The Sony Story: Part Three

from a couple of weeks ago. Episodes one and two I recorded in one go in the studio, and then I had a whole bunch of trips two different locations to give presentations, and I ended up uh putting off recording till today, which is a couple of weeks later. So if a sound remarkably different from parts one and two, that's why. So let's talk about Sony and let's kind

of bring ourselves up to current day. I promise that as we get closer to current day, I get less and less detailed dates, because otherwise there'd be four parts to this and I think that's stretching it even for me. So in the last episode, I concluded the show by talking about Sony's battle in the VCR Wars. But during that same time, the company was doing some other stuff, So some of this is going to overlap with the end of the previous episode. Back in nineteen seventy, Sony

became listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It also opened up Sony in Germany. It was eventually called Sony Deutschland UH in nineteen eighty. Sony would also open businesses in Spain and France and other nations over the next few years and would become a truly global company. So this was a big move. Remember, this whole company started out as a small Japanese organization and now had become

a multinational global entity. Nineteen seventy nine also saw the introduction of one of the most iconic Sony products of all time, one of their most successful products, the Walkman. Now officially it was called the TPS dash L two, and it lacked a recording function. It could play and it could fast forward and rewind and stop, and that's about it. But some people were saying, well, because there's

no record function, it's not gonna sell very well. But it ended up becoming an insanely popular product, and it launched an entire new product line of portable tape recorders or really tape players because they couldn't record. The company also introduced lightweight headphones, very important along with the invention of the portable tape player, and these lightweight headphone headphones were called the m d R DASH three or h

dash ai r hair headphones. C Sony knew that if they were to rely upon traditional, big, clunky headphones, no one was going to buy a portable tape player. It would just not be practical. So they had to invent very lightweight headphones that would work with their new product. So they did, and that together they ended up being a big success. Now, the next line, or the next evolution of the portable tape player was the w M two. This is the traditional, the classic Walkman we think about,

which launched in one. This was the one that really hit it big. They Sony knew from the tps L two that they were onto something, but it wasn't until the w M two in the Walkman too, that they really realized that this was a huge hit. It was smaller than its predecessor and also had some other features to help improve performance quality, and it became the standard portable cassette player. So essentially you either had a Walkman or you had some sort of uh portable tape player

that was essentially a Walkman knockoff. That's really what it boiled down to. Also in two, Sony introduced the MP d R E two five two, which it doesn't really have a very catchy name, but they were the first in ear headphones or earbuds as we would call them. Again, that's a standard that you see everywhere today, but at the time was completely unheard of. And uh, I really can't stress how big a game changer this was in the field of music. Suddenly you could take your music

with you. You didn't have to have a tape deck in your car. Most cars didn't have tape decks. In fact, some of them still had eight track players. Um, he didn't have to carry around a big, clunky tape recorder that had one lousy speaker, so you would get everything in Monto. You can actually have stereo cassettes played in

a portable cassette player. You could do things like go jogging or workout, stuff that we take for granted now because we can do all this stuff with our phones these days, or or MP three players if you're still sporting one of those, But back at two that was unheard of. It was huge, and it really changed the

way people interacted with their technology. In fact, I would argue that the Walkman is kind of the beginning of this portable technology craze that has carried up through mobile phones, smartphones, handheld gaming devices, all of that sort of stuff. I think the Walkman kind of proved that people really wanted technology they could take with themselves on the go, and so Sony was a pioneer, not to be confused with

pioneer the sound company in this space. In Sony engineers began to work on developing a video camera recorder using a new type of semiconductor new at that time called the charge coupled device or cc D. That's something that's still an important component in many, but not all, digital cameras. There's actually a couple different sensors that are used in digital cameras. Some u c c D and some use others. This camera was meant to record directly to cassette in

the camera itself. That was also huge in Sony launched the BMC one camera, which recorded straight to Beta max tape. Is a larger camera like one of those shoulder mounted type cameras. The colloquial term for this type of video camera recorder is the camcorder, meaning that you use the

same gadget to both shoot the video and record the video. Again, this is something we take for granted today, but before cancorders, the way it would work is you used a video camera two to convert light into a signal, which then you would send over a cable to a recording device, which really limited how you could use cameras right a video camera. You couldn't just take a video camera out

on the go. It had to have a cable attaching itself to some sort of storage device that it would record to the signal to a medium like magnetic tape, and that would also have to have its own power supply. So createing a cam quorter that could do all of

this in one unit was a big deal. Now. The BMC one hundred cost fifteen hundred dollars at launch in nineteen eighty three, and I adjusted that for inflation, so in today's dollars that's around thirty six hundred dollars, so twice more than twice as much what it went for in nineteen eighty three, so cost fiftellars. If you were to buy it today, it would be like buying something for thirty six hundred dollars. And it was large and bulky, but switching to the c c D system is what

would allow Sony to make things a bit smaller. Sony's team was able to create a smaller camcorder using cc D technology, but it wouldn't be until before Sony could market one to consumers, and it was the eight millimeter cam quorder called the c c D V eight. Now, one of the reasons for the delay was not purely technological. Sony wanted to work with other companies to establish a standard format so that way they wouldn't enter into another

VCR like battle on the video camera front. They were already fighting Beta Max versus VHS, and they thought, well, we don't really want to have thirty different video cassette formats out there, because that'll just confuse the marketplace. It will mean that consumers will get very upset because they can't just buy what they want to buy. They would be forced to buy all in one system, and if

that system ultimately failed, then it's wasted money. In other words, if I buy Sony's camera and it means I have to buy Sony's player in order to watch the cassettes that I record, and then Sony were to go out of business. I would never be able to buy more cassettes for the player I have, I'd never be able to shoot more footage, and I would be stuck with

technology that was obsolete eat. So in order to avoid that, Sony said, let's all get together and establish a standard so that way, no matter who does well or who doesn't do well, people will still be able to buy this technology with confidence. They won't they won't hold back out of fear that a company might go under and you'd be stuck with an obsolete piece of equipment. Pretty

forward thinking. As a result, Sony and a hundred twenty six other companies collaborated on the eight Millimeter Video Conference to hash things out. Now, I don't want you to think that this charge couple device was super advanced. I mean, it was definitely a big step forward at the time, but it's pretty primitive compared to today's standards. The c c D and Sony's camera had a resolution of just two hundred fifty thousand pixels, not megapixels. Two hundred fifty

thousand pixels megapixel means million, essentially million pixels. The color are captured by c c ds was vibrant, but the resolution was fairly primitive. Now you're looking at a much

smaller screen, so it didn't matter as much. You know, there weren't many people who had very big TVs back in the early eighties, so even if you're showing it on a television, chances are the resolution wasn't that big a deal because you weren't looking at a huge screen, and the smaller screen meant that the lower resolution didn't show up as much switching back over to audio. So in nine we had to backtrack just a bit. Here.

Sony partnered with another electronics company, Phillips, and Sony and Phillips worked together to create a new medium for music, and that was the compact disc or c D. Now, earlier storage media had relied on analog methods, such as the grooves in a vinyl album or the magnetic information stored on a cassette tape, but compact discs were to store information optically digitally in bits, zeros, and ones on

a shiny disk. A laser would read the information off the disc, and a converter would change the digital information into an analog signal to be played back on speakers. You have to have your analog speakers. Phillips and Sony worked to create a standard so there wouldn't be competing formats in the marketplace. And originally the CD was only meant for sound files. The engineers didn't intend for this to be a storage medium for all sorts of data. They just thought, oh, this is kind of like a

vinyl album is for for music. So it came as a bit of surprise to them when engineers began to use CDs to store computer data and not just music. That was a big change, and uh really excited the engineers quite a bit because they just had not anticipated that. Now, the original goal when they were coming up, when Sony and Phillips were cooperating in order to create the CD was create a disc that would be capable of storing one hour's worth of music on it. Now, later they

decided one hour wasn't sufficient. They wanted to go up to seventy four minutes. So sixty minutes to seventy four minutes. So what was the reason why why go from sixty minutes to seventy four Well, the story is, and I cannot verify that this is correct, but this is how it's reported. The story is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is seventy four minutes long, and they felt that a CD should be able to hold the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth on one side. So CDs can hold seventy four minutes of

music because of Beethoven. Now that also meant that it dictated how big the discs had to be, because it wasn't like they could cram more information on the same space. They actually used the physical space of the disk to encode information onto it. So to go from sixty minutes to seventy four minutes meant that the discs actually had to be physice a little larger than they originally hadn't had planned on being. So you could say that the reason as standard c D is the size that it

is is because of Beethoven. And I thought that was pretty cool, not only because I'm a technology nerd, but also because it happened to like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and awful lot that's the one that has owed to joy in it. In two, Sony introduced the world's first CD player,

the c d P one oh one two. I was actually surprised to learn the CD player dates all the way back to two probably because I didn't get my first CD player until I was a teenager, so we're talking maybe nine, so it had been out for quite some time, which is actually a good thing, because when

CD players first came out, they were pretty expensive. Uh, and so c d P one oh one it's sold for about seven thirty dollars when it went on sale two today, that would be around one thousand, eight hundred dollars. So you'd be spending the equivalent of just under two grand to buy just a CD player when it first came out. Uh, that's a lot of money. Was the reason why I did not have a CD player until much later, when the prices had gone down dramatically. But I wasn't even aware that c d s were a

thing in the early eighties. To me, music was all vinyl and cassette tape, mostly cassette tape at that point. Um, if I went into a music shop, there'd be a vinyl section and then a larger tape section. And it was years before I started seeing CDs pop up, and then of course eventually they replaced everything else. Now these days, we're starting to see vinyl comeback as sort of an answer to the all digital model that we've been in for the past couple of years anyway. Two, we get

that first CD player. About a month after the CD P one oh one launched, Phillips would launch its own CD player, but it also can hang some components that were designed and built by Sony, so there were even Sony parts in the second CD player to ever launch, even though it was under the Phillips brand name. In Sony introduced the world's first portable CD player. So just two years after the first CD player comes out, Sony introduces the portable one. It was called the D five hundred.

CDs were still very young in nineteen eighty four, however, and it would take a few years for the format to really gain traction on the more established cassette market. So while the portable model was out, CDs just had not quite caught on in a big way yet, not in nineteen eighty four. It would take a couple more years.

It was already pretty clear that they were going to be a strong competitor against cassettes and vinyl, but the cassette tape market was just so entrenched at that point that it took a while for CDs to undermine it. We're gonna get back to more about Sony in just a min it, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, and we're back, and now let's get into something really juicy. We're at nineteen

eighty nine. That's the year that Sony would acquire Columbia Pictures Entertainment and would rename it Sony Pictures Entertainment Incorporated in Now, Columbia Pictures Entertainment also has a very long history that predates the founding of Sony. You remember in the last episode I talked about CBS and how when Sony purchased CBS Records that that actually predated Sony itself

the company. Same is true with Columbia Pictures. Columbia Pictures was founded in nineteen eighteen as the Cone Brandt Cone Film Sales or CBC Film Sales Company. It became Columbia Pictures in nineteen four And yes, I could do a full episode just about Sony Pictures in Entertainment, no problem. It would be a full episode complete with drama, betrayal, triumph, tragedy. But do you know what that would mean? Fourteen more Sony episodes? And I think you guys would kill me

at that point. But if you want me to do an episode or two about Sony Pictures specifically, please let me know send me a message. In the meantime, I'll give you kind of the cliffs Notes version of what Sony Pictures is all about. So Columbia had changed hands several times before Sony purchased it. In Coca Cola purchased the company, but then in Coca Cola spun the company off, and then that was bought by TriStar Pictures to become

Columbia Pictures Entertainment before Sony scooped it up. Now, some of the famous stuff Columbia Pictures made before Sony bought them included nearly two hundred three Stooges shorts. The company also distributed Mickey Mouse cartoons for Disney. It was also a player in the classic television world through its division that was called Screen Gems. Because of Columbia, we got shows like The Monkeys, I Dream of Genie, The Partridge Family,

and Bewitched. Famous movies produced by the company include The Bridge Over the River, Kuai, Oliver, which is the musical adaptation of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Easy Rider, Stir Crazy Stripes, Twittsie, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, the original version, and more. Sony spent four point nine billion dollars to buy the studio and millions more to get it up

to speed. Besides Sony Pictures, the company also created a another company to handle more art house style cinema and they called that one, Columbia TriStar Pictures, and Sony spent another four point eight billion dollars and a leveraged buyout

of Metro Metro Goldwyn Meyer or MGM Studio. Now, this was also the division of Sony that was hit by the infamous hack in two thousand and fourteen, in which an enormous amount of data was stolen from Sony and distributed on the web, revealing company strategies, employee salaries and more. So let's talk about this hack for a second. I know this is jumping to just a couple of years ago,

but it relates to the entertainment branch of Sony. So a group called Guardians of Peace or GOP took credit for the hack, and they said that their purpose for the hack was because Sony had an upcoming film at the time called The Interview. And if you don't remember what the interview is about It's a comedy about two uh documentary or slash filmmaker types, an actor and a

director who get pulled in to become assassins. Their job is to assassinate North Korea's leader, Kim Jong and some security experts said that the attack on Sony originated from North Korea or agents working on behalf of North Korea,

and that this was all politically motivated. That in other words, North Korea was insulted that this movie was going to become a thing, and so set hackers on Sony, who then penetrated Sony's security, ransacked the databasis for tons of information, including things like people salary info, and then leaked it to the media. Now North Korea denies these allegations and says that while it thinks the hackers were brilliant and wonderful people, they did not actually tell the hackers to

do this. So North Korea saying, hey, it wasn't us. We think it's awesome, but it wasn't us. Now that's not the only opinion about the hack. There are other security experts who think perhaps it was not North Korea or agents working on behalf of North Krea, that perpetrated the hacks. Some people say, no, it was probably someone from the inside who already had access to all of this stuff. They didn't break into Sony's database. They had access to it because they were an employee for Sony

and for some reason they got upset at Sony. You know, maybe something happened, maybe they were let go but still had access to Sony systems, or maybe there was some other perceived slight and that as a result, they stole a ton of information and then leaked it to the press, saying that, you know, maybe that was really like a kind of internal revenge story and not an external hacker

at all. And then either someone else came forward to claim responsibility a k a. Guardians of Peace, or the person on the inside who did all the stealing created Guardians of Peace in the first place, just to kind of cover the tracks. We don't really know the answer to this. There are a lot of security experts who say it was definitely North Korea or someone working with North Korea. There are some who say, I don't see evidence of that. I think it was an inside job.

I was more of an inside job kind of person, believing that narrative more than the North Korean narrative, but honestly, completely objectively, I do not know what is the truth. I do not know if it was in fact a North Korean hacker or someone working under the direction of North Korea, or if it was an inside job. I have no way of knowing. And the only reason I leaned towards inside job was just that the security experts I follow, many of whom were you know, talking about

this at length when it happened. I thought that that was the most likely of the possibilities, But honestly, it could be either way, and I have no way of knowing. Very interesting story, though. I would love to do a full story about the Sony hack that goes into deep detail, but to be perfectly honest, I don't have a whole lot more information on it. I would have to see if I could get in a security expert in to

talk about the investigation. It may very well be that there's some evidence that has a much more definitive answer to who perpetrated this, and I'm just not aware of it. Entirely possible, but let's get back to the main timeline. So Sony, that that hack caused Sony endless amounts of grief. There were plans that were revealed that Sony had not made public. The the salary things caused a lot of

issues internally. It was a huge demoralizing force within Sony pictures. Uh, and it the ramifications of that are still being felt today. All right back to the main timeline. This makes us jump back to Sony launched an HD capable television set with a sixteen by nine ratio. Now, televisions before, I'm sure a lot of you remember this, maybe not all

of you. Uh, their standard ratio was four by three, meaning that you know, you're talking about width versus height, so four units by three units or sixteen units by nine units. And then you you know, by figuring out the width, you know what the height is going to be because of this ratio. So sixteen by nine is what we usually call wide screen, right, that's the standard wide screen. They're also sixteen by ten there, you know it's not sixty nine is not the only standard out there,

but it's the most common one. Now in launched it's sixteen by nine ratio HD capable TV. It was a thirty six inch television called the k W dasht h D That was however, it wouldn't be until nine three and the Digital HD TV Grand Alliance that HD signals

would become more common and standardized. You can tell that companies were hoping that three D technology would follow a similar path as HD, and the ideas get the technology that can play this stuff out there first, and then hope that the standard you create is compatible by the time it actually starts to perpetuate out in the wild. So we've seen that with HD and we're seeing it now with two K and four K video. They were hoping for the same thing with three D, but that

did not happen. I think consumers by and large have rejected three D television for multiple reasons, but the same thing was true of HD at the time. They weren't sure that this was going to become the new standard. They were pushing for it. But if you were an early adopter of HD television's in the very early days, that was there was hardly anything for you to watch

in HD. There was like a cable channel that was broadcast on a lot of cable providers that gave very beautiful pictures of like sunrise is in sunsets or ocean life. But it took a few years for HD signals to start broadcasting at at a high enough density where buying an HD television had some returns on it. Otherwise you just had an expensive, pretty TV that was showing Standard

definition because that's all there was now. In while playing tennis, Achio Marita suffered a stroke and sadly, from that moment until the end of his life, he would be bound to a wheelchair and he would pass away at age seventy eight in nine, so one of the the founding

voices of Sony passes away seventy eight years old. In Sony also in formed a new company, Sony Computer Entertainment, Incorporated, later rebranded as Sony Network Entertainment and later still as Sony Interactive Entertainment, and it would become a whole owned subsidiary of Sony itself in two thousand four. This new branch of Sony was formed in partnership with the Sony Music Entertainment Japan division and focused on developing products for

Sony's entry into home video games. They wanted to get into that market in the early nineties because it was it was ripe, it was one of those it was starting to come become really competitive again and the first major product would come out that was the original Sony PlayStation. Now again, I could do another full episode or two or three about Sony Interactive Entertainment. I could even do one or two at least on the Sony PlayStation, and

probably someday I will. But just like Sony Music and Sony Entertainment Sony Pictures, UH, this series would go on forever if I included it at this point. So again I'm going to give you the high points, and then later down the road, if you guys want to hear a full episode or two about Sony PlayStation or Sony Interactive Entertainment, I'll do it. Then here are the big points. Before the PlayStation, Sony had actually entered the console market

through a partnership with Nintendo that happened in Night. Sony and Nintendo worked together to create the Super Disc CD ROM attachment for the S and E S or Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but there were some licensing issues and some other bureaucratic nonsense that prevented the Super Disc CD ROM attachment from ever being released. So Sony made it, but it never hit store shelves, so that project was

a bust. But in Sony tried it again. This time they worked with Phillips to help create the Phillips c d I, which was a CD based entertainment system Compact disc Entertainment system, and that ended up being a commercial flop. It was competing against too many other systems and the market was just so diluted that it didn't get any traction.

It was also pretty expensive. Now, the original PlayStation when it was in its original design, not the one that went to store shelves, but in development in Sony, the original PlayStation could actually play S and E S cartridges.

It actually had a cartridge port as well as the CD drive, but Sony only made two hundred of them, and then they decided to change the design, so they got rid of the cartridge port at that point, So those two hundred were the only ones ever made that could play both PlayStation games and S and E S games. Now at the time where they took the cartridge port out, that's when the product became known as the PlayStation X

or PSX and it launched in December in Japan. The rest of the world would have to wait until the fall of for it to debut. Now, the original PlayStations competitors included the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Turbographics sixteen, the Sega Genesis, and the Panasonic three d Oh. And now we're talking about my childhood. I mean I remember all of those systems coming out. I didn't known any

of them. The only console I had owned really at that point was an Atard and then the video game crack market crashed, and when the Nintendo came out, my parents weren't so keen on spending a huge amount of money on buying yet another console, so understandably, and I did not have a source of income to save up for such a console. So I would occasionally play S and E S at a friend's house, and uh, I would it would? I think it would be until college

before I really started playing PlayStation games. So the PlayStation did very well in this market, largely because it's graphics quality and sound quality were so much better than most of the other systems out there. I think the Dreamcast could give it a real run for its money, but no one was supporting the dream Cast. It's just sad. I love the Dreamcast, by the way. Also, I love

the PlayStation. I'm not particularly picky here. I'm not taking sides, but I am sad that the Dreamcast never really had the success that it deserved. But the PlayStation did really well and it would eventually rise up to become Nintendo's chief rival. At that time, Nintendo had been dominant with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo, but now the

PlayStation was really challenging the company. Now, since then, we've had several evolutions of the PlayStation, and like I said, I could do a full PlayStation episode sometime in the future, but I'm not going to do one now, So I'm not going to go through every iteration of the PlayStation. We're up to PS four now, we're actually at the second generation of PS four, but I'm not going to cover all of those. So listen out for a PlayStation episode sometime in the future and I will get into

that story at that point. Back to Sony. In they released the first consumer digital video cam quarter the d c r v X one thousand and that same year, the company established the Sony Communication Network Corporation, and as the name indicates, this is the branch of Sony that became an Internet service provider. So now we've got Sony that is in charge of creating content like Sony Pictures

and Sony Music. And we also have Sony the Internet service provider, and we already have an early example of a potential conflict of interest where a company is both providing internet service and the stuff that could be delivered over that service. Um Sony also participated in creating the standard known as the Digital Versatile Disc or DVD, so Sony had a voice at the table when that standard

was being created. In Sony launched the popular cyber Shot brand of digital camera still camera h This was the first digital camera I ever owned, was a cyber shot. It was actually probably a cyber shot too, or something that probably wasn't the original, but I did own a Sony cyber Shot. It was a pretty decent little digital camera.

In Sony introduced the world to a robotic dog named Ibo a I b O. And that was the year that the shiro Kia Department Store, the original home of what would one day become Sony, closed and closed in January. All right, we're in the home stretch, but before we get there, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back, and now it's the year two thousand on October two, Sony would partner with Pioneer and unveil DVR Blue. Now this is the technology that would

eventually evolve into Blu Ray. On November one, two thousand, Sony announced the Ultra Density Optical or u d O format, which was the blue laser optical format that again would become Blu ray discs. In two thousand two, Sony would go all in on the new format, and now it's officially called Blu Ray. But also in two thousand two, Arrival would arise and face off against Sony and the Blu Ray standard. And actually it was a couple of them, is Toshiba and NYC primarily, and Toshiba and NBC came

up with a different format called HD DVD. So here's the high definition war, the standard beyond DVD, and we see another format war come out. And I remember in the last big format war, Sony was backing Beta max and the company lost. Beta Max did not become the

standard for home entertainment VHS did. So I've done a full episode, actually a couple of them, about Blu ray versus h D d v D. You might even remember that way back when we first started tech stuff, my co host Chris Palette and I had actually visited c e S that year. Those two thousand eight that was the year when h D DVD pulled out of c e S at the last minute, leaving a big empty spot on the show floor. Essentially, that was when the

HD DVD standard gave up the ghost. It had been a war from two thousand two to two thousand and eight which one was going to become the standard? Was it gonna be blu ray or was it going to be h D DVD, And for a while h D DVD was. It looked like it was dominating, but eventually Blue ray one out, and it is in many ways the superior format when you get to certain technical specs, but we all know that it's not necessarily the best format that wins. Sometimes other elements will allow one product

to win over another one. It doesn't necessarily mean that the one that one was the better product. In this case, I think blue ray really was, even though at the time I was kind of supporting h D DVD because it was cheaper when like those those players and the formats were less expensive than Blue ray. But again, like all technologies, if enough people adopted over time, that technology becomes less expensive because of manufacturing improvements and other issues

that reduced the cost of producing the technology. So if you stick with it long enough and if enough people adopted, prices come down. Um, both of those things are important for that to happen. Though, so Blue Ray one out. Uh this time, Sony would end up backing the the successful format In the format wars. Back to two thousand one, Sony established the Sony Ericsson Mobile communication branch. Today it's just called Sony Mobile. So then they got into the

cell phone industry. You know, they had already been in internet service providers, they had gotten into computers, they had gotten into television's. Uh, you know, they were they're essentially branching out as much as they could and getting involved in as many different industries, especially in the electronics field, as possible. In two thousand three, Sony would actually introduce the Blu ray disc player. In two thousand four, they

introduced the first four K l c D panel. Now, this was the first panel to actually meet four K specifications, the ones that had been suggested by a consortium of trying that was trying to define what four K would actually be. Sony made the first panel that actually met those specifications. Sony also would found another company in two thousand four, Sony Financial, which means yes, Sony does in fact have a bank, along with several other financial services.

So if you look at Sony the company, the big company, and you look at the different businesses that Sony is in, they can be divided up into specific disciplines or divisions. You've got financial, you've got music, you've got movies and TV, and you've got electronics. So you've got a couple of different ones. In entertainment. Actually you could argue entertainment is music and movies together. And maybe instead of saying music and movies, say entertainment. And then maybe Sony computers like

our computer games video games. So you've got video games, movies, and music. You've got electronics, and you've got this financial branch. Big, big divisions within Sony, each one big enough to be its own company with its own subsidiaries. In two thousand five, Sony would acquire MGM. As I mentioned earlier. One other major event from that year, in two thousand five, Sony would name Sir Howard Stringer CEO. Now he was the first foreigner to run a major Japanese electronics firm. They

very unusual. Normally, Japanese businesses end up electing Japanese leaders to be to take over these big positions for multiple reasons. There are linguistic barriers and cultural barriers. It's just very different ways of doing business in Japan versus in other parts of the world. In fact, Sir Stringer ran into or Sir Howard, I should say, you say sir and then the first name. Sir Howard ran into this during

his tenure as CEO. He ran into these these barriers between the way Westerners do business in the way um Japanese business owners do business, and it caused some friction. Sir Howard also focused very heavily on the entertainment side of Sony, and it's not a big surprise. He had previously been president of CBS Incorporated, and before that he had worked on various CBS properties, so he came from that background. It was not a huge surprise that he

would really focus on the entertainment side. And this was the era of Sony that saw things like the Spider Man franchise launch again that that would be the um Sam Rainy Spider Man movies in two thousand seven, Sony would move its headquarters to a new building in Japan called Sony City, at least that's what's nicknamed. And the company also released the first oh Led television in two thousand seven. In two thousand nine, Sony would develop an

authentication technology that maps the veins in your finger. It's called Mofira m O F I R A, And that's pretty cool. It's not just it's not reading your fingerprint. It actually looks for how the veins in your finger, how how they are aligned inside your finger that's unique to you. So using a little near and for red, you can look into a person's skin and see that network of veins. And since it's a unique identified to the individual, you can use it for authentication. Pretty cool.

Also in two thousand nine, Sony would unveil a new slogan for the company called make Believe, Make Period Believe Period In Sony would open up the three D Technology Center. Now, Sony was just one of several companies that were really pushing for three D television to become the next big, definitive step in home televisions, and most consumers, like I said, resisted that trend. Here's the reason why television companies keep

doing this kind of thing. You know, you might think, all right, well, first we got widescreen TVs and h D t vs, then we got flat panel TVs, and then after that, uh, you know, once we got the h D t vs, we started to get things like

three D television, even thinner television. Then we went two K and four K and some prototype eight KSE sets as well as curved TVs, and now we're talking about high dynamic range Television's the reason you see these trends is that companies want to sell TVs, but TVs are tough to sell, right. You know, most of us don't buy a television and then the next year say, oh, there's a newer model with more features. I'm going to

go buy a new TV. Because they're really expensive. Most of us can't afford to just keep upgrading our TVs regularly every couple of years. It's one of those purchases that you buy and then you pretty much use it until either it stops working or you're just like, no, it's really need a new TV. So companies keep coming out with these new technologies as an incentive to get people to go out and buy new televisions, I mean other otherwise you don't have a business. But it has

been tough going for three D television's. I know a few people who have said that they like them. I don't know any personally. None of my friends, as far as I know, actively use a three D television. Some of them might own three D capable TVs. Um There's one friend I have. She might actually have a three D television that she uses as a three D TV because she's kind of a techno geek on a level that is admirable, and she has a job where she

can afford that kind of stuff. She's awesome. But I have not actually asked her if she has a three D television or uses her three D TV if she does have one. So yeah, most of the folks I know they didn't like the idea of a three D television for multiple reasons, one of the big ones being they didn't want to have to wear a special pair of glasses just to watch their television, not in three D mode anyway, because it meant that you had to have an extra piece of equipment. That's another one that

you can misplace. It makes it harder to like you have to track down where your your glasses are. If their active glasses instead of passive, you have to charge them. It's just a level of involvement that will lot of television viewers just don't want. They would rather have the technology built into the television in such a way where you don't need an extra device or peripheral in order to enjoy it. And there are other reasons as well,

I'm sure. But anyway, three D tele Technology Center probably not seeing the success of some of the other divisions. Maybe they have some involvement with PSBR, which launched this year, in which case that could end up being a success. It's a little early to say right now. In two thousand and ten, Sony also introduced a new cyber shot camera, this time according to Sony, So the first cybershot camera was all one word in Sony's literature. This is actual

Sony literature I used for these notes. So the original still camera cybershot is one word. The version on their materials they have cybershot hyphenated. I don't know why, but this Cybershot was the world's first digital still camera capable of recording full HD progressive video. That's kind of cool. Uh. Also around this time. Soon, he began developing wireless communications technologies to allow various electronics to communicate at high speeds with each other. The goal here would be to cut

down on cables. You know, have wireless transmission of data between your various components so that you don't have to have cables connecting them. In other words, imagine that you have a Blu Ray player that connects wirelessly to your television and so you don't have to hook the Blu Ray player up to the TV with a physical cable. It just beams the movie at a very high data throughput rate to the television that can then display it

at Blu Ray resolutions. That's what they were really working on at that point, and I've seen some examples of HD versions of that. It gets tricky though, because you have to deal with interference and just you know, trying to get that much data through uh, you know, your wireless network, even if it's a wireless network just between two components can be a real pain in the butt.

Also in it was a big year for Sony. They introduced the first Internet TV using Google TV or Android TV, and Sony would introduce an e book reader that year, but the e book reader didn't do so well. The Sony E book reader was one of the big competitors to the Amazon Kindle. When the Kindle came out, it was really kind of down to the e book and the Kindle, and we know who won that one. Kindle

won that one. In fact, Sony discontinued the production of the book readers in though the company would continue to sell the units that they had in stock, but they wouldn't make any more of them. They were done. It was clear that they weren't going to be able to compete in that space. In Katsuo Harai was promoted to CEO. He replaced Sir Howard Stringer, and Harai attempted to reunify Sony strategies and get the penning on more stable ground.

The previous two decades had been pretty volatile for Sony financially. They had had very variable results year over year, so they're trying to get things to settle down. In fourteen, Sony would sell off its bio PC division. It was a big, big news for Sony to get out of that space, and they also in fourteen spun off its TV division into its own corporation. So again it was kind of an idea of of let's let the TV division be its own thing where it's not worried about

what the rest of the company is doing. They can focus on creating the best television sets with the newest innovations, unhindered by the rest of the company. That was the philosophy behind it. As for a vio PC, I assume it was just one of those things where it was a division that the company just felt didn't fit into the new vision of what Sony would be all about. Now we get up to twenty sixteen. This year the year I'm recording this. If you're listening to this, after

twenty sixteen, Hello from the past. In twenty sixteen, PlayStation would release the ps VR, that's the virtual reality system for the PlayStation, and so it entered into the competitive virtual reality field. Incredibly competitive right now, because you've got big names like the Oculus Rift and the HTC five that have been trying to make VR a consumer reality

for several months before the PSVR came out. Uh just before I came in to record this section, Sony announced that it was selling off its battery business, as well as readjusting its profit estimate for twenty sixteen, adjusting it downward for the fiscal year. So at this point, Sony is still uh looking at a two point six billion dollar profit at the end of the year, but originally

they were looking at closer to three billion. So it's been it's been a rough year for Sony in twenty sixteen in the sense that they're not performing as well as they had hope. They're still making a profit. It's not like they're losing money in twenty sixteen, but they're not doing as well as they had hoped originally. The p s VR is one of their strategies that they're really hoping will help carry the company forward this uh, you know, really investing in the video game and entertainment

aspects that Sony is involved in. And PSVR has a pretty good chance of doing really well because when you think about it, the PlayStation VR depends upon the PS four, of which there are millions out there already. If you want to get a VR headset like the Oculus Rift or the HTC five, you need a PC capable of running VR programs at a fast enough frame rate and high enough resolution so that you get the experience you want.

That can be pretty expensive. I mean the headsets alone are several hundred dollars, and then the PC you need to run the headsets maybe anywhere from eight dollars on up. So when you combine the two, you could be looking at between fift hundred and two thousand dollars just to run VR using these headsets. If you already own a PS four, the only thing you have to invest in

is the PSVR, which is still several hundred dollars. It's not like it's super cheap, but it's less money than buying an all news system and an all new headset. If it can run your existing system, then you can end up at least not spending extra money. Now, granted, if you want to use the full set up, you also have to have a Sony eye camera and the Sony move controllers, which you may have to purchase if you didn't buy a bundle that had those in them, and you'll have to buy those as well to get

the full PSVR experience. Not every game uses those. Some of the games used just a regular controller and they don't use the eye camera or the motion controllers at all, but some of them do use those motion controllers. Um

I've heard varying things about the ps VR. I've heard that it's the lightest headset out of all the VR headsets out there, so it's the most comfortable to wear for the longest amount of time, but the resolution is lower and that the motion tracking of the eye camera leaves a lot to be desired, so you have some performance issues with them. I don't know that firsthand because I haven't tried it, but that's just what I've read and heard on various podcasts. So uh, I don't know.

If you've had experience with the PSVR, you should let me know what it was like, if you loved it, if it was great. I would love to hear that, because I'm only hearing one side so far. I know some people really love it, but that's not the the not the people who have been doing the podcast I've

been listening to um. But it's interesting to see a big company get involved like that, and maybe that will end up creating the virtual reality experience that ends up being the killer app, because right now I don't think VR has had that. So that's it. That's that brings us up to speed on the Sony story, And like I said, it's huge. It's sprawls. There's so much more we can talk about. We can talk so much more about Sony music, or Sony pictures or Sony Interactive entertainment.

And again, maybe one day we will, but that depends largely on you, the audience. If you want to hear more about any of those in the future, don't worry. I'm not going to do them immediately after this one. I'm gonna cover totally different topics so that we can, you know, cover all stuff tech, not just one company. But if you ever want to hear more about those topics in particular, let me know, or if there's any other technology topic you would like me to cover, let

me know. You can email me The email addresses tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can get in touch with me on social media. I am on Facebook and I'm on Twitter, and I have the handle text Stuff h SW. That's tech Stuff hs W at both of those. If you want to get in touch with me, you could do so there. And I look forward to hearing from you, and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot Com