Brian's Brain

Jul 17 2008 6:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |
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As I type these words, I've just pressed 'play' on Hellboy in high-def (in preparation for a cinema viewing of its highly-rated sequel, shepherded by one of my favorite directors), played back over my PlayStation 3. But I don't have a Blu-ray disc in the drive. And no, I didn't do any arguably illegal ripping.

Hellboy represents my third sampling of the long-rumored, Tuesday-promised, and that-night-launched Sony movie download service. I'd been monitoring the PlayStation Store since Sony's E3 keynote on Tuesday afternoon, and at 8:30 PT that night (which I guess still qualifies as 'this evening' even on the Right Coast) the 'video' button on the home page appeared. My first rental download, since it was late, was The Onion Movie in standard-definition ($2.99). Sony's generous enough to document the file statistics, so I don't need to determine them in a roundabout fashion:

Sony claimed in its keynote that playback over most broadband connections would be 'instantaneous', and surprisingly the company was essentially right (without content caching, to boot, I suspect). The video codec is H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC, aka MPEG-4 JVT, aka MPEG-4 Part 10); for standard-definition resolutions (at least) the 2.1 Mbps bitrate is adequate to deliver acceptable quality, which my eyeballs confirmed. However, my 2.5 Mbps downstream DSL connection delivered the bits to my PS3 at only slightly higher than real-time playback speeds (pretty impressive, though, considering it was the service's premier night and every Sony fanboy was probably online).

I was reminded of this fact when I attempted to fast-forward through the ending credits (to see if there was more satirical silliness beyond them) and, in response, a 'buffering,...' delay notification message soon appeared on-screen. One other note; the content had 14-day delay-until-first-play and 24 hour from-first-play expiration periods, and it doesn't auto-delete after expiration (although you're not able to access it any more). Either auto-delete it or offer the option to extend the rental timeframe at additional cost, Sony.

My next step was to test the touted PlayStation Portable service integration. I connected my current-firmware-release PSP to the PS3 via Remote Play, but my downloaded movie didn't appear in the list of PS3-via-PSP available videos. And there was no way (that I could discern) to directly access the PlayStation Store via the PSP. I was offered the option to move the material to my PSP ('copy' is an additional option available with purchased material) but I didn't have a large enough Memory Stick at my disposal.

So I went for something smaller. Specifically, one of my favorite episodes of Family Guy (and no, not just because the dog and I share the same name) purchased for $1.99. The stats:

I did have a large enough Memory Stick available for this clip (almost big enough for four of them, in fact). Copying the video to my PSP over USB was quite quick, and playback was pristine.

Next step: high def Hellboy (a $4.50 rental). I kicked off the download at 7:40AM, and almost exactly 7 hours later (eerie, eh?) the entire movie was sitting on the PS3 hard drive. It's gorgeous, and playback (pause, fast-forward and -rewind, statistic display, etc) is as if I was watching an optical disc, with the added bonus that if I exit and later return, it continues where I left off. Here are the stats:

I definitely didn't have a large enough Memory Stick for this one!

Monday was Microsoft's day to shine, from an online video distribution standpoint. Tuesday, Sony attempted a counter-attack, but the company's unfortunately charging for the lead from near the back of the pack. Not impossible, but not probable, either. To the company's credit, it was able to muster an offering that wasn't solely restricted to Sony Studios' material. But Microsoft has been offering downloadable videos for rent and purchase since late 2006. The free (with Xbox Live Gold membership, and sufficient-grade Netflix membership) Netflix-service material only sweetens the pot. And, as I mentioned a year ago, Sony's walking a tightrope balancing act between its new downloadable service and its heavy investments (which it understandably aspires to recoup) in Blu-ray. By virtue of HD DVD's demise, Microsoft doesn't have similar corporate conflict constraints.

Could Sony cut a deal with Blockbuster, who bought partially-Sony-owned Movielink in August of 2007? Perhaps. But again, one gets the feeling that Sony would be an also-ran in this case. Which is nothing new (as Penny Arcade succinctly states); Sony is only now beginning to translate its hardware's potential into compelling service reality. For any other company, this delay would be a death knell. For someone with Sony's formidable name recognition and resources, it's still a substantial setback. Will the company rally in time to salvage the PlayStation brand? Only time will tell. What do you think?

Followup: Head here for an image-and-sound quality comparison of the same Spiderman movie (not sure which one) in HD via Blu-ray, Sony's new download service and Apple TV. Two-channel audio only, Sony? C'mon...I've just confirmed that Hellboy is also two-audio-channel source material; I hadn't noticed this last night because the A/V receiver happened to be in hard-coded Dolby Pro Logic II mode, and it therefore extracted and decoded a matrix surround version of the soundtrack.

Amazon Unbox, CinemaNow and Movielink all pull the same two-channel trick (which is why I'd had the A/V receiver in Dolby Pro Logic II mode), presumably to keep the file size 'payload' minimized both at their servers and from a download-to-you bandwidth cost-to-them standpoint, but the vast majority of their material is standard-definition video. Similarly, I'd tend to give Sony a 'pass' on this issue for their standard-def content (though, I feel compelled to point out, the DVD-Video optical disc alternative doesn't have this limitation). But I expect more than this for my $4.50 high-def rental experience, particularly given that Apple TV (along with, for that matter, Microsoft's Xbox Video Marketplace) already provides it.