Whereas our friends in the US are getting the chance to partake in a closed beta in January, with a planned rollout in US Summer (our winter) there are — at this stage — no details on when Australians will be able to take advantage of Sony’s ‘PlayStation Now’ service.
The official word from Sony is the following:
At this stage, we are not in the position to confirm launch details for PlayStation Now in Australia, however we’ll update you as soon as we have additional news to share about this great new service.
I suspect there are most likely a few roadblocks at this stage — latency and rubbish Australian internet being the two main culprits. Hopefully a US release will help iron out the creases, get the service running smoothly then — boom — Australian PlayStation Now for everyone because, if I’m being completely honest, I’d rather have this service launch and actually work than Sony rush out something glitchy.
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22 responses to “Sony Is ‘Not In The Position To Confirm Launch Details For PlayStation Now in Australia’”
I’m sure we’ll have it as a launch window feature of the PS7.
Available Everywhere* (*Not Available in Australia due to previous governments commitment to ancient technology)
Honest question, what’s broadband internet like in the USA? I know there’s cities that have fibre (whether it’s because of Google or the traditional companies) but one interview I watched, the Sony rep said it requires 5Mbps as a minimum. The reporter then said, “Oh, well that’s not too bad.” And the rep gave him a nod as if to say yeah, we had to lower it a bit.
Obviously it’s a much bigger country, but it made me wonder if there’s actually a large percentage of Americans that might miss out on being able to use PS Now?
I’ve heard that it’s actually not that great. A lot of areas only have one broadband provider so there’s little competition to promote investment in infrastructure. The flyover country area isn’t much better than ours, and often worse.
Overall, it is very patchy like Aus. They have more places that get awesome speeds, but they also get more places with crappy or no connection at all.
Most of the internet usage in the US is taken up by streaming services like Netflix and Hulu etc…, but there are a lot of users that can only get them in SD.
I’ve spoken to a couple Americans that are still on dialup. I’d doubt that Turnbull review would look so bad next to a similar review in America.
The difference is it’s 5MB (Megabytes) per second, not Mb (Megabits) 1 MB is roughly 4 Mb.. So that’ll mean we need a 20Mbps connection, which in Australia, is not usual from the average man.
Nope. Some sites have referred to the download speed required as 5MB/s but that seems to be incorrect. It seems the required speed is 5Mb/s (IGN originally posted 5MB/s but fixed it to 5Mb/s) and most other sites have referred to it as 5Megabits (Mb). Gamespot specifically mentions that it’s actually 5Megabits (Mb) which does well to clear the confusion.
So if a 5Mb/s connection speed is required for a good enough service, then you will need at least a constant speed of 0.6 – 0.65MB/s (Megabytes) (600-650KB/s (Kilobytes)) to maintain it. The real issues are upload speeds, which Australia has notoriously poor upload speeds, so this could cause input lag, which could end up getting you killed in whatever game you are playing and also bandwidth data caps from your ISP. I get 200gb a month and this could easily chew through all that.
When I download something through Steam I get up to 750KB/s, but averages out to 550-600KB/s and this is through wireless. If you are running it through an ethernet cable the download speeds will be even higher. I have ADSL+2 and I’m using a 3-4 year old modem. Now a lot of people are saying that wireless is really their only option for a console, but have a look at Ethernet over Power. This is definitely a fix for that issue.
P.S. A Megabyte is actually 1/8 of a Megabit. So 1MB actually equates to 8Mb. It’s not 1/4
The sony eu blog stated it was Mb/s as well.
The big difference is latency: even on slow connections, many sites still feel faster.
You might have 250ms of latency to hit a US site, while in the US it might be closer to 30ms or less. On a 5Mbps internet connection, that 200ms can transfer ~ 100 kilobytes of data before you’d see the first byte in Australia.
That makes a pretty big difference to the perceived interactivity of a website which can’t really be fixed while you keep the backend servers on a different continent. For a service where latency is more important than bandwidth, this makes a huge difference.
Alas, stuck on ADSL 1 for the foreseeable future, I will be unable to participate in this service, even if it gets here. I imagine a hefty percentage of Australian gamers will be in a similar position.
My prediction: getting this service rolled out here will not be a priority for Sony.
We all know we will never get such thing. Latency has always been an issue here and here is Abbott making us suffer longer with their “FTTN” solution. God dammit get your shit together Abbott.
Playstation Now joins the ranks of such products as Amazon Streaming, Netflix, Hulu & WWE Network. This club is called USA now, Australia coming soon* (*Coming Soon meaning probably never unless you find some sort of illegal work around)
It’s not really the same situation as those services, though. Those movie / video services tend to be unavailable here due to content restrictions i.e. the Australian rights to a movie are held by some other party than the one that holds the US rights. So we can’t access the US version of the content for legal / contractual reasons, not technical ones.
In this case the problem is technical – Sony would have (or can probably get pretty easily) the rights to put the games on PlayStation now. Maybe not to everything (e.g. look at the range of PS1 games on the US store vs the Australian store), but certainly the majority, especially the more recent stuff. But it’s just not technically feasible here because our speeds aren’t fast enough. With movies etc it can just buffer a bit at the start and that helps smooth out any issues with less-than-optimal internet speeds. But that’s not really possible with games because of the interactivity.
It’ll do well in some places outside the USA like Japan, Korea etc – a lot of places in Asia have good internet because they have large populations in small areas. Maybe Europe as well – I’m not sure what internet is like over there?
Not really Mase; because WWE Network and Playstation Now are coming to Australia, whereas Amazon, Netflix and Hulu don’t have interest atm.
Which is for the reason Braaains said; region restrictions that restrict services like netflix and hulu because of the wide amount of content and distributers.
They will be hiding under some coats and hoping that everything works itself out.
I thought that’s what the people in charge of the FTTN were doing.
I don’t think those people actually use the internet, so they probably don’t care.
The internet is to slow to get the message to Aus in time, so they will use a camel team instead.
Hey Australia, your internet is an unfunny global joke – how about never?
I HAT YOU FOREIGNERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Complete non-issue for me. Even if I was interested in it, which I’m not. Even if I wanted to constantly stream and gobble bandwidth and slow down internet for everyone else in the house, which I also don’t want to do, I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to pay for another subscription service. Thanks but no thanks guys 😀