The Interview and the recent hack attack on Sony, got top billing at Sony’s CES’s press conference, with Sony president and CEO Kazuo praising Sony employees for their response to the attack.
Hirai noted that Sony was “the victim of one of most vicious and malicious cyberattacks in recent history” and praised Sony employees who “stood up against some of the extortionists that attacked Sony and worked tireless 24 hour a day to bring The Interview to audiences in U.S. and Canada.”
Highlighting the importance that over-the-top platforms are playing this year at CES, Hirai began discussing their products with the new PlayStation Vue Internet video service, calling it a product that “reinvents the TV experience.”
But he provided few new details on the service which will launch in the first quarter and Sony executives did not discuss pricing or channel counts.
Hirai did note that PlayStation 4 has been the fastest launch of any of their PlayStation products, selling 18.5 million consoles since launch and about 4.1 million during this year’s holiday season.
In addition, its subscription service now has 10.9 million subs.
Sony also gave Google’s new effort to push into the TV business a major boost by announcing that all of its new 2015 sets will use the Android TV platform.
In terms of its new TVs, Sony highlighted both the Android platform's ease of use and a new X1 processor in its 4K TV, which provide much better color, dynamic range and image quality.
As part of that effort Netflix chief streaming and partnership officer Greg Peters appeared on stage to say Netflix would work with Sony to deliver more High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. Earlier in the day, Peters announced a similar initiative with LG.
In addition, Sony unveiled efforts to more closely integrate audio and video technologies into the home and showed off a new 4K TV that is only 0.2 inches thick, which is thinner than the Sony smartphones.
