Sony seems to be secretly working on a all new revolutionary project and is making every effort to keep it under wraps as best they can. On December 5th, Sony officially filed a trademark protection application to protect their new project. Sony has already revealed past projects for the PS3 including an on-demand video service and PlayStation Home (which was originally leaked online before it’s announcement from a trademark protection application).
The new project seems that it will be coined "Mezone" and appears to be concerned with television and as a home entertainment system. Under the filing Sony included a number of features that may be covered by this "Mezone" including; "computer hardware, set top boxes, remote controls, and computer software and peripherals, namely audio and video receivers and transmitters and computer software programs enabling receipt, download, playing, personalized and interactive viewing, and rental of audio and video programming through the use of internet connections to computer hardware, receiver and transmitter apparatuses that connect to a television set or monitor, computer software for use in database management; computer software for uploading, manipulating, and enhancing digital content, documents, photographs, images, video, and audio; computer software for linking metadata tags with photographic and other media files to enable search engine retrieval and database software collections of files and their on-line sharing…." and this is only a small portion of the entire list as it even includes shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps, jerseys, etc.
The latter part of the list that includes clothing items definetely points toward Sony’s Home initiative but it remains to be seen how it will integrate with the newer features that have now been revealed through this application. What is yet unknown is if this will come by way of a PS3 system software update or whether it may end up being a brand new component or a redesign to the PlayStation 3 in the future.
With Home just months away, it seems more likely that this new feature set will be integrated into it on it’s release or shortly after. PlayStation 3 owners are now left with a matter of "wait and see" for Sony’s latest announcement and see if the new Mezone will be a part of it. To look over the complete trademark protection application just follow this link to Uspto.gov.