I agree. It's hard for me to believe that certain directions that Sony took were engineer driven, as opposed to mandated by, say, the entertainment division. Early to mid 2000s was essentially one boneheaded move after another, from music players that didn't play mp3s, to cd rootkits, to UMD movies priced higher than DVDs. I wish I could say hindsight is 20/20 but you could literally see the train wreck happening in realtime, no hindsight needed.
As a Sony fan I remember watching their MP3 stumbling and being amazed. Even after MP3s got large traction, Sony continued to push MiniDiscs (which were a nice format in their day). As flash cards got bigger and you could start to put multiple albums on a single card, MiniDiscs still only held one (unless you really sacrificed sound quality).
Eventually Sony bended to the MP3 trend by releasing a new MiniDisc player with MP3 compatibility. Remember CD players that would play burned CDs of MP3 files? Sony's worked by hooking the device up to your computer where it would transcode the MP3s into a proprietary Sony format and then put those on the disc. It was one step above setting the thing up next to your speakers and pressing "record".
They did the same kind of nonsense with flash based MP3 players, where they never made any kind of dent for the same reasons. Their devices wouldn't play MP3s natively until (I believe) years after the iPod came out.
They said what they have so often: "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead". What they keep finding out is that no one is following them, and the torpedoes are really doing damage to their ship.
BluRay is the only thing I can remember them winning on. It was technically superior, but it also got a huge boost from the PS3 (which, remember, they were selling at a $250-$300 loss at first). Even then, as people shift to BluRay the market is crumbling to streaming video.
Paying more isn't going to do much. It looks like they're losing because of insane licensing costs. Paying more means more goes to the music companies.
Never. First, CD audio quality is good enough. Second, the market is in transition (already transitioned?) to a pure digital format, distributed either via flat files (e.g. mp3s), or via SaaS streaming services.
Similarly, Blu-ray is probably the last physical format for movies.
Well there is still an option for so called high definition digital downloads. Although MP3 audio quality is good enough, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of companies marketing "high frequency" "lossless" recordings at a premium price.
NPR mentioned this morning that digital music download sales far exceed physical media music sales already. This might explain there being virtually no record stores around anymore.
It's not 'far exceed' - last year was the first that digital sales exceeded CD sales, by something less than a percentage point. Still, it's nothing to sneeze at.
Hey, this is a very good question. We're currently working out an auth solution that we'll implement directly at the transport level. We haven't figured out every detail yet, but we'll be sure to give more insight on that matter as soon as possible - we understand how important it is as soon as we leave the realm of toy apps.
