No Sony OLED TVs for 2010, PS3 Getting Bravia Link Video Streaming [Sony]

Sony Insider's interview with Sony COO Stan Glasgow turned up two nuggets of gold: Sony's OLED TV strategy for 2010 is, evidently, not to release any new OLED TVs in 2010; and the PS3 will get Bravia Link video streaming.

That OLED TV innovation is still stalled is no surprise, since during lean economic times, companies—even huge ones like Sony—are hesitant to throw down the capital outlay necessary to ramp up production on larger OLEDs:

We're working on all sorts of prototypes, but I don't see production of product in 2010. There's a wonderful 3D OLED prototype here at CES; that's the real way to do 3D and TV – because you've got direct transmission, rather than back lighting and all the other reflective ways of doing it. But getting it to be commercially reasonable in price, we've got a long way to go. That's the whole problem in OLED, great technology, great feature set, but it's really hard to get the costs down. Smaller form-factors are easy to do.

We were warned, so the most I can say about that news is that it's predictably disappointing. But the revelation that the PS3's video streaming features will be merged with Bravia Link is actually kind of awesome:

We're beginning to port that network to other Sony products. We're doing BRAVIA Internet Video Link – which is more of a streaming service than a downloading service. We've got that growing at a fantastic rate in our televisions right now, we added it to Blu-ray players, and we're adding it to the PS3.

Bravia Link currently supports Netflix natively, so this could mean PS3 users get to ditch the disc for Instant Watch. Other than that, it would change a whole lot as is, but the prospect of new streaming widgets being added to the Bravia Link platform—assuming it consistent across hardware—is definitely exciting. [Sony Insider via Engadget]



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