Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Studios, Retailers Backing Away from UMD

Geoff Duncan
By

One year after being launched in the United States with the Playstation Portable, Sony’s Universal Media Disk (UMD) is in jeopardy as studios back away from releasing UMD movie titles and mainstream retailers lose interest in stocking UMD movies.

Universal Media Disks are a proprietary technology from Sony capable of storing up to 1.8 GB of data in a form factor similar to Sony’s MiniDisc. UMD is the defacto storage medium for PSP games and movies, and Sony promoted the PSP not only as a game device, but as an entertainment device for movies and other media, and studios responded with a flurry of movie releases in UMD format as the PSP hit the North American market.

Recommended Videos

However, UMD movies were criticized in the marketplace for being just as expensive as movies in DVD format; however, they offered a much lower resolution and could only be used in PSPs. Standard DVDs, conversely, could be used in consumer DVD players and computers.

Related

Now, rumors are circulating (via the Hollywood Reporter) that mass-market giant Wal-Mart is on the verge of dropping UMD-format movies from its shelves. After an aggressive launch, Universal Studios has stopped producing movies for the UMD format entirely, and although Paramount has not officially abandoned the format, insiders say no titles are currently planned for UMD release. Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment have significantly scaled back their UMD release plans, and several sources indicate Image Entertainment (Chronicles of Narnia) has abandoned UMD.

For its part, Sony seems to believe PSP users are ripping content from computers and traditional video players and watching it on PSPs, although both the digital video and portable gaming communities are skeptical, instead regarding the PSP as primarily a gaming platform with some lightweight wireless Internet capabilities. The Hollywood Reporter quotes Sony’s Benjamin Feingold as saying the PSP would have been more compelling for movie playback had it been able to connect to TVs for big-screen viewing…at which point, we’re wondering why we’d watch low-resolution UMB movies on a big screen?

As long as a retail market remains for developing PSP games, it’s likely the UMD format will stick around as a way to deliver new games to PSP owners; however, the days of seeing movies and other video content released in UMD format for PSP seems to be drawing to a close.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more