UMD movies made perfect sense. It’s not like the machine took mini-DVDs, and back then, watching anything on a mobile screen felt futuristic. Competing options included movies on Game Boy Advance cartridges and black-and-white Spongbob episodes on VideoNow CDs.
Warner did try the sensible thing - whole movies on mini-DVDs, which could play on mobile or home players. But they were so fundamentally dysfunctional that every movie came split across two discs. Not two-sided! Separate easily-scratched discs! Like you’re gonna juggle that, in your pockets, halfway through Catwoman.
Where Sony fucked PSP users was on Memory Sticks. They took their price-gouging proprietary format, and made a special version you had to buy new. Oh were you already in the Sony ecosystem, for cameras and phones? Fuck you, buy it again. Then they released a newer PSP model and it took an even special-er version, so if you upgraded, you got zero benefit. I mean at least your games would play, until they released another PSP with no optical drive, and you bet your ass that took yet another extra-proprietary flash media format.
The wildest thing is - they weren’t fighting bootlegs. There were no bootleg Memory Sticks. The DRM was not cracked until like 2020. Sony played these fuck-fuck games purely because they could. And it must have chased off a lot of early adopters who glanced at the DS line’s simple backwards compatibility and thought Spirit Tracks looked fun.
Sure, and I loved my PSP, but remember how Sony tried to sell us movies on disks made just for PSPs?
We were free because the companies sucked at making things terrible, not due to lack of trying.
UMD movies made perfect sense. It’s not like the machine took mini-DVDs, and back then, watching anything on a mobile screen felt futuristic. Competing options included movies on Game Boy Advance cartridges and black-and-white Spongbob episodes on VideoNow CDs.
Warner did try the sensible thing - whole movies on mini-DVDs, which could play on mobile or home players. But they were so fundamentally dysfunctional that every movie came split across two discs. Not two-sided! Separate easily-scratched discs! Like you’re gonna juggle that, in your pockets, halfway through Catwoman.
Where Sony fucked PSP users was on Memory Sticks. They took their price-gouging proprietary format, and made a special version you had to buy new. Oh were you already in the Sony ecosystem, for cameras and phones? Fuck you, buy it again. Then they released a newer PSP model and it took an even special-er version, so if you upgraded, you got zero benefit. I mean at least your games would play, until they released another PSP with no optical drive, and you bet your ass that took yet another extra-proprietary flash media format.
The wildest thing is - they weren’t fighting bootlegs. There were no bootleg Memory Sticks. The DRM was not cracked until like 2020. Sony played these fuck-fuck games purely because they could. And it must have chased off a lot of early adopters who glanced at the DS line’s simple backwards compatibility and thought Spirit Tracks looked fun.
I watched movies go from VHS, to DVDs , and Sony was at the forefront of all the media changes. So I was sold on the umd format.
I remember being so jealous at my one friend who owned like The Matrix on umd.