Sony to Introduce Media-centric Gaming Box

EE Times and IGN report on the intro­duc­tion of a new gam­ing con­sole by Sony. Not, it’s not the much vaunted PS3, which is still sup­pos­edly on track for 2005 but some­thing much more inter­est­ing (at least to me): a PS2 gam­ing box that also includes a pro­gres­sive DVD player and recorder, a 120Gb Hard Drive, TV tuner, an eth­er­net port, USB 2 con­nec­tion, and a mem­ory stick reader. Look­ing at the back of the box, it looks like it will also include tele­phone con­nec­tiv­ity, DVI out and a way to get com­po­nent video and Svideo both in and out of the sys­tem. To run all this, they seem to have devel­oped an inno­v­a­tive inter­face that shows their intent to play in the music, video, game, tele­vi­sion, and more space.

That’s a lot of things, if you think about it, for a sin­gle device but it points to a vari­ety of pos­si­bil­i­ties. For starters, it makes it pretty clear that gam­ing con­soles are grow­ing up. With this device, Sony is sig­nal­ing its intent to take its lead­er­ship in the gam­ing world and extend into a more wide­spread all/media space, serv­ing as a home server for any bits that gets into the house.

The broad­band con­nec­tion, com­bined with DVD burner, hard drive, and an inter­face that includes video seems to point to the pos­si­bil­ity of their offer­ing a video on demand ser­vice in the future, as well as music on demand or some­thing sim­i­lar. The pres­ence of the mem­ory stick slot increases that chance as peo­ple could buy music online, burn it on the mem­ory stick and play it in their Sony Clie or other Sony MP3 player. Alter­nately, this slot could be used to upload pic­tures from cam­eras that have a mem­ory slot (and those cam­eras are made by… Sony)

The demon­stra­tion on the inter­face video seems to also point to the pos­si­bil­ity of inte­grat­ing video and music. Could it be the begin­ning of an inte­grated suite that would allow peo­ple who bought a Sony video cam­era to quickly edit their films, add some music from the Sony music store, and then burn it to a DVD or ship the movie over a broad­band connection?

The pres­ence of a TV tuner and hard drive should def­i­nitely send shiv­ers down Tivo’s back, as it points to a built-in dig­i­tal video recorder being pretty much a sure thing with this. With the DVD burner, one could eas­ily then copy the shows to a DVD too!

There seems to be so many pos­si­bil­i­ties. Con­sid­er­ing the fact that Sony owns movie stu­dios, music stu­dios, and gam­ing com­pa­nies, it will be inter­est­ing to see how they shape their busi­ness model around this. Fur­ther­more, it’s going to be inter­est­ing to see what Microsoft will try to do as a counter-move.

One ques­tion remains though, why is Sony com­ing out with such a device in late 2003-early 2004, when it is sup­posed to come out with the PS3 in 2005. Is there a chip in there (or maybe there’s some­thing in the soft­ware) that would even­tu­ally allow for an auto­matic upgrade to the PS3 engine? Or could it be that the PS3 will be delayed to late 2005-early 2006, leav­ing this box as a stop­gap mea­sure before Microsoft comes out with Xbox 2?