The head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Andrew House has claimed there is not enough consumer interest in 4K UHD discs to support the format on the new PlayStation 4 Pro.

Speaking to the Guardian after the company’s PlayStation Meeting event in New York, House said it would not be possible to add support for UHD discs in a later firmware update, but argued that such support was unnecessary.



“Our feeling is that while physical media continues to be a big part of the games business, we see a trend on video towards streaming,” he said. “Certainly with our user base, it’s the second biggest use case for people’s time on the system so we place more emphasis on that area.”

During the PlayStation Meeting, House specifically highlighted streaming video services, announcing new Netflix and YouTube apps for PS4 Pro that will provide access to UHD 4K content, including the forthcoming the Luke Cage series from Marvel, and season two of the crime drama, Narcos.

This announcement also comes five months after Sony’s launch of a streaming 4K movie service named Ultra, offering a range of films for purchase over broadband – it is not yet clear whether PS4 Pro will support the Ultra package. Moving totally away from discs would be a major change in direction. The PlayStation 3 was heavily marketed on its ability to act as a Blu-ray disc player, and the company announced heavy support for UHD movie discs as recently as November 2015, revealing a slate of major releases.

When asked if the arrival of PlayStation 4 Pro and Microsoft’s Project Scorpio heralded the end of the traditional five-to-seven year architecture lifecycle, House stated: “I think that since this is our first foray into this kind of mid-cycle innovation, it’s far too early to call that. He also refused to rule out further hardware instalments in the PlayStation 4 generation. “We think that for a really substantial period of time this is the PlayStation 4 lineup. We’re very comfortable with that.”

The veteran PlayStation executive was bullish when asked about the company’s competition. Microsoft has received a positive response to its Xbox One S machine which – for the same price as the slimline PS4 – adds 4K video capabilities, both for streaming and disc-based content. The Project Scorpio iteration, due in Winter 2017, also looks to be substantially more powerful than PS4 Pro in terms of raw technical specifications, with greater graphics performance.

House, however, pointed to the PlayStation 4’s market dominance and denied that Pro was in any way a response to Microsoft’s Project Scorpio project. “When Playstation 4 Pro was being conceived there wasn’t a word about Project Scorpio in the marketplace. I would suggest that ‘reactive’ isn’t our approach this time around,” he said.

“Lifecycles take on, at a certain point, a sense of momentum. Thanks to the efforts of great developers around the world and consumers that have placed their trust in us, we’re 40m units into this lifecycle. Our declared goal is to be a further 20m units above that by the end of next year. At that point we’ve got a pretty good sense of where the momentum of the lifecycle is, but I think the Pro can be something new, innovative and possibly take us in a slightly different direction.”

Regarding the PlayStation 4 Pro, he suggested the Xbox wasn’t even being considered its main competition. Rather, it was the PC. “I saw some data that really influenced me,” he said. “It suggested that there’s a dip mid-console lifecycle where the players who want the very best graphical experience will start to migrate to PC, because that’s obviously where it’s to be had. We wanted to keep those people within our eco-system by giving them the very best and very highest [performance quality]. So the net result of those thoughts was PlayStation 4 Pro – and, by and large, a graphical approach to game improvement.”

As for estimates on how many PlayStation 4 Pro units Sony expects to shift, or what percentage of future PS4 sales would be made up by Pro purchases, House refused to be drawn into providing figures. “Pro sales are factored into the 20m units that we’ve said we’re going to sell this year,” he stated.