Poor Sony. It seems like everything they touch goes south, doesn’t it? Now with the poor press, shoddy business practices and other problems, we can now watch the demise of their UMD format as well.

Westlake Village (CA) - Sony had planned big things out of the small Universal Media Disc (UMD). Meant to be played on the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), the 2.5-inch diameter discs promised to distribute both games and movies cheaply. The format was introduced last year and went off to record sales. Now the situation looks bleak as several movie studios have eliminated or reduced their UMD offerings. According to Reuters, Wal-Mart will stop selling the small discs.

Several movie studios have reduced their UMD offerings lately. Just last month, the home entertainment divisions of Paramount, Warner and Sony started limiting their movie titles. Universal Studios and Image Entertainment joined that list in March.

A high-ranking Universal Studios executive told Reuters that the company has stopped making UMD movies and added, “It’s awful. Sales are near zilch. It’s another Sony bomb - like Blu-ray.”

UMDs store 900 MB of data on a single-layer disk or 1.8 GB on a dual-layer disk. While the capacity is inferior to a single-layer 4.7 GB DVD, MPEG-4 compression allows studios to fit full-length movies on the UMD. Movies are typically scaled down to fit on the PSP’s native 480 by 272 pixel resolution. Source: TG Daily

[tags]blu-ray,industry support,movie studios,umd offerings,mpeg-4 compression[/tags]