Many have always claimed that despite Sony owning a music label and a movie studio, that it has never been able to leverage the two entities for its electronic business and create synergy, the beloved corporate word. With Sony’s Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited offering similar content to iTunes from Apple though to be fair, they do release movies sooner than Netflix, which must wait longer for Sony titles, its easy to see why Sony Pictures hasn’t been too helpful to their electronics business till now. Sony Network Entertainment VP Michael Aragon has confirmed that the company has flirted with the idea of offering TV over the internet. With Sony Pictures in their back pocket which owns movies like Spider-Man, James Bond, Bad Boys, and The Social Network while Sony Pictures Television houses classics like Seinfeld, Wheel of Fortune, and Community, its easy to image that Sony would step into this situation with leverage on their end, something that Netflix, Apple, and Amazon don’t have with their services though Apple does have share market share going for it. So what’s the hold up? Lets talk about it, after the jump.
With Sony running services like Video Unlimited and producing television shows and movies, the company has both the proper studio backing and technology networks and knowhow. The real issue seems to be ISP bandwidth caps. Many US internet providers have begun to give caps to users like like AT&T and Comcast with 250GB limit per month. With more of our services and shows being fed to us via the internet, you can see how Sony might be weary of launching a service which might get crushed by ISP due to the amount of data that it uses. Consumers would equally shy away, instead opting for regular TV which wouldn’t eat into their data limit. Aragon said:
“These guys have the pipe and the bandwidth. If they start capping things, it gets difficult.”
Despite the obstacles, Sony still seems hopeful about the situation and the ability to leverage their content, adding:
“We do believe there’s a business model out there. “If we can get that, that’s certainly a differentiator that can make the economics work.”
Discuss:
Should Sony create an IPTV service?
[Via Variety]