When Sony CEO Kaz Hirai took the stage at CES, most people were expecting something like the Playstation Now, one of many major product announcements he made. In essence, PSNow is a cloud gaming service for TVs, consoles, and phones; the service debuted at CES where test participants were able to play The Last Of Us streamed over Wi-Fi. The service is coming to a closed Beta at the end of the month, and is expected to roll out at the end of the summer, at which point it could become a very serious competitor to Steam.
What most people weren’t expecting, however, was for Hirai to announce other cloud-based services for live TV, DVR, and Video On Demand, which is precisely what he did. It’s more ambitious than the streaming PSNow, and it looks to build out the Sony Entertainment Network in a big way, drawing consumers into a network by bolstering content and storage options, much like 4K and Streaming TV providers have done thus far at CES this year. If Sony can pull it off as well, it will certainly be a big step towards the unified Only-Sony device network that Hirai has wanted for a while now.
