Sony to Release 500 movies for mobile devices

Next year, Sony will digitize its top 500 movies and make them available for mobile devices including cellphones, portable media centers and the Sony PSP game console. That what Michael Arrieta (VP of Sony Pictures) said during the Digital Hollywood conference: “"We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like [Apple chief Steve] Jobs did for music, but for the film industry".

Sony will try to leverage the box office success that they own, such as Spider Man or Hitch, to lead a trend to be as successful in mobile movies as Apple is in mobile music. The idea of having more digital content that’s downloadable creates fear in the movie industry. They have seen how file swapping can spread (pirated) music on the internet faster then their own distribution network and think that one way or the other this can is bad news for their future revenues.

I don’t know if I’ll watch a movie on my mobile phone, but I would certainly give it a try on a Sony PSP. In the next year, we will see if Sony can pull off the equivalent of an iTunes for movies.

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