Big news from the CES in Vegas this week regarding Playstation 3 and Blu-ray. Sony demoed a future PS3 feature which will allow PS3 owners to legally rip BD movies to their PSP or a memory stick. The converter rips the movie and downconverts it to a lower resolution for playback on their media player. This is all part of Sony's BD Live initiative which intends to expand on what we already see in special features, such as including games and ringtones on BD movie discs which can be downloaded to a BD Live player.

Depending on the DRM scheme Sony chooses to adopt for the downconverted movies, if any, this is a huge step forward for portable media player owners and the movie biz as a whole. For years, iPod and PSP owners have been clamoring to be able to painlessly rip DVDs they legally own for their own enjoyment on the go. With music increasingly going DRM-free, there may be hope for the movie industry after all. People want digital copies of their movies and music, but they want tangible copies as well since hard drives do fail. If they do this right for a change, we may see a revolution in the way we watch movies.

I'm not holding my breath though for this to become a reality. Many products demoed at shows like CES and E3 never see the light of day. Sony hasn't announced any release date for the software.

Source: PC World