Sony to Testify In Person Re: PSN Outage

Sony will finally be sending a high-level executive to testify before the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade on the three week outage of PlayStation Network and Sony’s slowness in informing its customers on the compromising of personal and credit card data.

Ken Johnson, an aide to subcommittee chairwoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), told The Atlantic Magazine that Tim Schaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment, would testify before the subcommittee next week:

“While Chairman Bono Mack remains critical of Sony’s initial handling of the data breaches, she also is appreciative that the company has now agreed to testify. The Chairman firmly believes that the lessons learned from…the Sony…experiences can be instructive and guide us as we develop comprehensive data protection legislation. We expect to introduce that legislation, which will provide new safeguards for American consumers, in the next few weeks.”

Previously, Sony’s Kaz Hirai had only sent his testimony in a letter to the Committee.

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Podcast notes:

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Five Dollars Gets You 55 Original Rock Band SongsFive Dollars Gets You 55 Original Rock Band Songs

If you’re into Rock Band and love the songs you’ve played, you may want to migrate them into Rock Band 2, correct? For the price of 400 Microsoft points ($4.99) you’re now able to download an export “patch” to allow exporting of 55 Rock Band songs into the next version of Rock Band.

There are a total of 58 songs in Rock Band, you can export 55 of them with the patch, left out (perhaps due to licensing issues) will be: Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills”, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

For five dollars this isn’t a bad deal, definitely worthwhile if you’re looking to have a huge library of rocking songs for Rock Band 2.

Today, we’ve learned the PlayStation 3 will get the same export feature as DLC, if you’re into the PS3 and plan to get Rock Band 2 you’re in luck. Also included in the PS3 patch, you’ll now have the ability to use your Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul Guitar with Rock Band. Excellent news.

(Thanks, 1up)

PlayStation 3, March 2009 Price Drop RumorPlayStation 3, March 2009 Price Drop Rumor

With so many people wishing Sony would cut the PS3 price to something more reasonable, it’s no big surprise we see constant rumors about potential “price cuts.” This time, a March 2009 rumor “supposedly” came out of the Sony Annual Briefing in London where a butt ton of information was “rumored” to be leaked.

The anonymous source is running around with a bunch of neat rumors, such as a LittleBigPlanet release on the PSP but the one that may hit home most with gamers is price cutting. The PS3 has been around for a few years now and hasn’t budged on the price tag; they’ve had fire sales on obsolete products (smaller disk drives mainly) but no official drops.

Sony won’t comment on speculation, of course, but we’re sure they want to catch Mr. Anonymous from hiding in their meetings and giving away their information… if it is real. D+Pad published the rumor-mongers message saying the “SCEE will be getting more competitive in price from March 2009 onwards.”

Easter would be a fine time for a price cut, if the speculation is real. This upcoming holiday would have made the most sense, to consumers, but Sony apparently has no plans to reduce the price around the time their sales will be increasing anyway. As the PlayStation 3 is doing okay in PAL territories Sony is relying on them, it would seem, to kick up the numbers and show Microsoft they’re not the only second-place game in town.

The Wii continues to dominate and we’re sure a PS3 price drop won’t impact Nintendo’s sales strategy or gamers decisions on one console versus the other as a price drop wouldn’t bring it to a competitive Wii price.

What is your magic number? What price would you buy a PS3 at if you don’t own one already. For us? Drop it a bit and throw in a free LittleBigPlanet.