Sony To Unveil PlayStation 4 Entertainment Capabilities At Upcoming Events

The PlayStation 4 is set to be one of the biggest hardware releases in years, not just in the consoles games industry, but in the tech industry as a whole. Many games developers, hardware partners, retail outlets and of course consumers have a lot counting on this console and the question of will it fail, or will it succeed is important when it could see a hardware life cycle of 7-9 years, much like the PlayStation 3 has and will.

Yet for all its graphics and gaming prowess (for a games console at least, I know PC “can” be more powerful), games console have to be a little more than just games consoles these days, they take center stage under our TV’s and act as a hub for many kinds of digital content, yet for all we have been told of the PlayStation 4’s hardware capabilities, little has been discussed about its multimedia capabilities.

“We know that people like these functions, such as Netflix, and use them a lot. And especially for those people who are not the person who purchased these consoles – like family members – they tend to use these non-game functions. So it’s not like we are no longer going to do these functions, but especially for the announcement event, we wanted to show how the game experiences will change with PS4, because that’s the biggest focus for us. Once that communication [to the public] is achieved, then probably later this year we’ll talk more about what these non-game functions [are] that we are trying to bring to PS4 as well,” said Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios.

Sony is due to launch the PlayStation 4 this year and prior to that we can expect a show at E3 in June, as well as a few smaller events held by Sony them selves where they will no doubt tout the gaming titles, hardware and price tag for the console. Yet there will be time for other features and while the software partners will soon pick up the slack in terms of game coverage and news, there will be time to discuss streaming media, online services, blu-ray playback and much much more.

I would bet at a bare minimum we can expect to see a continuation of all streaming services that are currently available on PlayStation 3, perhaps with a few surprises thrown in.

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