The next time you fire up your PlayStation 3, you’ll have the option to pull down films and television from Amazon’s handy Instant Video service.
If this news comes as a surprise, you’re not alone. Sony did almost nothing to promote this addition, instead preferring to surprise PlayStation 3 owners with a brand new cross-media bar icon. Clicking said icon will prompt a 19MB download, but once that’s complete users can rent and purchase video content from Amazon’s sizable library (or gorge on huge swaths of filmed ephemera at will, if they happen to have an Amazon Prime subscription).
Interested in using the service? Setting it all up seems rather simple if you have a PlayStation 3 and an Amazon account. Simply hit this link, follow the on-screen instructions and start pulling down video from the world’s largest online retailer.
So why now? Why this? It obviously seems like an attempt by Sony to counterprogram the Xbox 360’s swelling multimedia offerings, but the lack of build-up for today’s launch is just weird. Shouldn’t they have, like, maybe, told PS3 owners that Amazon Instant Video was coming? If, for no other reason, than to convince film buffs and those who subsist entirely on passive entertainment that the PlayStation 3 continues to be a good investment.
But what if that’s the gag? Maybe somewhere there’s a movie buff who traded in his PlayStation 3 a few days ago who is now intensely regretting the decision. Maybe this is like that Twilight Zone episode where the last man on Earth is finally free to read all the books he never had time for before, right up until his glasses break.
If that’s the case, then mad propers to Sony for crafting such a bafflingly intricate example of poetic irony. It doesn’t make any sense to the rest of us, but you better believe that one dude has totally learned his lesson.
Source: Joystiq
