Any rumors of a major change to the interface of the PlayStation 3 were erased as Eric Lempel, Director of Network Operations at Sony, told PC World that we shouldn’t expect any major firmware updates soon. He did, however, state that Sony is very interested in universal chat and that the company is currently working on this feature.
When asked about voice chat outside of games, he said, “Yeah definitely, we realize that a lot of people want that. It’s one of the most requested features, and it is something we’re looking into. It’s a very complex feature, but we are looking into it.”
The interview primarily focused on forthcoming firmware updates, rumors of major changes to the PS3 interface, and how Sony uses the PlayStation Blog to communicate with consumers.
“We’ve released a bunch of firmware updates to date, and we’ll continue to do that,” Lempel said. “We’re aiming to release them quarterly, and sometimes there are a lot of great consumer features in them, and other times they’re just updates to help things behind the scenes. I should say that a lot of times when we do these updates, there’s a ton of stuff in them for our developers, and consumers don’t see the benefits of those until they play some of those games that come out later on.”
In regards to Hulu (the online video service) apparently blocking PS3 users from watching videos in the browser, Lempel said Sony is not sure why the service does not currently work. He speculated that Hulu may have refined its list of supported browsers, and therefore PS3 users cannot stream videos through the site.