Digital Media

Could the disaster that was Sony's Connect music service have soured the international conglomerate on offering downloads at the PlayStation Network?

Rafat Ali over at the tech news blog PaidContent.org is reporting that not only has Sony scrapped plans--at least for the time being--to offer music downloads to owners of the PlayStation Portable, but the executive in charge of dealing with the labels has resigned, according to the report.

Two weeks ago, CNET News reported that Sony had talked to some of the largest recording companies about the possibility of offering music via the PlayStation Network, the online store for PlayStation, Sony's video game console, and PlayStation Portable (PSP), the multi-purpose handheld.

PaidContent's report comes on the eve of the expected debut of the new PSP Go, the latest version of the device. Sony executives were not immediately available for comment.

Music should have been one of the PSP's core offerings a long time ago. Sony is a major player in gaming and music. It's a little ironic that while Sony owns the second largest music label, the company can't offer MP3s to PSP owners.

James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, is just one of the people who has said that the PSP has failed so far to live up to its potential. The device is probably one of the best mobile video players available, with a larger screen than any of the iPods or iPhones. It provides an excellent game-playing experience. But it has been well chronicled that the machine was hobbled by Sony's decision to initially offer physical media (Universal Media Disc) rather than digital content. That appears to be changing as the PSP Go, according to reports, will not offer an UMD drive.

Sony has also been determined to keep the PSP's focus on gaming, which is understandable. But at the same time, Apple's iPhone has taken the Swiss Army knife approach and is offering a device that plays music, videos, and games, and also takes photos, downloads books, helps us organize our lives, counts calories and a lot more, thanks to all the applications being written for it.

Sony may have lost the taste for competing in digital music sales by the misguided attempt that was Sony Connect. Connect was a troubled effort marked by infighting and software glitches and the company finally shut it down a year ago.

Sony has spoken with some of the major recording companies about providing music for the PlayStation Portable, music industry sources told CNET News.

The sources said the talks are only preliminary and no deals have been struck. But apparently, Sony is considering offering music on the PlayStation Network, the company's nascent multiplayer gaming and digital download service. Such a move could place the PSP in direct competition with other multiuse music players, most notably the iPhone.

Spokespeople from Sony and the big recording labels declined to comment for this story.

The PSP is a nifty little handheld that plays games, video, and music, but has never fully lived up to its potential, many say. With a larger screen and superior games, the PSP could have rivaled the iPod. The PSP's development, however, was partially hobbled by not offering digital content for download.

Instead, Sony early on chose a walled-garden approach to content. To watch videos on the PSP, the company stuck with physical media and required customers to buy Universal Media Discs, the mini DVDs that play only on PSPs. UMDs never caught on, and one reason was that Sony didn't initially offer a means to watch the discs on a television. This meant PSP owners who bought a UMD movie had to pay out again for a DVD if they wanted to watch on a TV.

If you believe the rumors that have flooded the gaming sector in recent months, Sony plans to release a totally revamped PSP. Some reports say the device will feature a larger screen than the PSP 3000 and have slide-out controls--and it will no longer play UMDs. Told that Sony was interested in music for the PSP, Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, a financial services company, applauded the idea.

"This makes total sense that Sony would try to get content for the device," Pachter said. "If Sony is smart, they would manage it the same way iTunes has and be device-agnostic. Whatever you get on a Sony site should play on an iPod as well.

"(Sony) should want that but right now you can't download a Sony PSP game to an iPod Touch because the operating system won't allow it," Pachter added. "I know I can get music from iTunes to the PSP...It's just a question, but I wonder if Sony will configure the PSP so it would be incompatible with iTunes. They could come up with their own proprietary format for music so that MP3s won't work."

As the current music format of choice is MP3, this would be bucking the popular trend in music, to be sure. The PSP currently plays unprotected MP3s and Apple and most other leading download services have removed digital rights management from their songs. Nonetheless, Pachter knows Sony's long history of trying to force proprietary formats on consumers.

Remember the Music Clip, Sony's first digital music player that ignored the public's preferance for MP3 and only played in its own ATRAC3 format? Sony's MiniDisc was supposed to replace the cassette tape but failed to catch on anywhere but Asia.

When it comes to selling music online, Sony hasn't had much luck there either. Connect was Sony's answer to iTunes, but the download service proved hopelessly buggy. Sony shut the service down in August 2007.

The good news for Sony is that CEO Howard Stringer appears willing to adopt a more open approach.

"If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple," Stringer told Nikkei Electronics Asia recently. "Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its Connect music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads.

"This approach, however, created a problem," Stringer said. "Customers couldn't download music from any Web sites except those that contracted with Sony."

This should be welcome news to PSP fans, many of whom consider the device an excellent game and video player. If Stringer is good to his word, and if Sony does offer music downloads, the company apparently won't try to imprison songs in a Sony system.

Facebook Connect--the service launched last spring that lets members log on to other Web sites using their Facebook profile--appears to be entering a new phase.

The New York Times, in a big-picture story Sunday about the social network's plans to extend its reach across the Web, notes that the Facebook Connect service is gearing up for expansion:

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni, and the online video hub Hulu.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington chimed in with a related post about Facebook Connect and other such services, noting that Facebook had slated Sunday as the start of "a big press push" for Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect was launched in May as a way for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites, much like services offered by rivals MySpace and Google. Members can use their Facebook identities across the Web, including profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook handles the authentication process and stresses that user security is a priority.

Some of the other announced Facebook Connect partners include Movable Type, Amiando, CBS.com, CNET (that's us, of course), CitySearch, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo, and Xobni.

DANA POINT, Calif.--Jason Hirschhorn said negotiating with Hollywood has been "a soul-killing, ego-destroying experience."

But Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment Group, also said it's been worth it. Sling is getting ready to roll out some big new projects that he hopes will make it more than the company that made the Slingbox.

In a panel called "A Hard Reset for Hollywood" at the beachfront WebbyConnect conference, Hirschhorn, the former chief digital officer at MTV Networks, talked about Sling.com, a video hub that's is currently in private beta and promises to deliver a huge library of TV and Web video content. (Hirschhorn said later that while making it the biggest is a general goal, the company isn't comparing catalogs and keeping statistics at this point.)

He showed a preview. It looks a lot like Hulu, but with more video (that's what it looks like from a preview, as Sling has not said whether there physically is more) and more social-networking tie-ins--and eventually owners of Slingbox devices will be able to watch streams from their own TVs on it as well. That's key, because it will eliminate the need to install any desktop software, but Hirschhorn couldn't demonstrate the TV streaming because the company has not finished building the Web-based Sling Player for Mac.

Also key? It'll be free. "Free is the name of the game," he said, adding that Sling.com is "playing with some ad networks." As for its hardware business, Sling's SlingCatcher device will soon have "" capability to take clips from their televisions and send it to their friends.

Hirschhorn elaborated after the panel that future releases of Sling.com--not the initial one--will be able to stream that content directly to SlingCatcher devices, something that has been rumored but not confirmed by the company. That means, yes, you'll be able to watch Hulu or any of Sling's other content partners on your TV. He is not announcing dates yet, but said that the press tour for Sling.com starts in very early November.

Most of this has been announced before, and in some cases it's coming out belatedly--"Clip-and-sling" was first previewed at the 2007 CES trade show nearly two years ago. Hirschhorn said, not surprisingly, that the industry has faced serious difficulties when it comes to online video: securing rights, getting people to keep watching, and figuring out models for making money. These issues are "choking Hollywood," as he described it.

In a world where we expect results on-demand, online video's slow crawl to maturity has left many frustrated, especially now that both the venture dollars and ad dollars are drying up. There continue to be plenty of dead ends and bad ideas. "We just landed on Plymouth Rock and we're on the way to L.A.," Hirschhorn joked. "Nobody knows anything."

Above all, he reiterated that media companies and content producers shouldn't be afraid of distribution, and suggested that exclusive deals are a bad idea--whether it's a network TV show that's not available on the Web or a Web series that's limited to a single site.

"I love television, but television is probably a finite world," he said. "You as the creator, especially when your model is different and smaller, the idea is that you need to go as wide as possible."

This post was updated at 3:56 p.m. PT with clarification from Jason Hirschhorn.

Updated at 3:50 p.m. PDT with further detail and information about Blueprint programming tools for mobile devices.

SAN FRANCISCO--Yahoo on Wednesday released a preview version of a free new iPhone application called OneConnect that can centralize communications and social-networking activity.

"OneConnect allows everybody to keep connected to the persons they care about. It's a socially connected address book," said said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo Connected Life, in a speech here at the CTIA Wireless show. "The address book now comes to life."

Yahoo is racing against Google and others to bring more applications to mobile devices in an effort to tap into the growth of mobile Internet use. Previous Yahoo applications such as OneSearch and Go compete against Google applications including Gmail, Search, and Maps.

One feature of OneConnect, called Pulse, "allows you to tap into everything going on with your friends," Boerries said. It pulls a news feed from "Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm--all the leading social networks--into one aggregated view."

A related "Favorites" feature lets people track or quickly contact the handful of people in a user's inner circle.

Another feature provides a unified hub of instant messaging, SMS messages, and e-mail.

OneConnect will be released in the U.S. initially, but "toward the end of the year will branch out to the rest of the world," Boerries said. Also coming will be versions for other phones. "The other ones will follow soon shortly," including BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile, and Nokia Series 60 phones, he said--but not for the Palm OS-based version of Treo phones.

Google, meanwhile, had its own news. It announced a new version of its Mobile App for BlackBerry users. This software lets people search the Web, with a boost from search suggestions and previous search history, and get links to Google Docs stored online. The company already had an iPhone version of Google Mobile App.

Monetizing mobile
Why all this attention to mobile devices? Because Internet companies are looking for growth, and the mobile phone arena is one place where that growth is spreading now that networks can transfer data as well as handle voice calls. Yahoo expects to make money through sales of advertising, not service fees, Boerries said.

And mobile ads have personalization potential missing from those on computers, he said in an interview after his speech.

"We believe that because of the inherent personal nature of the mobile device," such as location information, "we should see significantly greater CPMs or CPCs," he said, referring to the cost per thousand impressions by which display ads are sold and the cost per click by which search ads are sold.

Blueprint's footprint
Yahoo also announced Wednesday it's increasing the profile of its Blueprint software foundation for developing mobile phone software. Blueprint consists of a "runtime" foundation tuned for each supported mobile device and software components programmers can use to build applications that run on that foundation.

Previously, Blueprint could only be used to develop "widget" applications that would run within the Yahoo Go mobile phone software. Now, though, it can be used to develop standalone applications that anyone can develop and distribute, Boerries said. Programmers wishing to do so can set their download sites so they transparently take advantage of Yahoo's back-end service to identify what phone a user has and to supply the appropriate Blueprint runtime, he added.

Blueprint also works for developing software on an Apple iPhone--as long as you're a Yahoo programmer. "We are currently in discussions with Apple as to how we can work to make that available to other developers, but right now it's only used inside Yahoo," Boerries said.

The software is designed to ease the development difficulties of ensuring compatibility with hundreds of different devices.

"It's insane," Boerries said of the profusion of devices. "I do believe it'll be somewhat chaotic for the foreseeable future because of the size of the market. Blueprint hides that complexity."

Sun Microsystems, along with allies such as Motorola, has tried to accomplish much the same simplification through use of its Java software. Blueprint takes a different approach, though: instead of trying to provide interfaces that will make an application appear the same on every device, Blueprint tries to take advantage of what each phone can offer, so more sophisticated devices get more sophisticated options, he said.