Sony Qriocity

» see qriocity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

qriocity was a brand most people only saw on a settings screen they were trying to leave. sony launched the video on demand piece in the us in april '10 on bravia tvs and ps3 consoles, rolled the music piece across europe in december, then took the q prefix off everything by august of the following year. i was twenty seven that year, working as a computer engineer outside the consumer entertainment market, ps3 ownership in turkey was a thin slice and the qriocity brand never had a meaningful turkish presence.

the made up name was the q-fronted misspelling sony picked to umbrella its incoming subscription services. video on demand powered by qriocity launched in the us in april '10 and added france, germany, italy, spain, uk in november. music unlimited powered by qriocity launched in europe in december '10 with a quoted six million song library at start. the "powered by qriocity" suffix sat at the bottom of every menu it appeared in, from the ps3 home screen across to the playmemories photo cloud product.

then the april '11 psn breach hit. seventy seven million playstation network accounts were exposed and qriocity went offline alongside psn. the outage ran for twenty three days. the public relations response was a long restoration plan paired with a "welcome back" package of free games and one month of free qriocity music. sony rebooted the services through may and june and qriocity came back. the user base had visibly thinned through the outage and the trust window for the brand never recovered.

this part you had to be inside sony's brand strategy meeting for, and i was not. kaz hirai took the stage at ifa berlin on 31 august '11 and announced sony entertainment network as the new umbrella. video unlimited and music unlimited were rolled in and the "powered by qriocity" suffix was retired everywhere. qriocity.com redirected to the new sen page. the brand had lasted seventeen months. through '12 sony rewrote the marketing copy across ps3 menus and bravia firmware updates to remove the word, by the end of that year qriocity existed only in old launch press releases.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

qriocity was supposed to mean "curiosity" with the q for "quality" or for sony's qrio robot mascot from the 2000s, the marketing copy never settled. the brand was specifically the umbrella for streaming subscription services across sony hardware. video on demand powered by qriocity sold movie rentals and purchases that you could start on one device and finish on another. music unlimited powered by qriocity was a streaming subscription with offline caching to ps3 and android. playmemories powered by qriocity was the photo cloud part. the umbrella tied them to a single sign in across psn and the bravia network platform.

the ten dollar a month tier of music unlimited got you the catalogue on demand, the four dollar tier was a radio mode without on demand. video unlimited rentals were three to six dollars depending on hd. the catalogue partnerships were the slow part. sony pictures was easy and the rest of the studios negotiated by territory and were never complete across the launch markets. the music side was easier because sony music was a label and could cut deals with universal and warner as peers rather than as suppliers.

~ the psn breach ~

this happened more in the global gaming press than where i was. on 20 april '11 sony took psn and qriocity offline after detecting an external intrusion. the attacker had pulled seventy seven million account records out of the playstation network database. names and billing addresses were confirmed exposed and the credit card status was uncertain for weeks. qriocity ran on the same auth and account system so it went down with psn. the outage ended after twenty three days for psn and slightly later for qriocity, the music service came back first under a "welcome back" promo of two free months.

the breach made the qriocity name visible in a way the marketing had never managed. millions of psn users learned the word from incident emails and forced password reset flows. the cultural reading of the q in qriocity flipped from "premium streaming" to "the thing that got hacked". sony's senior leadership reportedly decided around then that the q brand was a marketing liability that needed to go. four months later, hirai announced the rebrand at ifa.

~ the day it died ~

this part you had to be at ifa berlin in '11 for. kaz hirai stood up on 31 august '11 and introduced sony entertainment network as the new unified consumer brand for sony's content services. video on demand powered by qriocity became video unlimited under sen and music unlimited dropped the suffix at the same time. the qriocity suffix was scrubbed off every storefront over the next few weeks. by january '12 the qriocity word was gone from the ps3 home screen entirely.

the music side hung on as a sen product until 31 march '15, when sony shut down music unlimited globally and partnered with spotify to launch playstation music. the video side was renamed playstation video in '15 and shut down in north america in august '21. qriocity itself outlived no part of the brand strategy that had created it. the word survived only in old launch press releases and in sony's annual reports, where the q showed up as a footnote in the digital entertainment revenue line.

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