UMD's Are Lagging In Sales

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Warner Home Videos, and Paramount Home Entertainment are going to cut back on the production of UMD formatted movies for the PSP, according to reports from Variety Business. Jeff Baker, senior vice president at Warner said, "We are re-evaluating our position on any future [UMD movie] releases at this time. We’re looking at this on a case-by-case basis. We’re disappointed with consumer demand at this time." Chris Ansley, a buyer for media company Virgin said, "We continue to carry most new titles and there is a modest demand for them, but there simply hasn’t been a consistent growth of this new format to justify making more space for it. We have been encouraged by the results of a couple successful campaigns that we’ve featured to help promote them, but the overall impact of the format has still been nominal." What this amounts to is the UMD movie format is failing to sell as expected and demand for the format has not been high. Another problem concerns the consumer having to buy two formats in order to view the same movie on the PSP and on their television sets. This simply does not make sense to the consumer. A retail store insider was quoted as saying, "Consumers aren’t going to buy three or four configurations of the same movie. Something has to give." And give it has. Several weeks ago, Sony announced a movie bundle package in which purchasers could buy a standard DVD movie with a UMD disk for a price of about $28. The problem of the underperforming PSP movie disk is a simple one to figure out, if one sits down to think about it, literally. A movie runs approximately 1.5 to 2 hours. This means a movie fan will have to sit and stare at the small screen display of the PSP, instead of lounging comfortably on the sofa, watching a 32 screen, with drinks, snacks and friends in tow. Few, if any of us, would take the small display over a larger display, unless we were either commuting on the train to work, or goofing during class. The novelty of the effect of movies on the PSP wears off quickly, and many PSP owners regress to just gaming on the handheld. While novelty is always interesting, it seems that PSP owners want more than that; they also want practicality. If this is true, many PSP fans saw UMD movies as a cool gadget, rather than something they would want to use everyday. But there is a silver lining to the cloud. Fox Studio™s Napoleon Dynamite, has become a top seller hit for the PSP. Luckkkkkkkky. Personally speaking, that would be the only movie I would buy for my PSP too.