Sony: No Video Sharing in Home Beta

September 18th, 2008, 20:11 Posted By: Shrygue

via Wired


Remember how you were going to be able to invite other PlayStation 3 owners to your virtual apartment in Home, then watch videos together? That's not happening, at least not in the "open beta."

I got a demo of the latest beta version of PlayStation Home, Sony's upcoming PS3 virtual world, Tuesday. My full impressions are coming soon, but the biggest news to come out of our conversation was that the video-sharing feature has been killed, at least for the first public release of Home this fall.

Video sharing was one of the most talked-about features of Home when it was announced in 2007 -- not only because it would be awesome to go to someone's apartment and watch whatever movie they'd cued up, but because of the legal implications of such a feature that Sony was shrugging off.

While PlayStation Home director Jack Buser said the company was "looking into" adding the feature, he also said that Sony's approach to "user-generated content" was likely to be more of a "Lego-block" structure, in which Sony gives users the parts and lets them create what they want from a predetermined set of tools.

In other words, while Sony isn't saying whether video sharing will ever happen, it doesn't exactly sound like a system that provides for letting users stream videos off their PS3's hard drives.

More news about Home later.

There are 7 comments - Join In and Discuss Here