With rumours abound that Sony are to support live streaming game service OnLive via their devices, what could such a partnership mean for the current consoles and Sonys future projects?
Closing Down Piracy
One of the big advantages Sony has had is that PS3 games come on Blu-ray discs - a format still in its infancy with a low adoption rate amongst the PC crowd. This immediately created a barrier to people experimenting with and disseminating pirated games on the system. Another advantage of the Blu-ray disc was its potential capacity. With few people able to read or burn discs, a copy-protection system thats (relatively) hard to crack, and game files that would take ages to send over torrents - Blu-ray was a good move for Sony. As time marches on and Blu-ray becomes more common, this barrier will begin to fall. What better to do in this situation than move to a medium that simply cannot be pirated: video game streaming. With the system in place, Sony can look to wean customers onto streaming and away from the risky proposition of handing out code on shiny discs. In the long-term, physical media is on the way out, so Sony would be prepping their customers for the day when the humble 50 gig Blu-ray disc is history.