Moore's Law, the more transistors, the more Gates
|
|
|
Playstation video store tested
SONY RECENTLY LAUNCHED its new video store for the PS3 and PSP, and over the weekend we've been poking at it thoroughly.
There's a large variety of content available, with some very recent titles - for example, the latest Transformers, Star Trek movie, Inglourious Basterds - however most of the films are considerably older amongst these newer hits. You can view the range of titles at Sony's video store website.
You have the option to buy or rent movies, with renting prices for new HD titles at around £4.49 per film, with older titles at £3.49, which seems a slight hike over traditional physical video outlets. A comparable Bluray from Blockbuster costs in the region of £3.95 to rent. SD prices start at £2.49 for older titles.
Purchasing a SD movie - HD titles aren't yet available - will cost about £11.99, which may appear to be a similar price to traditional physical media until you realise it's stuck forever on your PS3/PSP, for roughly the same price as a transportable DVD.
Rentals last for 14 days but once you press play you have 48 hours to finish watching the film before its gone.
There's a fair amount available, though more needs to be added - the service launched with more than 800 titles, 146 in HD.
There's one major problem with the service in its current guise though. It takes ages to download a film, especially if it's HD.
A typical HD film clocks in at around 8GB. We were using a connection that was downloading at a good 10 to 11Mbps, yet each HD film was taking a whopping seven to eight hours to download. In that time you could've retrieved several videos from Blockbuster, watched and returned them.
SD films chime in at around 2GB - which take about 2 hours to download. An hour a gig seems to be the going rate over our admittedly pretty fast broadband link.
Thus you'll have to think ahead before you want to watch something, especially in HD.
The service is lovingly presented, but the prices need to come down, and Sony needs to provide increased bandwidth to users of the store. With current broadband speeds there's always going to be a wait, but 1GB an hour is simply too much to ask. µ
Share this:
Share
It's been 1 year since this was released. I have LoveFilm and ITunes as well as Homechoice (aka Tiscali and now TalkTalk TV). They were all fast enough to buy a film and then watch at the same time. The download was faster than viewing. Then along came Sony with the PS3 store and not only does it take an incredibly long time to download a film, way longer than the viewing time, you can't watch it whilst you download it. Well you can but only if you are prepared for it to buffer every 5 seconds of viewing even when it has already downloaded the next 50 minutes of the film!
All in all, a complete waste of money, I won't be buying anymore from the PS3 store and I'm off to get a 3View box tomorrow which actually does the trick. And yes my PS3 is up to date with software. Lovefilm and Iplayer all work OK, ITV player is still buggy as only just released.
I've tried this out recently and found the same thing, the download was really slow. Plus, my PS3 powered itself down during the download, I would have expected downloading to have stopped it going to sleep.
I also found the choice a bit disappointing in that the two films I was interested in were both only available for purchase, not rental. The price is also too high. On Love Film "pay as you go" you can buy 15 rentals (DVD or Blu-Ray)for £30, £5 is way too much.
I would love to use it as in theory it's really convenient but high price and slow downloads make Love Film a much better choice for now.
That you have to wait for the download to finish?
When I've downloaded video from the Playstation Store I was given the option to watch it as it downloaded.
I've rented 2 SD films from the store so far, both around 1.7GB in size, which have downloaded in 43 minutes to an hour on a Virgin Media 20Mb connection, which was under-performing at the time. So exactly how fast is your 'admittedly pretty fast broadband link'?
I think your math is a bit wonkey JD.
An 8G file would take about 1hour 50 mins to download.. and thats at the theoretical maximum throughput (which almost never happens).
But it's going to be a lot longer than that because it's not just the file thats being sent. There's packet overhead (which is quite high) and resent packets to consider among other things.
here's the wolfram to back me up:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8Gigabytes+%2F+%2810+mbits%2Fsec%29+
I think your getting you bits and bytes mixed up, your 10mbit/sec is 1.25 mbytes/sec at peak so to download a 8 gig movie which you can stream by the way, would take 80 minutes, it's all down to your isp, your obviously not getting anywhere near your 10mb/s, nothing to do with sony me thinks. You really need a 20mb/s connection to stream hd content live and obviously this would negate the need to wait for it to download.. Shouldn't you guys know this?
Does it really matter if it's the ISP or Sony? If someone goes to watch a SD movie and find that they have to wait for buffering, they will be unhappy and not rent again - at least that's how I feel. Many services like NetFlix and Hulu offer immediate viewing with less-than-SD quality for people who's ISP suck. Obviously Hulu is a different business model but the fact remains that the tech is there to transmit faster.
how much does this cost compared to the Xbox 360 offerings?
In addition to all the comments about the length of time to download, the price (is too much) and the 1080i (is it?) resolution, why o why serve the content up with 2ch audio only - especially the HD content!
I've invested in the HD telly, stung myself for the PS3 and ensured I have a 'proper' 5.1ch surround system - it's a bit of a waste to find one of the most important aspects of movie going has neglected. Get a grip Sony!
. . . a ready meal or a pot noodle:
It costs less to make than the competition, tastes worse and is more expensive.
It's a tax on laziness and impulsiveness and that's the type of people they want to make their money from.
Look how many people buy games from steam when the prices are sometimes over double the price for a physical copy.
If you had any brains you'd just download a torrent of the movie and order the DVD for a couple of quid in the post (if you want to keep things legit that is). Same with games.
When I can buy the DVD from HMV and rip it for £3?
Rent it from the Library for a £1?
I know its convenience but £10 is a lot to charge for that.
I guess a lot of folks dont live in the real world.
From what I saw of it, the content was 1080i only and not 1080P.
A bit poo.
Also, I get rentals from LoveFilm.com, which is LOADS cheaper than this option!!
I was very disappointed with the price and the quality of the films on offer. Not a good advert for downloadable rentals and sales.
If your ISP is actually providing you with 10Mb/s then a 2GB file should take no more than 1 hour to download. Obviously, you are not getting any more than half your rated download speed which is not necessarily Sony's fault.
It might be Sony's servers, or it might be your ISP, or it might be any congested routers in-between. Why not actually investigate the issue and report your findings to your readers?
I'm a reader of this site and I'd like to know where the problem lies, I'm sure others would too.