Sony and NTT partner to take the PS2 online

Sony Corporation and Japanese telecommunications leader Nippon Telegraph and Telephone have officially announced their intentions to bring broadband gaming and entertainment content to Japanese owners of the PlayStation 2. The new service, which will begin in April, will provide Japanese consumers with online games, financial productivity tools, and forms of entertainment such as music, television, and movies. Earlier this year, the two companies partnered to launch an experimental project aimed at providing on-demand entertainment content that is streamed over NTT's fiber-optic cables. The PS2 service, to be launched next year, will also use asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL). As of September, there were more than 350,000 subscribers in Japan with ADSL lines, up sharply from 70,000 in May.

Sony has similar announcements planned for markets such as North America and Europe for early next year. At E3 this year, the company announced partnerships with AOL Time Warner, Macromedia, Real Networks, and Cisco to offer various applications for its PS2 network service. Sony has shipped 23 million PlayStation 2 units worldwide to date and recently announced that it has sold more than 6 million units of the console in North America alone.