It looks like Wal-Mart might stop selling UMD movies, as they become less of a popular seller in the marketplace. Everyone is pointing fingers at Sony, laughing at them for going with a proprietary media source once again.
More bad news for Sony’s UMD format: after word last month that several studios were cutting back on UMD releases or dropping support for the format entirely, it now looks like the discs are about to lose coveted shelf space in America’s largest retailer. According to reports, Wal-Mart is expected to stop selling UMDs, though the company has declined to comment on the rumors.
Bye Bye UMD?
For me the main reason for the UMD’s downfall is the lack of a recordable UMD and lack of a video device or drive to use the UMDs on something more than the PSP.
The price of them doesn’t help a lot either. But even if UMD dies as a video format Sony could always turn things around and deliver a video-purchase service a-la-iTunes.
Is Sony trying to hold the record of most obscure file formats that failed for reasons everyone predicted?
The irony is, if the legitimate sources of UMDs dry up the only way to breathe life in to PSP video playback will be using illegitimate third party tools or piracy, what the locked down device intended to prevent in the first place.
I have this on video if anyone wants it. It’s on my betamax tape.
(sorry, i couldn’t resist)
I have the podcast on my minidisk ;)
With todays’ dropping price of Memoery sticks,
you could buy 2 gig stick with less than 150 dollors.
A 30 min. TV shows with pretty damn good quality will take up about 300-400mb of space.
A movie with good quality takes up about .7-1.0gig. (There are PSP application which enalbes PSP to run not just mp4 but avi, and dvix…)
As for getting the source of TV shows or movies, there are many ways of getting them for free..
Given this situation, why would one pay
20-30 dollor for signle UMD moveis?
well, there is a convinence of not having to go thru process of finding the source or encoding them….
But if u r anything like me, I dont mind
those process at all.