Yes, Sony's still working on a PS3 video download service

The Playstation 3 will eventually have a video download service, similiar to the one that Xbox 360 has had for over a year. We've all known it for a long time. Here's a story I wrote last summer that Sony was working on the service. Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal last September saying the same thing. Marketing senior VP Peter Dille said on the Playstation blog a few days ago that the video store is coming, but he didn't provide any details, and in fact Sony execs were willing to confirm that fact at any point last year. I know. I asked them. And thought it was so non-newsworthy that I didn't report it.

All of which makes it quite odd that the L.A. Times has a story on the front page of its business section today with the lede "[Sony] is preparing to to launch an online video service through its game console Playstation 3 as early as this summer, studio executives familiar with the play say."

"As early as this summer" is arguably newsworthy, since we haven't known when it was going to launch. But that's still a vague date and it could very easily be pushed back. Studio executives I talk to say that Sony has been talking to them about the service since last year. And a senior Sony insider I was talking to a few months ago said that the video download store is a low priority this year compared to establishing PS3 as the best videogame console on the market.

The Times does put it in interesting context, since the multi-studio Internet download service Movielinkn, which was first developed by Sony, flopped and was sold to Blockbuster at a launch and Sony's online musicstore Connect was also a famous disaster.

But in terms of news... we always knew that Sony would launch a video download service. And now we know it might launch as early as this summer.

(Also worth noting: the first analyst quoted in both last year's WSJ story and today's in the LAT is the game guy, Kurt Scherf of Parks Associates. I guess these repeating stories on the same topic are good for his publicity needs.)