While confirmation of the Playstation 3 price drop and news of a new 80GB PS3 pack with Motorstorm included sucked up most of the attention this morning, there was one other thing mentioned by Sony today.

N'Gai Croal points out that the company also announced that they have a new video download service in the works that will let PS3 owners get movies and TV shows, much like what Xbox 360 owners can do. This new service, I suspect, is part of the download service for the Playstation Portable that Sony has been working on for more than a year. Croal says that he hears that while it will be announced at E3, it won't be unveiled, mostly because SCE Japan is still working on finalizing the guts of the service.

Croal had a phoner with SCEA head honcho Jack Tretton recently, talking about the price cut and how it fits into Sony's console history. Most notable, to all of your PS3 naysayers out there, is that SCEA cut the price of the PS2 eight months after launch, and this round is cutting the price of the PS3 seven months after launch. So it's not that shocking.

Tretton does a good job of explaining why both the PS1 and PS3 received early price drops, while the PS2 didn't"

When we talked about the original PlayStation to consumers, you're talking about a great gaming experience; CD-based technology; and oh, by the way, it also plays audio CDs. Once you digest that, what you see is what you get. In the case of the PlayStation 2, you had backwards compatibility factored in there, and you had DVD playback, which was certainly of great value, but again, a fairly simple message to understand. But when you're talking about Playstation 3, you've got the Blu-Ray movie player, which is obviously a new technology and something that people haven't fully grasped yet, although I think it's making great progress in the last six or seven months since Playstation 3's advent. You've got the hard disk drive built in with every device and the benefits that brings; but that's not something that consumers have ever had in a gaming system before, built in. You've got the implications of what the Blu-Ray drive does for gaming and the 50 of storage capacity. And last, but clearly not least, you've got all the downloadable content implications that the device gives you in terms of music, video, digital pictures.

These are things that I think people are fairly familiar with in a PC, but not necessarily familiar with and appreciative of in a gaming device. Like I said, if you digest all that, that's a tremendous value at $599. But if you look at it as just a gaming machine, it's a very expensive gaming machine.

Tretton goes on to talk abut the split between the 60GB and 80 GB models in terms of supply, 360 hardware problems and the Wii's impact on the PS3.

Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton Chats With Level Up About the PS3 Price Cut, Its Slow Sales, And the Xbox 360's Hardware Woes [Newsweek]

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