PSP john koller Tagged Stories

Initially, when the Play Station Portable was launched it was very successful as a handheld gaming console despite the fact that this device also supports high quality movie playback. The sales of the game UMDs have been always high but the sales of movie UMDs has never reached to that much height. One major reason for this was that the movie discs were very much expensive. They cost more than a standard DVD. Due to the poor response many studios discontinued the manufacturing and licensing of the game UMD for PSP. Ultimately it forced the hardcore PSP fans to access and download illegal movie files which were ripped and stored on the World Wide Web.

Now the Sony Entertainment has decided to boost the popularity and sales of the legal UMDs. The company has now promised to take care of most of the work such as licensing, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of movie UMDs. The company has also dropped the prices of the discs this time in order to make sure that the PSP fans now don’t look for any other alternate methods to enjoy movies on their consoles. The new UMDs will be available with a price tag ranging from $9.99 to $14.99, i.e. $10 to $25 less than the initial price of the discs which was announced few years back.

The director of hardware marketing John Koller said, “We want to provide a legal offering from the studios, … and it’s an easier conversation to have with them now. There is a lot of positive momentum with the PSP.”

The new UMDs are targeted to please the young males basically as they make up 92 percent of the total PSP owners. According to Koller, ” The biggest issue with UMD was the lack of creating for a targeted demo. When we first launched, it was a difficult sale. I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say that a 16-year-old doesn’t have a lot of discretionary income. … We were offering UMDs that were more expensive than DVDs at the time. And we want content that is in line with what the demo is asking for, action and comedy … not romantic dramas.”

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How much of a growth rate would you imagine a popular device has? How about an unfathomable 85 %? That’s the sales growth rate at which the PSP has been growing in the US, as recently announced by Sony PSP’s Senior Manager, John Koller.

Also, according to some company sources, The console’s decreased prices; new designs and the introduction of new models or versions have helped the company target a whole new demographic – namely the teenage consumer, instead of the 20-something one. Moreover, the PSP’s appeal to a non-gaming community with its multi-tasking abilities, like listening to music or watching videos, is clearly another reason for its strength.

In an Interview with Game Informer earlier this week, Koller commented on exactly these multi-tasking abilities:

“We’re finding in a lot of our research that the consumer’s using the PSP because of its gaming but then also because it has these other elements as some of the other devices they own, but they don’t want to bring four or five devices with them in their pocket. The PSP solves all of those multifunctional demands in one product”

“It’s primarily centered as a gaming machine. That said, the multifunctional aspects differentiate it from any competitive platform — and that’s including the DS and the iPod, the Zune and the Zen and all the other handheld products that are available in the market, inclusive of mobile phones.”

However for Sony and most others, it must be noted that the PSP is still a gaming device and an entire set of marketing campaigns are being devised to drive that point home. It is easy to get swayed by the fact that there are indeed many a companies and services that have introduced all kinds of value added services attached to the PSP — like streaming videos, listening to streaming music, music and book downloads etc.

The Sony PSP will still remain first and foremast as what it was intended to be. Nonetheless, its multi function extras will always be a pleasure to use and help the PSP outshine its more rigid and restricted competitors.

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