Market KO's Sony UMD Format

by: DarthMolen 2 years, 5 months, 4 weeks, 5 hours, 2 minutes ago 2

UMD is a propietary disc format specifically for the Sony PSP.  UMD for movie-watching is on it’s last legs. We have known this for quite awhile now. Only a select amount of people want to pay double to see both their movies on a teeny tiny screen and purchase a regular DVD of the same movie to watch on their widescreens.

There have been unconfirmed rumors that both Best Buy and Wal-mart are going to tank the format on their shelves and various studios have either scaled back or quit production entirely of these movie discs.

Target has made the rumor reality and has bitten the bullet. Gamespot reports that the San Fransisco Target is no longer selling the format. Curiosity got the better of me and I made some local calls here in Houston and sure enough “We took those down a week ago and no longer sell that format” was the general reply from my friendly neighborhood Targets.

At virtually the same time, Sony announced the forthcoming release of a pair of Memory Stick Entertainment Packs (MSEP). The packages will come in 1GB (MSX-M1GSTEP) and 2GB (MEX-M2GSEP) Memory Stick Duos for about $60 and $100--the standard retail price for both items.

Each will contain an installer DVD with four movies—Hitch, S.W.A.T., The Grudge, or XXX: State of the Union. The kicker is that you can only dl one to the memory stick and then the rest of them lock. Plus the movies only play in 320 x 240 mode.

IMHO, save your bucko’s, find a good software converter out there (you know they are out on the web) and watch your current DVD’s on the PSP if you want movies that bad.