Upon hearing that Sony had decided to make an online service available allowing people to download movies and television shows for both purchase and rental and then those movies could be shared on your PSP as well. I was thrilled.
Well, I was unfortunately unable to view this service when it was SUPPOSED to be launched last night. Rather I booted it up today to take a look.
Upon my first entrance into the service I was hit with one of the most poorly planned interfaces I've ever seen. I'm sorry XBOX LIVE MARKETPLACE for all the bad things I've EVER said about your organization.
I entered New Releases thinking that since this service hasn't even been active for 24 hours that I would get all the available movies. However this was not the case, it was simply a random grouping of movies based, I guess, on when they were posted to the site.
I then entered the view all movies area. Which simply gave me a bunch of letters and a couple of numbers. I supposed this is better than showing all the movies available but then they should have a heading saying, Movies by Alpha Order or something. Not View ALL MOVIES.
OK, now let's get into the inexcusable part of this service. The rental part is pretty standard except that some movies that are made by Sony and available in BLU-RAY are not available in HD like: Resident Evil 1, 2, or 3; for instance. They are $2.99 for Standard Definition and $5.99 for High Definition. Now this would be fine except that the movies to purchase are $9.99-$14.99 for STANDARD DEFINITION ONLY!
So you can buy a BLU RAY FOR $30 or a DVD for $6-15. But they want you to get a digital version with no box or media for $10-16? Excuse me?
Why? These downloads come with nothing! No director commentary, no deleted scenes, nothing. And I'm sorry but I don't own a PSP so I can't avail myself of the sharing service. Nor would I want to. Watching a movie on that little screen is pointless.
There is absolutely no point to have this service except for the rentals. Which with Netflix having Blu-Ray and if you have PS3 you have a BLU-Ray player; it's pointless to not spend the same amount as 2 movie rentals on the PSN service and get a month of rentals from Netflix.
Sony should have allowed people to download the HD versions of their movies for between $15-$20 and made a fortune. Rather than STILL TRYING TO PUSH BLU-RAY and making no money at all.
Oh and by the way Sony, Microsoft has been showing SD and HD movies on their Rental service for about a year now, so keep trying to upgrade and maybe one day you'll at least reach the same level as Microsoft. Oh but wait, you can watch Netflix instant downloads for free this fall as long as you have a Netflix account. Oh, well I guess Sony has some MORE catching up to do. It must be hard to be Sony. The PS2 era seems SO LONG ago, doesn't it....
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