Sep

11

Are people actually buying UMD movies?

Posted by Todd

September 11, 2007 |

This amazes me. Let me give you a little background.  UMD is Sony’s proprietary format for the Play Station Portable.  About two years ago I was one of only two people in our office to program these torture devices. Now don’t get me wrong, in a sense they are kind of cool. But honestly, for the price to make and the price for the consumer they are painful little devices. A lot of work goes into programming these bad boys. In fact, their menu development closely mirrors HD-DVD. Now, I worked on them for several months. Nobody was buying them and titles began falling off the schedule…quickly. This wasn’t really a surprise. It didn’t make sense to me. Pay $20 for the umd version of a movie. Dumb. Now, if they bundled them with a DVD like they should have done I figured it would have had some life. But they didn’t. Maybe even putting them in vending machines in airports would have worked. I don’t know. Anything but selling them alone.

Eventually I went back into standard definition DVD production and didn’t think another thing of it. About a month ago our director came into my office and asked me if I remembered much about coding them. I shuttered.

As it turns out, they are starting to pump them out again. I just went over to Amazon and noticed there are several new releases. In a way it’s unbelievable to me. It has to mean there has been a renewed interest in them, or I should say interest in them at all. There certainly wasn’t the first go around. Why now?

I’m not a fan of any portable video. Short of video podcasts on my Ipod I see no point. I just don’t have the need to watch a full length movie on a 2 and a half inch screen. Maybe the Ipod touch, but even that seems small to me. I guess TV episodes would be cool if you have a long bus/subway commute or something.

If anyone out there is really into these things let me know. It would be cool to know that my work had value with someone, but to me it was just Sony putting out another silly proprietary format that would flop (ahem minidisc anyone?).

Just felt like getting that off my chest.


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