Sony Looks To Do With Movie Sales Online What It Failed To Do With Music

Sony’s once sterling reputation has in recent years caked on quite a bit of mud. It’s dealt with a backlash from consumers over underhanded rootkit installations made to consumers’ PCs. It’s seen its Walkman heritage fade every so painfully to become what many would agree is now, when juxtaposed against the all-powerful iPod-iTunes duopoly, just another second-class. And just last week the company announced that it is shelving the ATRAC file format it stubbornly held onto since as far back as I can remember, and will also be putting to bed the music side of Connect Music Store; the eBook division of the Store will remain open (for now) for the sole purpose of maintaining its Reader-compatible catalogue.

Doesn’t look very good for Sony, does it? No, not very. But it’s not over for the company yet. In case you’re thinking the company’s digital media division is finally biting the dust for good, Sony’s got news for you. Rather than accept defeat after years of struggle, it’s going to press on. How, you ask? Well, by launching another media download service of its own, of course. The main attraction this time: movie.

Awesome.

If you looking into the details of this new initiative of Sony’s, you’ll see that, ideally, such a service could in fact work in ways that the Connect Music Store never could. How?

Playstation 3. Yep, a lovely piece of kit the PS3 is. It’s the newest iteration of the Playstation lineup rightfully dubbed a full-blown entertainment center. (Though the way Sony markets the console, one wouldn’t think so.) One can game on the platform, but one can also view DVDs and Blu-Ray content and traverse the Web and presumably network with others via things like VoIP and so forth. If one looks at all that the Playstation 3 can do, it does in fact look to be a wise investment.

Unfortunately, few are investing. The Playstation 3, despite intense efforts by Sony to market the console to various markets of the world, regularly falls to a third- or fourth-place behind its biggest competition. Clearly, Sony had better luck with the Playstation 2.

The fact that the Playstation 3 isn’t selling well, however, portends tough times for a Sony movie download store, regardless of how wonderful and “open” and easy to use it ends up being. The only way the company could in fact spark a sort of “change of heart” in the consumer world for its digital media offerings is to make its hardware products far more compelling than they appear today. The PS3, for example, is high-def-video-compatible right out of the box, includes free access to over-the-Web multiplayer gameplay, offers storage for media, and, because its operating system is structured in such an “open” fashion, possibilities for expansion are pretty much limitless.

But Sony doesn’t appear to highlight these features. They market the box as a game console. Nothing more. A marketing sin by omission, in my view.

I’ll be honest, I like Sony in its most basic form. It’s hardware, is, in a word, beautiful, almost Apple-like in its simplicity/sophistication. But the company fails to capitalize on the gorgeous factor. It doesn’t take to heart the necessity to create great software and a great customer experience, which at the end of the day are components absolutely crucial – I dare say even more important than aesthetics - to making the whole thing work. If it addresses these problems, it may just see its fortunes change. If not, anything it produces will more or less fall into infamy as good ideas sullied with bad execution. Which was the problem that proved the downfall of Sony Connect.

The company will no doubt have to consider the desires of the end user a bit more when constructing its movie download store.