation with vendors like Netflix, which, as I’m a Netflix subscriber, is disappointing.

Next up will be direct access to the PlayStation Store using the PSP. I’m guessing this ties directly into the video store offering content to the PSP, but while the video store should debut this summer, direct Store access was only given a release window of this fiscal year. This is typically something I hear often from new PSP buyers, so I’m glad the work on it is far enough along for them to say it’ll be headed our way this fiscal year.

No firm dates were given on the other announcement, the Life With PlayStation service that will deliver news and weather using a globe interface to the PS3. I suppose adding news services to the PS3 would be good, but I don’t see why they don’t just beef up the RSS reader on the PSP and then port it to the PS3. Most of the work is done, it just needs a better UI and to be much more forgiving of malformed RSS feeds and other customizations of the format. Either that or team up with a best-in-breed aggregator like Bloglines or Google News and do it native to the XMB. They’ve already shown a willingness to team up with others by putting Google on the PSP XMB in firmware 4.00.

From EvilAvatar, who linked to IGN.