Tretton: Digitally distributed movies will determine fate of UMD

via Games Industry


At an E3 2008 roundtable, SCEA CEO Jack Tretton admitted that the company has had trouble establishing the UMD as a movie format.

"I think the UMD has struggled," he said, as reported by Kotaku. "And that's an understatement. That's been a very frustrating thing. I don't think [UMD movies] were handled very effectively."

He said it seemed as if the studios said "let's see if we can get people to pay USD 20 or 30 for crappy movies with less content."

Tretton noted that Sony was considering a PSP model with a harddrive or larger built-in memory, which he viewed as the trend going forward.

Yesterday, Sony's video download service for the PS3 and PSP went live. Tretton acknowledged that digital downloads will determine the fate of the UMD as a movie format, saying that they would either supplement the UMD's struggle or be the "stake in the UMD's heart."

I would prefer UMD's, but I'm sure they will choose the video download service route instead.

I did own 2 UMD movies at launch (supertroopers,dodgeball) but I found it to be too expensive to continue purchasing water downed dvds. Another thing that discouraged me ever buying UMD was that the movies were censored (at the time dunno now).

I liked the idea of UMD but it just wasn't well executed. Im one of those people that like to have a case with artwork and a booklet inside :)

Didn't the Japanese establish that UMDs sell very well at about ten dollars?

I go for the stake option, but it would have been better to have included the UMD as a bundle with dvds or blu-rays, although they are planning on adding downloadable versions of the movies on the blu-ray disc themselves so that you can input the disk in you pc, and grab the movie for you ipod/psp/other multimedia device.

UMD is dead. Long live UMD.