UMD Video: A history of film on the PlayStation Portable

The 1990s and 2000s was a frantic time in the development of portable media devices. From CD and cassette players to phones, MP3 players, pocket TVs, and handheld video game consoles, technology was revolutionising the range of entertainment available outside the home.

Movies, however, were relatively late to this portability party. Limited by large file sizes and the bulkiness of laptops and DVD players at the time, feature-length films mostly remained the preserve of cinemas and home entertainment units.

That did not stop hardware manufacturers from trying. Various attempts were made to bring affordable portable video devices to the market, such as the VideoNow unit that launched in 2003 and played low-resolution kids TV shows in black and white.

Nintendo also entered the market in collaboration with 4Kids Entertainment in the form of GBA Video: cartridges that stored episodes from children’s shows and even a few movies for playback on the Game Boy Advance. The quality of the footage wasn’t great, however, with GBA Video playing in 240x160 resolution at a chugging frame rate. Sales were also poor.

Nevertheless, GBA Video did prove that distributors could use the existing install-base of portable game consoles to sell more than just games. Console manufacturers were beginning to realise this too — Nokia’s N-Gage was a phone/game console cross-over that could also play video and music, while Nintendo’s DS line of devices were marketed as digital planners and cognitive training tools as well as gaming units.

Sony had experience in the multimedia game with the inclusion of DVD playback capabilities in their PlayStation 2 home console, giving it a big edge over competitors like Sega’s Dreamcast. Following the success of the PS2, it was perhaps only natural that Sony would try to replicate this multimedia magic when they entered the handheld console space with their PlayStation Portable (PSP), launched in December 2004 in Japan, March 2005 in North America, and September 2005 in Europe.

Of course, a properly portable device was never going to be big enough to support DVDs, so they had to develop a brand new format that was up to the task. Sony’s solution? The Universal Media Disc, or UMD.