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How the Playstation 3 took over the world: A recap
Posted January 15th, 2008, in Games.
This is a short recap article on how in only about 7 or 8 months Sony have actually done a lot of the things I wanted them to do in my little article about the ideal PS3 media centre, written in March. In the last month or two, a lot of these ideas have come to fruition, amazingly!
I believe that right now, the PS3 is the best thing anyone with a HDTV could buy. It provides all your viewable and listenable content, except TV (but as we’ll see, there’s something for that too!) I think Sony are doing a good job positioning the PS3 as a media playing device, and I wish they would market this with more panache, as currently nobody really cares about it.
It can get content from your real media library (the PC)!
This is important, because nobody will ever use their PS3 as their primary point of photo\video\music storage, yet in many cases the PC has this role - with individual folders and apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player as the databases. Nullriver MediaLink has provided this functionality in combination with Sony’s implementation of DLNA (golly, an open standard!) It puts all your photos, movies and music from the computer in the PS3 XMB, streaming them over WiFi from computers it automatically searches out. All you need is something like MediaLink running on your computer, and you get everything - complete with album art, full XMB functionality and support for DivX and WMV files that works remarkably well on animu and all sorts of other files you probably have. It’s amazing!
But it’s not perfect. I envisioned Sony creating a little background app like MediaLink for free, and encouraging PS3 owners to put it on all their computers with media. I hope they still do, as paying $20 for MediaLink kinda sucks. (I’m also not sure if there’s a comparable Windows app, probably not.) I also think the UI should be done as more of a “pool” of content rather than the current system where you have to select the specific “Media Server”. But these are easily fixed, and the hard technical work has been done, almost precisely as I wanted it to be done.
You can use it as a DVR!
Something called “PlayTV” is going to be released, and it’s suspiciously like my idea for an external tuner box that turns the PS3 into your source for ALL content, recorded, playable as well as TV broadcasts.
“The new box will feature two 1080p tuners, which utilize the European Digital Video Broadcasting system (DVB-T) — which should dash any US hopes for the time being. The system will allow you to store recorded broadcasts on your PS3 drive, and also transcode and transfer the saved files to your PSP. Additionally, you’ll be able to use the PSP’s “Remote Play” feature to program and watch your PlayTV away from home.”
So you get full HD TV content on the PS3, for around £70. Content which you can pause, rewind, record, keep and re-watch. This means that if all the broadcast TV you view is terrestrial digital TV, you need never switch away from the PS3 on your TV again. Unless you have another console or something. Plus you get the equivalent of a Slingbox or Locationfree TV in it, because the PS3 streams TV to the PSP, worldwide. Great idea!
Again, it’s not perfect. It’s all about over-the-air digital TV, and I want a box that simply takes a bunch of inputs and lets you switch between them, also providing more storage but it’s getting there, right? It’s also for Europe only. A second revision of this box with a 3.5” HD and inputs for cable TV and some additional sources would perfect it, and match exactly what I called for. Maybe at the end of 2008?
More to do!
Of course, Sony still needs the following on their to-do list: internet radio, podcasts, trailers, iPod support and Youtube. They seem to be doing at least the first two on the PSP, and the others aren’t totally unfeasible.
Either way, it looks like they basically did two of the three things I had under “major stuff”, with only the minor things left to do. And as a major thing to implement, AppleTV kinda stole Youtube-on-TV’s thunder anyway (I wrote my original blog before we knew about that.)
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