Back in 2012, Sony made an interesting move and purchased Gaikai for $380 million dollars. Anyone who was familiar with Gaikai knew their specialty was in streaming PC games from the cloud. This feature changed the game (no pun intended) removing the system requirement barrier and opening top tier titles to be played on low end PC’s or laptops. When Sony made the acquisition, every gamer knew what was immediately going to be on the horizon.
But Sony is taking it one step further.
This week during CES, it was announced that Sony is going to utilize it’s latest console, the PlayStation®4, to test a cloud based TV service – a “comfort food” mix of cable (live), on-demand and DVR specific content, oh, and of course games.
While Sony reps say they aren’t trying to compete with other video services, I remain skeptical on how they plan to differentiate themselves or how they will compete with the Xbox Video service that their top rival already has a lock on.
Having sold a whopping 4.2 million consoles since Christmas clearly passing Microsoft’s 3 million for Xbox One, Sony is putting themselves in a prime position to win this round of the fabled console war.
Being in the storage business, obviously the cloud remains part of our bailiwick, so it’s fascinating to see how it’s being used. Our theme for the show this year is “Creating Space for the Human Experience” and what Sony has planned for their entertainment system not only is right up our alley but could be the motivation I need to get one sooner rather than later.
How about you?
Leave A Comment