All Major Movie Studios Now Selling HD Movies at PSN, Sony Says

SAN FRANCISCO -- All six major Hollywood movie studios are now making HD movies available for purchase in the U.S. on the PlayStation Network (PSN), more than for competing online services including for the Wii and Xbox 360, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) said Tuesday as the Game Developers Conference started. Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner HD movies are also available for rental through PSN.

Palm, meanwhile, increased its game activity, saying a public beta version of the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is now available at the Palm Developer Center online. The company is demonstrating new games from early developers in its booth at GDC. The kit “enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform,” the company said. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing now, but “distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update,” it said. At CES, Palm introduced 12 games developed by EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research with early access to the PDK. Since then, said Palm, more than 20 webOS titles have been launched by those developers. They include Assassin’s Creed -- Altair’s Chronicles and Brothers In Arms: Hour of Heroes from Gameloft, and Guitar Hero 5 Mobile from Glu.

Some HD movies had already been available on PSN from major studios. SCEA didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about which studios had been added. “Securing high definition content” from all the major studios marks “another significant milestone further validating PlayStation Network as a complete entertainment network in the home,” said Peter Dille, SCEA’s senior vice president for marketing and PSN.

SCEA said it plans “soon” to make the HD programming available in the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain. Movies new to PSN in HD include, from Fox, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Jennifer’s Body, with Fantastic Mr. Fox coming March 23; from Disney, Earth, G-Force and Up; from Paramount, Paranormal Activity, Star Trek and Zoolander; from Sony, District 9, This Is It, 2012 and Zombieland; from Universal, Couples Retreat, Inglourious Basterds and Public Enemies; and from Warner, The Hangover, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and The Wizard of Oz.

Separately, SCEA said its PhyreEngine for PSP will become available to developers of games on the handheld system this spring. The advanced graphics rendering engine is already provided as source code and tools to PS3 game developers, publishers, and tools and middleware licensees and is used in various titles released on PSN’s PlayStation Store and Blu-ray Discs. PhyreEngine for the PSP “will enable game franchises to be efficiently developed to make use of the strengths of” Sony’s handheld platform, it said. SCEA is demonstrating PhyreEngine for the PSP system and Tunnel Shooter, a game demo using one of the original PhyreEngine game templates, at its GDC booth this week. Sony is pleased with “the continued popularity of PhyreEngine with the global game developer community,” said Teiji Yutaka, senior vice president for SCE’s Technology Platform in Japan. PhyreEngine for PSP “was developed in response to requests from the game developer community, and we hope that the release of the PSP version demonstrates our commitment and support for game developers on all our platforms,” he said. SCE “will deploy various measures to further reinforce game development for the PSP system and will continue to expand the platform to offer interactive entertainment experiences only available” on that platform, it said.

Microsoft released details about XNA Game Studio 4.0 at GDC. It said the new developer toolset for creating games for the Windows Phone 7 Series will “allow game developers to create better mobile games faster by providing a comprehensive and powerful set of tools to work with.” For consumers, that will mean “they'll be able to find a variety of games” on Phone 7 at launch with “high quality graphics and for the first time games with Xbox Live features,” it said.