Sony makes all kinds of electronics, televisions, video games, and movies, but it has always had a hard time encouraging it’s various divisions to cross-promote one another’s products. The company recently announced that it would be closing one such effort- it’s sole PlayStation store and the neighboring Sony Style outlet in the Metreon Center, an entertainment and shopping complex in San Francisco.
But the company is taking another stab at cross-promotion with its new fourteen-screen cinema complex that is opening this week in The Oaks shopping center in a suburb of Los Angeles. The theater will use Sony’s digital projectors. The complex will also contain a bank of the latest Sony video games, The Play Station 3, in a digital playroom.
The theater hopes to attract an upscale crowd with cash to spare. The complex also features valet parking and allows customers to take food and alcohol to the reserved seating “Premier” section of the theater, where seats will cost about $20 each.
Sony thinks that this theater is an ideal location to promote its products. Revenues from electronics and video games have slumped recently and the Sony Corporation has been trying to push each of their divisions into working together more closely to promote each others products.
Sony’s new high-resolution digital projection technology is an ideal way to show live musical events. The company is working with Live Nation to produce a series of at least six concerts, which in addition to their theatrical exhibitions will be shown on home televisions through Sony’s broadband Bravia Internet Video Link service and via the Play Station Network.
Sony also has plans to turn the release of new PlayStation games into an event; a few days before a game goes on sale in stores, fans may be able to try it out on a big screen at a movie complex like the one in Los Angeles.
Sony also hopes to increase its penetration of the digital cinema market. The company now is running a distant second behind Texas Instruments, which has its new digital cinema projectors in over 5,300 theaters. Sony claims that its new digital projectors display an image with four times as many pixels as the Texas Instruments system, resulting in sharper colors and a richer picture.
Sony’s new digital projector system cost about fifteen percent more than the Texas Instruments system does. Even so, many theaters have already committed to using the Sony system, and if the claims of its superior quality are true, other cinemas are sure to follow.
