Skip to footer

Sony spins off PlayStation and doubles down on the Internet of Things

Sony is spinning off PlayStation, one of its few profitable divisions, into its own separate company in April. It also announced its acquisition of Altair Semiconductor, which makes LTE chips for Internet-enabled devices.

|
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File
Sony announced that it will spin the PlayStation off into a separate business. Here, a PlayStation logo is seen at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, in Los Angeles, Calif. on June 17, 2015.

Electronics giant Sony has been struggling financially for a few years now. In 2014 the company sold its VAIO PC division and its mobile division lost $172 million last quarter. But Sony has also had two bright spots. One is its image sensors, which are used in Apple's iPhone and in many Chinese handsets; the other is the PlayStation video-game division, the strong sales of which allowed Sony turn a modest profit last quarter.

This week Sony announced that the PlayStation division will be spun off into its own company, called Sony Interactive Entertainment. The new company will handle PlayStation consoles and software; Sony’s subscription services such as PlayStation Vue, which lets viewers watch live TV on Playstation 3 and Playstation 4 consoles; and the PlayStation Store, which offers downloadable games. It will be headed by Andrew House, who currently runs Sony Computer Entertainment, and headquartered in San Mateo, California with $2 million in capital. Sony Interactive Entertainment will start business on April 1st .

PlayStation owners probably won’t notice too much of a change from the new company spinoff. Sony says it’s aiming to “further accelerate the growth of the PlayStation business” by developing “pioneering services and products.” In other words, this is a way for the company to devote additional attention to the successful PlayStation brand, rather than to make a major change in direction. Last November Sony announced that the Playstation 4 console had sold more than 30 million units since it launched in 2013, which is even more than 2000's wildly popular Playstation 2 had sold by the same point after its launch. 

In a separate announcement, Sony noted that it has acquired Altair Semiconductor, an Israeli chipmaker, for $212 million. Altair’s chips use low-power LTE – the same technology used in 4G cellular networks – to connect smart devices to the "Internet of Things." Most current Internet of Things devices use WiFi or Bluetooth to connect to one another, but LTE and other cellular technologies can connect a greater number of devices at once, and can use existing networks such as the 4G cellular networks that already exist in many parts of the world.

Sony’s acquisition of Altair puts the company in a better position to compete with Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia, which are working together on a cellular technology called Narrow Band-LTE, and with Vodafone and Huawei, which are working on a separate standard called Narrowband Cellular IoT. As the Internet of Things grows, Sony wants to make sure that its chips are at the heart of as many drones, smartwatches, and sensors as possible.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Sony spins off PlayStation and doubles down on the Internet of Things
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0126/Sony-spins-off-PlayStation-and-doubles-down-on-the-Internet-of-Things
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe