PS3 Fanboy

Unlike the PAL regions, it appears those of you in Japan will be getting the PS Store video service fairly soon. Sony has announced they will launching the new PS Store video service for the Japanese market in September.

Despite launching on the same day it was announced in the US, Europeans will not be enjoying the PS Store video service in 2008. David Reeves, President of SCEE, made the announcement at a SCEE event yesterday, but both him and Howard Stringer promises that it "will come to all regions in due course" and that additional information regarding dates, content or pricing will come later this year. Reeves attributes the delay to localization of the service in regards to content. No word yet on any other territories.

Not till 2009?! That's a long time to wait for all the Europeans out there -- does Go!View provide any consolation? Tell us what you think.

Sorry, Europe. The video store will be heading your way at some point in the future, but in the mean time you're going to have to live with without some awesome non-interactive downloadable content. The video store is ip locked to the US, which means that even if you set up a US account in Europe, you're going to be locked out. There are probably ways around it using proxies, but for most people that's going to be more hassle than it's worth.

The question is, if Sony can region lock the stores like this, why don't they? Surely it prevents cross-region purchases far better than just crying "don't do that!" On the other hand, it makes sense considering that the PS3 is region-free for Blu-ray games, but locked for Blu-ray movies. Maybe the game stores remain unlocked because they know what a shambles the EU Store is. Whatever the reason, we're glad for it. Hopefully we'll hear about the EU rollout for the video store soon.

Announced yesterday at E3, the PS Store video service was ready for us the same night. We tried it out, and chronicled our experiences with it. Will you be using this instead of buying/renting a DVD, or even a Blu-ray?

We tried a both a SD and HD download, as well as watched a video on the PSP. We also played with different options, and even took a note of download and transfer speeds. Hopefully this will help out you guys who are on the fence about all of this.

So what cha' waiting for? Took a look here.