Sony Sneaking Past Amazon and Apple in the Media Convergence Hardware War

I’ve written before about the struggle between Sony and Amazon over formats for eBooks and the eBook reader market.  Increasingly, this is becoming a three-handed game as the battle moves over onto other platforms and Sony is sneaking up in stealthy, if not entirely mysterious, ways.

When you talk about the future of computing, there are generally three schools: those who focus on the TV merging with the computer, those who focus on laptops becoming slightly smaller and more powerful and those who focus strictly on handhelds and mobile devices taking over.  While we haven’t seen the television-meets-computing device yet (let’s face it, WebTV was lame), those laptop and mobile devices are around, and all three schools of thought are focused on the convergence of media consumption and computing.

Joining Sony and Amazon in this fight is Apple.  Apple is the biggest hardware threat to Sony and Amazon, right now.  The iPhone, for the moment, is the leading smart phone for non-business uses.  The various flavors of iPod are the leading mobile media devices in consumer eyes.  There are persistent rumors that Apple with be releasing a tablet PC (which could simply be a MacBook with touch screen navigation or giant iPhone).  While one wonders what the price point such a device would hit at, a laptop-sized iPhone could easily lap the Kindle and Sony eReader as the eBook device of choice – and it would be in color, something Amazon and Sony haven’t cracked yet.  Plus, all Apple would need to do for the supply chain is put a little more emphasis on eBooks in the App Store / iTunes.

Amazon recognized this threat fairly early on and devised a Kindle App for the iPhone.  Call it a shopping application with a translator for Amazon’s proprietary eBook format.  You just hope somebody isn’t paying to subscribe to a blog or newspaper through the Kindle app, instead of just pulling up the web page.

Apple’s been holding back on trying to effectively own media formats besides music.  And maybe they want to wait and see what kind of a dent the imminent Android OS flood makes in their dominance of the mobile market.  This should not be mistaken for Apple not being capable of making a play, they’re just hanging back with the hardware.

And then there’s Sony’s stealthy behavior.  Sony’s interest in the mobile marketplace _used_ to be confined mainly to their Sony Ericsson partnership.  This is no longer the case.  Did you know you can run Skype on the PSP (PlayStation Portable)?  Of course, Skype only works if you’re near a WiFi connection, but if there’s usually one available where you live and work, the PSP can be argued to be a de facto mobile phone.

The PSP is primarily seen as a mobile gaming device.  Well, it turns out the iPhone is also a mobile gaming device for a lot of people.  You can use the PSP as an MP3 player and watch video on it, too.  When you add Skype to it, the PSP and iPhone have quite a few functions in common.  And at this point, Sony is sneaking an eReader onto the PSP.

The initial foray into PSP eBooks, is actually comic books.  Whether Sony thinks the PSP demographic is more likely to buy comics than prose or just wants to fly a little under the publishing industry’s radar as they perfect the reading and shopping experiences is an excellent question, but Sony recently announced the program and highlighted licenses for the likes of Marvel, Archie and Star Trek comics with a proprietary, in-house browsing software.  Comic books are a fairly recent wrinkle on the iPhone, but have proved a popular item, particular when the comics tie-in to a current film like Star Trek or Transformers.

And here is where we sit and wait for these companies to take the next move.  Amazon seems focused on the Kindle.  Apple currently owns the consumer segment for media-centric smart phone sand has the implied threat of an eBook-killer tablet PC.  Sony is still fighting for eBook supremacy with their own eReader, but are quietly expanding the functional reach of the PSP.

Of these three players, only Apple is taking a format-neutral stance when it comes to media.  (Sony already owns the BlueRay format for DVD, while both Sony and Amazon are trying to establish their own proprietary eBook format as the industry standard.) Sony literally went so far as to create a proprietary way to read comics.  Will Microsoft enter into this area with any force?  Will Apple decide to make a play for new media formats?  How much of a dent will the mobile devices powered by the Google-shepherded Android OS make in the market.  (Sony Ericsson will almost certainly have one.)  For some reason, open source doesn’t seem to have made as much of a dent in the mobile field as it has in desktop computing, but we should wait until Q1 of 2010 before saying that too loudly.

The answer to the these questions is “wait and see,” but Sony is definitely worth keeping an eye on as they continue to emphasize media convergence in their hardware offerings, as we wait to see how ambitious Apple will become.