Raw Japan

Two dimensions of 3D

An old Saturday Night Live segment once included this joke when Frank Sinatra was still alive:

“‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ is back in town, and sources report nobody’s interested and nobody cares.”

That line came back to me after Sony,  once Japan’s “Big Blue”, announced Thursday its vision of an $11-billion 3D market by early 2013, with three-dimensional PlayStation 3s, TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, cameras, live broadcasting and — the historic staple — movies and theatres.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Rick Wilking

I attended Sony’s briefing that included a 2D video of its 3D world, plans for 3,000 projector installations by end-2010, a single-lens High-Frame-Rate movie camera (when previously it took two cameras to make three dimensions), and an end-to-end solution still involving glasses.

The plan was wider than 3D (it pushed back a 5-percent operating profit target to 2013) , but investors sold it Friday, and few analysts saw the technology quickly ending six years of TV losses.

Game on!

Nintendo still expects to make $4 billion this year and Sony to lose over $600 million, but last week may ultimately be remembered as a crossroads where each firm’s fortunes began to change directions, or at least when a 15-year battle for gaming supremacy again became competitive.

Electronics conglomerate Sony trimmed its overall loss forecast on Friday, while some of last quarter’s bleeding was attributed to what is now seen as its successful price cut for the PlayStation 3 console, jolting the PS3 ahead of its Kyoto-based rival’s Wii in monthly sales.

Nintendo, meanwhile, saw profit and sales declining at its earnings on Thursday with the main panacea a bigger screen handheld DSi LL console coming in late November, a move industry-watchers say is certain to diversify consumers’ handheld options but by itself won’t counter growing ennu-Wii.

On Friday, shares of each underscored investors’ views on whether a shrinking loss or slowing profit was more attractive, with Sony bought before its statement and Nintendo sold after its numbers.

Still, Nintendo, which began as a cardmaker and may have a thing for trumps, held its analyst briefing Friday at the same hour as Sony’s earnings, debuting the DSi LL. This followed a Nintendo price cut in September at nearly the same hour as Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai was addressing the Tokyo Game Show, an event the reigning game giant eschews.

Before an interview with Reuters that day, console war veteran Hirai laughed when asked about Nintendo’s cut, adding: “Interesting timing.”

Sony game changer, or Game Over?

Sony unveiled its leaner, meaner and — most importantly – cheaper PlayStation 3 in Tokyo Wednesday after a gamescon debut in Europe, but it offered little beyond a quick glimpse of what it hopes will stop the money-bleeding of arguably one of the most troubled products in its history.

After rising to industry dominance with its PlayStation and PS2 consoles, Sony’s gaming unit grew to account for 60 percent of the conglomerate’s profit, and its chief, Ken Kutaragi, was seen as a possible future CEO.

But the next-generation PS3, initially with a “cell” chip and a price mid-decade of just under $600, has been a tale of woe, contrasting sharply with the wild success of Nintendo’s Wii console, with Kutaragi leaving Sony two years ago as chip and PS3-related losses mounted.

 In the wake of its early poor performance, Sony fiddled with the PS3, cutting its price and modifying the range of bells and whistles that came with the lowest and highest versions of the console.  

But some software makers recently fired warning shots, saying they may not make PS3 games unless Sony cut the price of the console. 

Blu-ray rental shelves still look bare

Some of my friends have bought Blu-ray disc players recently and brag about the breath-taking picture quality on their big flat TVs. Sales of Blu-ray recorders have outstripped those of regular DVD recorders by almost seven to three in recent months in Japan, research firm GfK Marketing Services Japan says.

But some Blu-ray users complain that movie rental stores don’t have much of a selection in the format. Tsutaya, Japan’s largest movie rental chain and a unit of Culture Convenience Club, says some of its stores carry as many as 300 Blu-ray titles, but that’s barely a fraction of the average 40,000 DVD titles available.

It’s perfectly understandable that it takes stores time to replace their old movie collections in the new format — some have only recently finished the switchover from video cassettes.

But even for new releases, rental stores are unlikely to keep their Blu-ray movie collections abreast of their DVD line-ups anytime soon because of the gap in the number of titles produced for each format. There were 494 DVD movies released for rental in Japan in June, the Japan Video Software Association said. The association doesn’t collect data for Blu-ray rental movies, but an official said only 10-20 percent of the 168 new Blu-ray releases that month were thought to be available for rental.

An industry insider said Hollywood studios are more aggressive about promoting Blu-ray than others, but some Japanese makers have been hesitant to commit to the new format until it becomes more widespread.

I guess I’m a laggard though, as I don’t have a Blu-ray recorder yet. My dream is to have a home theatre, complete with powerful surround speakers, and a Blu-ray machine would definitely have to be at the centre of the system. High-definition or not, though, it’s rare that anything gets me as excited as when I watched “Back to the Future”, “Star Wars” and other movies on a small old telly in the living room when I was a kid. Or am I just being sentimental?

Photo credit: REUTERS/Nicky Loh

Nintendo’s game face

After a long spell in the gilded kingdom of record profits, Nintendo, the 120-year-old creator of Mario and Zelda, is again having to dodge barrels such as a high yen and consumers’ eternal quest for new kit. Its returns are slowing, though they are still to be envied with the firm forecasting $5 billion for the year ahead.

Last month company President Satoru Iwata told Tokyo journalists that Japan’s enthusiasm for its Wii was waning mildly. But he promised more software titles and said a new console would come when design wizard Shigeru Miyamoto ran out of ideas for the current hardware.

A few years ago around the debut of the Wii, Iwata, only the fourth leader in Nintendo’s history, said that by the time a product hits store shelves, the Kyoto-based firm is already deep in development of its next big thing.

So what is that large gorilla to come? Iwata’s not telling, but after substantially broadening the user base with more women and older game players and helping to untether gaming from merely a sedentary experience, a pot of gold is at stake if ennu-Wii is indeed setting in.

Nintendo, like many firms at the top of its game, doesn’t waste words on competitors (often not even acknowledging them as such). But Sony and Microsoft and plenty of unknown firms are deeply engaged in this multi-player scenario and have been gaining ground.

In the more than 30 years it has taken for gaming to become a passion for hundreds of millions and a multi-billion dollar business, calls on winners and losers have regularly proven premature or wrong.

Stringer yet to unite Sony factions

When a Welsh-born former TV journalist was appointed chairman and CEO of Sony Corp in 2005, he set out to destroy the factions dividing the electronics giant and uncover the synergies needed to grow.

Three and a half years later, Howard Stringer’s empire faces its biggest annual loss on record, slammed by a soaring yen, sliding demand, and restructuring costs.

What’s more, analysts say the maker of Bravia LCD TVs and PlayStation 3 game consoles remains as fractious as ever.

Stringer, a dual U.S. and British citizen, was handpicked by his predecessor, Nobuyuki Idei, who was charmed by the Oxford-educated former screenwriter’s wit and vision of technology’s potential.

At his best when poking fun at himself, Stringer’s verbal sparring with Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month drew applause and laughs from the audience.

“Stringer can unite Sony,” Idei had said shortly after Stringer’s appointment to run a firm whose interests range from electronics to movie making and insurance.