Game on you… a blog for UK Gamers

Sky TV have announced a deal to take on-demand downloads of TV shows (and presumably movies at some point) to the PSP in the UK and Ireland. Whether this will be free for those already subscribed to Sky, it isn’t clear yet. I would imagine it will be a completely seperate service with limited shows.

Expect the usual Lost, Prison Break, 24, Heroes. More news on this closer to release time. Bringing franchises such as God of War over to PSP, announcing the new version of the PSP and now this. Maybe Sony’s handheld isn’t quite dead yet…

Pick a category for the full story…

SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE AND SKY JOIN FORCES TO DELIVER VIDEO ON DEMAND SERVICE TO PSP OWNERSLondon, 27 July 2007. SKY and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) today announced the formation of a Joint Venture company to deliver on-demand entertainment content to owners of the PSP™(PlayStation®Portable) in the UK and Ireland.

The Joint Venture company, with equal Board level representation from SKY and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe will draw on the unrivalled entertainment aggregation expertise and technical leadership of SKY, and the handheld entertainment knowledge and brand power of PlayStation®. The company will establish PSP and the new ground breaking video download service as the natural partners for those seeking the ultimate choice of portable entertainment content.

Focusing exclusively on delivering video content to the PSP, the Joint Venture will initially provide a wealth of video and film content to the more than 2.3 million PSP owners in the UK and Ireland. The two companies are already in discussions with entertainment content providers across Europe to facilitate future introduction of the service to European PSP owners.

More information on the service will be announced by SCEE at Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany on Wednesday 22nd August.

So the PSP is getting a little bit lighter, a little bit thinner, and your old accessories won’t work.

Gizmodo have been exploring the new 200x manual and have outlined the main changes:

- Its TA-085 PCB motherboard is homebrew-conducive.
- USB can be used to charge the battery.
- The battery has been shrunk from 1800mAh to 1200mAh, but retains hour rating.
- Memory increased from 32mb to 64mb
- Old PSP remote is not compatible.
- WLAN switch has been relocated to top.
- TV-out cable is not included.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that the only real (in terms of how it will affect games) difference is the doubling of the memory. The increase now means that the PSP has double (yes DOUBLE) that of the PS2. So we can definitely expect quicker loading times. Whether we will get games that only work on the new model, we don’t know yet.

What we do know is that Sony have killed off one of the main drawbacks of the PSP – load times. If only they’d given us a better battery rather than made the PSP slightly smaller, they could have really challenged for the DS’s crown…

Prod the slightly sleeker portable for the full works.