We speak to a spokesperson for the Video Delivery Service, recently announced for Sony's PS3

What kind of content is going to be available? Movies, TV shows and so on?
Tomorrow on 19 November we launch the Video Delivery Service on the PlayStation Network in four territories – UK, France, Germany and Spain. It’s a movie service so you can download to own or you can download to rent movies. We’ve signed all the major studios but also we’ve done local content deals in each country too so we’ve been spending time getting good local movies. We’ve got some in the UK, France, Germany. [There’s] 2,000 in total, and that’s split up pretty equally across the countries, a mixture of HD and SD.

Are there any plans for TV series or anything like that?
Not just yet – we’re just launching on the movie basis in those four territories and then the plans are to roll out the service across Europe in 2010 and beyond.

Is there going to be support for independent filmmakers?
That’s an interesting question – I think we’ve picked up a few independent movies from the local deals that we’ve done. So we have Optimum in the UK… but I think moving forward there’s an opportunity to support local independents as well. It’s something that we are looking at, but we may do it in a slightly different way to the way that we do the deals with the big studios.

And on an individual basis, as opposed to just independent studios? Individual filmmakers and things like that?
We’d love to pull that talent in because I think it really fits, it aligns itself with PlayStation the brand really well. We’re not doing anything yet, and we haven’t announced we’re doing anything yet and we don’t have plans to do anything yet but moving forward I’d like to see more of that, particularly in the UK. It would be really nice.

Are there going to be anything like user ratings or user review systems for the films?
Not yet, but this has come up several times. We don’t have it on the service right now, maybe it’s something that comes in the future, but we haven’t planned it yet.

How big are the downloaded movies?
It all depends, but you can say an SD movie is around 2GB and maybe an HD is around 8GB.

Are rentals streaming?
No, it’s all download. But I think if you download an SD of that size it’s probably going to take you an hour or so, maybe up to three hours for an HD so I think you have a choice there. With the SD you could probably, after a few minutes, start to watch it if you wanted to on the progressive download function, or with SD you could put the download into the background, go play a game use the other services, the other functions or just think ‘I’m going to watch that later’.

… continued