Universal Media Disc

The Universal Media Disc was Sony’s attempt to put an optical disc in your pocket. Introduced in 2004 for the PlayStation Portable, it packed up to 1.80 GB onto a 64 mm dual-layer disc sealed inside a small plastic caddy, so you loaded the cartridge whole and never touched the disc itself. It carried PSP games, and Sony also pushed UMD Video — full-length movies and TV shows pressed for the handheld, launched in tandem with the system. For a stretch in 2005, studios pressed hundreds of films to UMD and stores stocked them next to DVDs. The disc only ever worked in one machine: the PSP, which shipped somewhere around 80 to 82.5 million units across its lifetime. That single-host dependency is the whole story of how it died.

UMD Video broke first. The discs cost about as much as a DVD but carried no extras and played on nothing but a PSP, and buyers ignored them. By March 2006 Universal and Paramount had stopped shipping UMD movie titles, Wal-Mart was pulling shelf space, and the trade press was already calling the movie format dead; film releases trailed off and ended by 2011. Games lasted longer, but the format had no escape route. When Sony built the PSP’s successor, the PlayStation Vita, it announced at GDC 2011 that UMD was gone — replaced by 2 GB and 4 GB flash game cards and digital downloads — and the Vita that launched in December 2011 had no disc drive at all. No later console ever read a UMD; the standard did not carry forward under any name. The last PSP rolled off the line on 26 September 2014, and with the only hardware that could read it discontinued, the disc had nowhere left to spin.