I understood that the PS3 almost killed Sony.

They thought that the blue lasers were going to be easier to perfect than they ended up being, so yields were low and costs were high in their BluRay players that were one of the big selling-points of the box. ("Buy this inexpensive game machine and get a free Blu-Ray player!")

The Cell processors were a big risk for them, too.

I think it's great that Sony was willing to push the technology and take risks like that. The hardware behind PS4 and XBone seems to be much more conventional (even if the graphics performance, etc., is much higher than the predecessors).

It'll be interesting to see if they're as popular as the earlier boxes.

I'm tempted to look into one mainly for the mediaplayer aspects (we haven't even downloaded any TV shows yet even though we've got Amazon Prime). We're paying over $200 a month for cable TV and internet and it's tempting to find ways to cut that expense down some... Or maybe a Chromecast dongle, or ... But I'm often on the trailing edge of technology now - the hep cats probably do everything on their phones now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were canceled 3 months after we bought one. ;-)

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.

The PS2 was timed nearly perfectly for DVD, but the PS3 was about a year early technologically speaking. They took a bit of a bath and it was a huge gamble, but they've come out of it doing not too bad. I think Sony Corporate learnt to let SCEI just do what they're good at.

Sony and MS have been pretty pro-active in making their gaming network work. I think it helps that download only games have started appearing that are good enough to win significant awards (Journey comes to mind).

I use a PS3 for DVD and BluRay playing as well as the games, but I have a MythTV for DVB, catch-up TV (iView usually) and Youtube. Sony did make a DVR add-on for the PS3 but it seems to have vanished from the market.

Wade.

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