PSP Gaining Ground
Ken Kutaragi, chief operating officer of Sony Corp. spoke at length Thursday at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. Availability of the popular new handheld was one of his first subjects. ""We have shipped 800,000 PlayStation Portable as of today," said Kutaragi."It's not a small number but it's not big enough a number for the current market." He said that Sony intends to considerably ramp up production. It wants to get to 1 million units per month and then proceed straight to 2 million units per month. Over the summer, in preparation for the holidays, he said that it hoped to hit as many as 3 million produced per month.
In talking about the multimedia capabilities of the unit he revealed that Sony will be giving outside companies access to the UMD movie and music technology. This would allow other manufacturers to create UMD capable devices, such as home players. The gaming format will be kept proprietary to prevent any competitor from developing a PSP clone. Yoshiko Furusawa, a spokesperson for SCEI, said that the format had been submitted to an international standards organization in late December, although she declined to specify which organization.
This is a big step for the company. Kutaragi said that Sony was "growing up." He went on to admit that the company had made a mistake by being overly proprietary about music and entertainment content that caused it many lost sales. He singled out Apple's iPod as an example of a widely popular device for which Sony had no answer as a result of its concerns over content rights. By being more open with the UMD format, and building in things like mp3 compatibility it hopes to achieve that same sort of appeal with the PSP.