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December 15, 2008 3:52 PM PST

Sony still believes in USB drives for music, movies

by Greg Sandoval

The big entertainment companies refuse to give up on USB drives for media delivery. Sony announced on Monday that it was loading movies and albums on flash drives.

Michael Jackson fans can obtain the 25th Anniversary edition of the album Thriller for $19.99 or the feature films The Da Vinci Code or Men in Black for $29.99 each.

I can understand trying to sell flash drives for digital movies. Downloading big movie files can still take hours depending on the speed of the Internet connection. I'm not quite sure why anyone would pay $30 for catalog titles just because they're on a USB drive. Sony's press release doesn't say whether there are any added features.

As for offering music on flash drives, well, it's been tried and the public yawned. It's just too easy to download music from iTunes or other music stores and store them on digital music players. If you absolutely require a physical media-delivery system why not just buy a CD?

But Sony Music has struggled lately. For more on that read this story.

Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET.
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by Penguinisto December 15, 2008 4:28 PM PST
Now for the big question - do they still park rootkits on there (that we don't know about yet)?
Reply to this comment
by toosday December 15, 2008 5:22 PM PST
Is this the same as Slot Music? Because Slot Music is advertising ALL OVER Hype Machine today. It's weird because Hype Machine straddles a fine line by linking to mp3 blogs - so much that it's made it very difficult to sell the popular company. Also, Hype Machine's advertising is usualy very clean: I've never seen them allow anyone to take over an entire page MySpace-style before, but they did with Slot Music . What gives?

Hype Machine website:
www.hypem.com
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by t8 December 15, 2008 5:28 PM PST
It believes in a technology that is better for their pockets, unfortunately it also has to benefit customers.
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by Waam December 15, 2008 10:58 PM PST
Can you believe at one time Apple actually offered iPod and iTunes for a collaborative effort with Sony and they refused lol. Please somebody write about that.
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