Sony: Failing Real Good Since 1975

It's X-mas season again, which means if you're a guy under the age of 30, you're entertaining sweet reveries of the latest electronic devices. The desire to constantly acquire and update anything with circuitry is keyed directly into the Y chromosome. It's right there between Adam's apple and testicles. Best Buy circulars are straight up gadget porn to dudes, even though I won't shop there because of their annoying ads with carolers that get stuck in my head (hahaha, your turn!).

we're going to need some alone time

Anyway, every time I buy a movie now all I can think is how much more badass it would be on Blu-ray with an HDTV. It's a bit annoying since marketing drones across the world just finished telling me how awesome DVD was and now they're like, "Come on, guys. We weren't even serious about that last one. All the cool kids are doing Blu-ray now." I guess I just suggested that all forms of media are drugs...but I'm going to run with that analogy: DVD's are now the Quaaludes of the media world.

The really important thing of note here is that Sony has finally won. They've been pushing proprietary formats for a long time and they've finally got us hooked. No one brand was directly responsible for the CD and DVD formats. In fact nobody even knows what the fuck DVD stands for. So because no one owned those formats, no one was able to collect all of our souls as payment. Well, Sony decided that just wouldn't do. Sony makes movies. That means if they'd wanted to play hard ball they could have chosen to make their movies available only on Blu-ray. They were always going to win against HD DVD. And now we must come to love our new master. But maybe you've forgotten about all of the failed attempts Sony has made to lure us into they're creepy van.

hint: they didn't use candy

1.) Magic Gate/Memory Stick:

Sony actually did pretty well with this one, mostly because we didn't know any better. It's like when you first got the internet back in 1996 and you subscribed to AOL because "why the fuck not?"

because everyone at AOL hates you, that's why not

We've seen a lot of rapid expansion in digital technology and a lot of people just grit their teeth, shut their eyes, and dive in. When the average consumer goes to buy a device, let's say a camera, they don't always go in with all of the information they need. It usually boils down to knowing that a.) more mega pixels are better, and b.) high profile brand names are the only way to go. That's not very helpful.

would you like the Magnet Box, the Panaphonics, or the Sorny?

You know the Sony name. They make good shit, right? And how were you to know which memory card was going to become the most widely used? You probably had only heard of the competing Compact Flash cards at the time. But the real place that Sony found an application for this technology was in their PlayStation systems. The PlayStation 2 used memory cards which we'd come to have accepted as standard. These memory cards exclusively required Magic Gate authentication. That means that not just any company could produce third party cards. No, you had to be directly licensed by Sony, which meant the prices were fixed. So while I could buy a 512MB card for my Nintendo Game Cube for $30, I was stuck buying 32MB cards from Sony over and over at $20 a pop. And the PlayStation Portable requires a Memory Stick as storage. So if you want to use any of those devices, you're just going to have to ask Sony to "please be gentle."


2.) UMD:

While we're on the topic of the PSP, who could forget the Universal Media Disc? So compact and sexy. And it's universal! You can do anything with this son of a bitch!

you can even use the cases to store Sony's other formats!

OK, so it's a disc-based portable system and that's a first. Neat, right? No. No one gives a fuck. That's why they're out there playing Nintendogs or whatever, that are just printed on a flash-memory cartridge. Disc-based systems run into a lot of problems. Remember when portable CD players were becoming common? Remember how they could detect an earthquake in China and they would immediately skip? That's the problem. There a ton of tiny, precise moving parts in those things and it doesn't take much for one to break and fuck up the entire thing.

you're fucked

But back to the "universal" part. You were supposed to be watching movies on these fuckers. That sounds fine on paper, right? Well, the catch is you paid the same price as a full DVD which contained bonus features, commentaries, surround sound profiles, and higher resolutions. The UMD movies had none of that. Oh, and more than one person could watch a DVD at the same time. This concept was so mind bogglingly retarded that even Walmart stopped selling UMD copies of movies because no one wanted them. Also, the little open space where the PSP's laser read the UMD was completely uncovered and prone to scratching...


3.) MiniDisc:

...But the MiniDisc at least had a sliding cover to protect the optical disc inside, as well as some hardcore anti-skip protection. And what's more, the MiniDisc was a moderate success for Sony. Just not with you. No, all of you owned CD players because that was the cheaper, more logical thing to do. When you bought a CD, you were like, "Great, I just a bought a CD! On the way home I'm going to listen to it on my car's CD player and when I get home I'll listen to it on my stereo, and when I go out for a jog, I'll listen to it on my portable CD player." Why buy another, more expensive player that required its own special kind of discs and needed a computer to convert your CD into ATRAC format files (true MP3 profiles weren't supported because, you know, Sony didn't own them)? Only music industry, radio, and audiophiles bought this fucker.

I actually own several...

The MiniDisc did have some really bitchin' qualities, though, and that's why it was used in all of those industries. First, most of the players were compact and ran off of one AA battery for around 36 hours. Batteries used to be a big deal in the era of portable CD players. Second, each MiniDisc could hold about five CD's worth of music. That's a lot of music in a small space and each disc was rewritable. Think of it like a removable storage medium for an MP3 player. The third and maybe most important feature to sound nerds, it had an optical jack (most people don't fucking care) and a microphone input. You could record directly into this thing. So it got used a lot for high quality, digital recordings of interviews. Beyond just recording, you were able to place or remove track marks at any point in a recording or song. So you could jump to different sections of an interview or just skip right to the part of a song you actually like.

Having sung its virtues, this motherfucker is the bastard son of the CD-R and the MP3 player. It was middle-ware and really had no place in the consumer market. You probably didn't even remember it. Or, at best, you thought it disappeared a long time ago. Guess what? Fuck you, that's what.


4.) Motherfucking Betamax:

There's not really much I can say here since the name "Betamax" is synonymous with failure. Most people born before a certain date remember this high priced paperweight. It was launched in 1975, but I knew more people growing up with Laserdisc players than these god damned things. But there was a massive war between Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS cassettes. The 1-hour recording time probably hurt them there since VHS (which stands for "Video Home System" because don't even pretend that you knew that shit) could record up to 4-hours. And this was in a day when VCR's cost the low, low price of infinity dollars.

you've probably got enough there for a VCR and a copy of Flashdance

Hey, at least they did better than DIVX managed against DVD. You don't even fucking know what DIVX was, so don't even play.

again, I still own two of them...

LP out.