Sony Planning Video Download Services, Company-Wide DRM

Days after announcing the imminent death of its Connect service, the WSJ reports that Sony’s planning to leverage the PS3, PSP and their Bravia line to jump into the video download market. In fact, Connect was probably killed in order to concentrate on the IP video market—and the article implies that the move was just the tip of the corporate restructuring iceberg in the name of IP video. “People familiar with the situation say Mr. Stringer has been laying the groundwork in recent months to shift the company’s focus to video downloading.” In a nutshell, Sir Howard’s pushing more cooperation across units and heightened hardware/software zen, seeing them as necessary to establish dominance in the primordial soup that makes up the video download market right now.

But, proving that Sony’s still Sony, Stringer “personally enforced a decision to adopt certain digital rights management software that will eventually be used in all of Sony’s products.” Guess there’s still a few things Sony has left to learn. [WSJ]