Sony Universal Media Disc losing its charisma

Sony Universal Media Disc losing its charisma

Sony has a history of promoting proprietary formats and storage systems and their Universal Media Disc was the latest one of these. The company is using this storage format in their hugely popular Playstation Portable gaming device and also promoted it as a tool for shipping digital content like movies and other digital media.

However, this format is not gaining much popularity as most third party content developers either have stopped shipping their content on the UMD format or have drastically reduced the number of units shipped in the market.

In fact, even the retailers are no longer interested in selling these discs with Wal-Mart considering dumping the entire section devoted to it. The reason is simple. It is not usable in any other device by Sony PSP and not all video gaming fans own this gaming device.

Most movie studios have claimed that they are not even breaking through with the sales of content sold on the UMD format and one of them even said that PSP is more like a gaming platform than a portable digital video player.