Facing falling TV sales and the closure by key retail partner Bing Lee of the first Sony Central Store in Australia, Sony Australia has moved to shore up its product offering by launching several new products including Wiggle Time, a TV service that will compete for TV subscription dollars up against Foxtel and Fetch TV.
Sony Australia, which is banking on content to drive TV sales, is refusing to answer questions about the recent failure of its Internet-enabled Bravia TVs to properly display web pages, as highlighted by the Financial Review newspaper recently.
Nor are they saying how many subscribers they expect to get for their $7.95 per month kids TV programmes which only offer 3 hours of new content a month.
They are also trying to extract an additional $3.95 for another Video on Demand service or $6.95 for HD content.
Currently, several vendors are spruiking Internet-enabled TVs as either Smart TVs or Connected TVs despite those televisions lacking the processing power to deliver a good live Internet TV experience.
Currently, Sony is banking on its Internet TV strategy to drive TV sales despite recent problems with their own PlayStation and Entertainment Networks which have been used as the backbone to deliver Sony content in the past.
Sony’s new Wiggle Time! TV service for Bravia Internet-enabled TVs, as well as its Video on Demand service that is delivered from its Qriocity servers is coming under pressure from BigPond TV which is now integrated into Samsung and LG TVs as well as Fetch TV which will soon be available on the Optus network for $19.95 a month.
Wiggle Time! TV offers children access to programs including “The Wiggles” and “Dorothy the Dinosaur” for a monthly subscription fee of $7.95. In comparison, subscribers to Foxtel get eight childrens’ channels and over 30 programs including content from Disney, the BBC and a host of cartoon shows.
Nicholas Villani, Sony training manager, said that the Wiggle Time! service will be updated every month with three hours of new childrens’ content.
For an additional $3.95 or $6.95 for HD content, Sony is hoping that consumers will pick up its “Video on Demand powered by Qriocity.”
Sony said that this service allows users to stream content to a network-enabled Bravia HDTV or Blu-ray Disc player.
While Telstra has over 2,300 movies on offer, Sony is not saying how many movies its customers will have access to. Consumers will have up to 30 days to start watching their film, but only 48 hours to watch it after downloading the content.
