Sony ready to increase Playstation 2 output

Sony ready to increase Playstation 2 output
TOKYO — Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) will make broadband services available to Playstation 2 game consoles through an alliance with Namko Ltd. and former competitor Sega Corp. that will make arcade game centers available via a network connection. The company is also ramping its production of chips essential to the console and has developed a copy protection system to avoid a legal morass.

"We want to offer contents which will make people desire to have [a broadband connection] at home," said Ken Kutaragi, president of SCEI. "We want to present what will happen with a 100-Mbit per second network in a visible way nationwide in Japan. Using Namko and Sega's arcade game centers and SCEI's bases, we will deliver entertainment which will become available if an optical fiber network is available to homes."

But Sony first had to address content protection issues before offering broadband services, Kutaragi said. "We could not propose a broadband service until we have a confidence that we do not repeat copyright issues that hit the music industry in the game and computer entertainment industry," he said. The service is scheduled to begin this summer.

Kutaragi also said that Sony is ramping production of the Playstation 2's Graphic Synthesizer chip, a shortage of which caused Sony to ship only 8.2 million game consoles last year, well short of its 10 million unit target. Kutaragi said that SCEI will ship 20 million units of the game console in its next fiscal year, which starts April 1.

"Reviewing present capacity, we are confident that we can build that many units," Kutaragi said. "We are building one million units a month of Playstation 2, but it is still in short supply both in North American and European markets."

The company expects to make 1.4 million units of the Graphic Synthesizer chip in February and 1.6 million units in March. "The production is recovering to the planned level," Kutaragi said.

With a stable chip supply, SCEI plans to build 1.5 million Playstation 2 consoles each month in the first half of the next fiscal year and 2 million units per month in the second half.

To provide broadband services, SCEI will employ a content protection system called DNA-S that will read a unique ID number from an optical disk before copying or downloading the disk's content.

The copy management system may be applicable elsewhere, but "we'll start with the Playstation 2-based network in our first attempt," Kutaragi said.