While most of the tech world was focused on the Apple event yesterday, Sony announced expansion plans for its streaming media service, Qriosity. Qriosity’s been around in the US for a few months, offering on-demand movie titles to consumers who own Sony connected devices. This week’s announcement adds five European countries to the distribution list, and includes the debut of a new “cloud-based” streaming music service, Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity.
If you’re wondering what the Qriosity expansion means, well, you’re not alone. In theory, Sony is taking on the iTunes ecosystem, but its approach is underwhelming. The company’s on-demand video library consists only of films (no TV), and while Sony has been talking about eking out a space in the home entertainment platform business (beyond hardware) for years, it’s had relatively little traction. On the music side, Sony is up against serious competitors, not only from the likes of networked music providers like Apple and Sonos, but also potentially from those in the Internet radio space, including Slacker, Pandora, and Last.fm. And it’s been a long time since Sony’s Walkman dominance.
The crazy thing about Sony is that it has all the pieces to be a major media service provider. It’s got Sony Pictures and Sony Music on the content side, and CE gear for virtually every facet of your digital media life. But having all the pieces doesn’t mean you can make a coherent whole. And I haven’t seen convincing evidence to date that Sony can put its pieces together.
Relevant note- InformationWeek reminds me about Sony Connect, the company’s earlier online music store attempt that was shuttered in 2007: http://bit.ly/aYKzTZ
Qriosity is different from PS Store, right? That one has TV shows. Why couldn’t just base Qriosity on PS Store?
Ivan- Seems to be. Though PaidContent points out that CEO Stringer said last year that Qriocity is “based on” PlayStation Network. http://bit.ly/a7KhFL
Clearly this is a branding issue they’re still trying to sort out.
Dunno. They have just messed up for so long I don’t know if they can even pull out of it anymore. The new Walkmans look nice, but I’ve never even bothered to evaluate them. In the past Walkman’s had crappy software, used weird formats for encoding, etc. Now that the world has mostly moved on from music-only players (I haven’t touched my iPod Class in ages now that I have an iPhone), why should I consider them?
Yet I follow news about the Zune quite closely, since Microsoft is doing some interesting things (wifi-syncing, music subscription, hd fm radio, etc) that I wish Apple would do. And they’re getting their act together as far as integrating their various brands (XBox live, Zune, Windows Phone 7 Series). So there’s a chance there might be a Microsoft product in my future. But I don’t even look at what Sony is doing any more. Despite at one time being a complete Sony-holic. XBR TV, Cassette, Beta machines, etc.
Too bad. A sad fall.