Sony to target Sky, Virgin with net telly channel
PSTV inbound?
Sony is exploring how to expand its existing IPTV efforts into a fully-fledged service to compete with cable and satellite TV.
The Japanese firm has approached various media companies about gaining the rights to stream Sony's TV channels, as well as other already-established ones, over the web in the US, According to people "familiar with the situation" cited by The Wall Street Journal.
The company reportedly plans to stream programmes to Sony devices such as PlayStation consoles, phones, tablets, TVs and Blu-ray Disc players.
Sony already offers movies and some TV shows through its net-connected TVs and the PS3. Right now, the model is a 'buy or rent' one, but it wouldn't take too much effort to convert this into a subscription-based IPTV service along the lines of US cable channels like HBO or even broader services like the UK's Sky and Virgin.
Last week, Sony CEO Howard Stringer spoke of a new kind of television set, a challenger for Apple TV, which the firm had been working on for the past five years. ®
COMMENTS
If its anything like the speed of PSN it will be awful
I have a 50mb connection, and i get 50mb from it, except from the playstation network. Xbox live can download demos and games at just under 300MB a minute when its the only connected device, my pc downloads at the same speeds from itunes, Sadly the playstation crawls along even when it has all the bandwidth of my connection to play with.
I personally cant wait to see sonys take the buffering screen.
It'll be okay.
Sony have a lot of fans so could minaturise a shit on a platter and sell it. People don't forget what Sony gave them. Cheap T.V, cheap audio, expensive consoles, missing console connnection ports and so on.
Stringer should probably have a beer or two with the guys at Logitech before saying such things out loud. And it's not as if Apple TV is changing the way we watch telly, it's barely even a niché product itself.
If their TV and Playstation business is losing money, maybe they should just try making better tellies and stop pissing money away trying to resuscitate dead & dying platforms.
