UMD (Universal Media Disc)

~ the obituary ~

The strangest thing about the UMD is not that it failed. It is that in 2004, when every other disc in a normal house had become writable, Sony shipped a brand new consumer format that was read-only by construction and sealed shut at the factory. There was no blank UMD. There was never going to be one. The disc lived inside a plastic caddy with a sliding shutter, and the only way to get anything onto it was to be a company with a pressing contract. Everything that happened to the format afterwards follows from that one decision.

It launched with the PSP in Japan on 12 December 2004, standardized a few months later as ECMA-365, which describes it flatly as data interchange on 60 millimeter read-only optical disc cartridge. The disc held 900 megabytes on a single layer and 1.8 gigabytes on a dual, and video went onto it in H.264 at a point when that was still an expensive thing to decode in a handheld. Sony did not stop at games. It licensed the format to the film studios and pushed UMD Video as a way to sell you movies again, and around fifteen hundred titles were eventually pressed, roughly a thousand of them available across all regions. For about eighteen months you could walk into a large American store and find a rack of them.

That rack never existed here. UMD Video was retail distribution in a handful of markets and Turkey was not one of them, so the only discs that arrived were games, one to a box, priced against a shelf of PC titles that cost a fraction as much. What the PSP actually meant locally is a different object entirely: a memory card, filled by somebody who knew how, holding more than the disc slot underneath it ever would. The format's whole proposition was that the disc was the thing you bought, and in a market where nobody was selling them, the disc was the thing you took out.

~ the case file ~

~ sealed at the factory ~

The caddy was defensible engineering. A bare 60 millimeter disc rattling around in a bag with keys would not survive a week, and the shutter kept fingerprints off the surface, which matters when the read head is that small. It also made the cartridge chunky enough that the PSP had to be built around it, with a hinged door on the back and a drive motor drawing power every time the game loaded something.

The cost of the choice showed up in battery life and in load times, both of which the PSP was criticized for from launch, and both of which improved the moment people stopped using the drive. By the time the PSP Go arrived in 2009 with no drive at all, Sony had effectively conceded the argument, although it conceded it so badly that the Go could not play any of the discs its owners already had.

~ fifteen hundred films ~

UMD Video launched into genuine enthusiasm. Studios liked the idea of a new format cycle and Sony had a hardware install base growing fast, and the early titles sold well enough that the numbers looked like a market. Then the repeat purchases did not come. People who had bought a film on DVD were being asked to buy it again, at close to DVD money, in a version that only played on one device that they also had to be holding.

By 2006 Wal-Mart was cutting the shelf space and the majors were withdrawing, with Universal and Paramount among the first to stop. It took less than two years from launch for the video side of the format to be effectively finished, which is fast even by the standards of failed media formats, and the remaining releases drifted toward the kind of catalog that gets bundled with hardware. The games carried on until 2013 and the PSP itself until 2014.

~ what a memory card held instead ~

The thing that beat the UMD was sitting in the same handheld. A Memory Stick Pro Duo went from a few hundred megabytes at launch to 32 gigabytes within a few years, which is more than seventeen dual-layer UMDs in a card smaller than a postage stamp. Sony's own store started selling games as downloads in late 2009. The disc slot was competing with the slot next to it and losing on every measure except one, which was that the disc was the only version of a game a shop could put in a bag.

Production ran on for years after nothing new was being made for it, servicing replacement and back catalog, until the last Japanese factory pressing UMDs closed at the end of 2016. There is no announcement to point at and no shutdown notice, because a format does not get one. It ends when the last machine that stamps it is switched off, which for this one was twelve years and one device after it started.

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