Sony’s PSP Gets a Show

Sony’s new mobile multimedia device, the PSP, continues to attract attention from the entertainment world – not as a video game handheld, but as a television and movie device.

Television and movie studios have been falling all over themselves to release their content in mobile form, particularly content that is aimed at – as this Associated Press story points out – young males likely to buy these devices.

Universal said Monday it will release six titles on Universal Media Disc (UMD), the proprietary format devised by Sony for the PSP.

Sony, The Walt Disney Co. and Twentieth Century Fox have previously said they will release films on the miniature disc.

Before this job, I worked as the director of new media at VTV: Varsity Television, an independent cable network that took shows created by high school kids and cut them into 30- and 60-minute shows. I’m not sure how effective I was there, but the one thing I was able to convince them about was that the future of television wasn’t simply going to be on a TV screen. The future is in delivering programming to whatever screen happens to be in front of the viewer: computer, mobile, TV, or anything else of which they can think.

I’ve long held that the game companies were going to hold the key to the integrated home entertainment sphere because they make devices that are 1) targeted towards the demographic of early adopters, and 2) capable of handling multimedia in a very intuitive way.