PSP digital distribution and Atari

The UMD, another one of Sony's proprietory media formats, has had a steady decline in popularity since it's inception with the launch of the PSP. Sony had grand ideas with movie distribution on the format along with games and music videos. The problem with the UMD is that it's another format that's not helpful to the consumer unless you happen to want to run it in a PSP. To my knowledge the only thing that currently uses the UMD is the PSP meaning that any movies you may have bought are limited to only one play device. A bad idea if you want to sell things to consumers at a price which rivaled or was more expensive than a fully fledged DVD.

The UMD has been the bain of the PSP ever since, due to it's lack luster support and death as anything but a games distribution format. Recently Sony has been investigating and investing in digital distribution. It's Playstation Network and accompanying Playstation Store on the PS3 has been a big success with many many downloads happening all the time. It's a success because it brings the content into the home straight from the machine itself and doesn't require anything but the PS3 and an internet connection. Sony recently launched a Playstation store on the PSP, which again has brought the content straight into the device without the need for anything else. PSP games are quite easily accessible as a download the largest clocking in around 1.7Gb (the UMD capacity is 1.8Gb). Most games are much smaller than this meaning that game download times aren't that long for today's modern connections. It's the digital distribution that I think is the future for the PSP. Phil Harrison, President of Atari seems to agree with me having been quoted by Eurogamer as saying:

"There is no doubt that PSP is a very vibrant platform from a hardware perspective and I think Sony has recently made some good moves into opening up online distribution for software on PSP, so I'm looking to explore that."

Other devices have shown that having a good, easy to use and on-device digital distribution service have made the device. A quick look at iPhone's App Store shows how easy it can be to purchase and download new apps and games, and is one of the factors that has made the iPhone so popular. I really hope that Sony really gets behind it's digital distribution service and makes the PSP what it should have been on launch, a connected, easy to use portable gaming and media device that doesn't rely on you having your collection of discs to carry around.