UPDATE, 4/22/21: IGN has reported additional details about PlayStation Plus Video Pass. The service will launch in Poland as a test, and Sony may spread the functionality for other regions later. The trial won't cost Polish PS Plus subscribers any additional money, and will run for one year.
PlayStation Video Plus will give Polish subscribers access to 21 movies and six TV shows, with new titles added every three months. The initial offerings include Baby Driver, Jumanji: The Next Level and Arrival on the movie front, in addition to the titles listed below. In terms of TV, subscribers will be able to stream Community, Future Man and Lost Girl, among other programs.
If Sony decides to expand this functionality to other regions, we'll cover the story in a new article.
ORIGINAL:
PlayStation Plus offers a number of benefits: online play, complimentary games and access to the excellent PS Plus Collection library. At the same time, neither it nor Sony’s PlayStation Now streaming service offer quite as comprehensive a service as Xbox Game Pass, which continues to gain features by the day. Still, Sony may have a new idea to make PS Plus a little more competitive: Sony PlayStation Plus Video Pass, which could hook up PS Plus subscribers with hit Sony movies.
Information comes from gaming news site VideoGamesChronicle, which caught a hastily deleted message on the official PlayStation website this morning (April 21). On the Polish version of Sony’s website, the VGC team discovered a “PlayStation plus Video Pass” logo, along with three movie posters: one for Venom, one for Zombieland: Double Tap and one for Bloodshot. All three movies come from Sony studios.
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“A new benefit available for a limited time on PlayStation Plus,” the listing read. “PS Plus Video Pass is a trial service active [April 21 to April 22]. The subscription benefit is available to PS Plus users in Poland.”
Since the listing is no longer up, and we’re already a good chunk of the way through April 21, this service doesn’t seem likely to debut today. It’s possible that Sony wanted to launch this service today, but had to push it back. It’s also possible that these were just placeholder dates, and that PS Plus Video Pass won’t come for a while — if ever.
But at the very least, the PS Plus Video Pass functionality seems clear. For at least a limited time, PS Plus Video Pass would come as part of a regular PS Plus subscription. With it, you’d be able to watch at least a handful of Sony-branded movies. How big the library would be, whether you’d get any TV shows as well, and whether you’d stream the movies or download them remains a mystery. We also don’t know whether Sony would make this service available outside of Poland. It’s possible that Poland would just be at test bed before a wider release.
The language in the post also suggests that PS Plus Video Pass might eventually spin off into its own subscription. We’re not sure how much it would cost, or whether existing PS Plus subscribers might get some kind of price break.
In any case, since the information showed up on the official PlayStation site, we can at least say that PS Plus Video Pass is something that Sony is working on — or was working on at some point.
It’s always possible that this is a scrapped project, which accidentally went up on its intended launch date.
In theory, PS Plus Video Pass could kill two birds with one stone. First, it could hook Sony subscribers up with movies after the PlayStation Video store goes dark in August. Second, it could give PlayStation Plus subscribers something that Xbox subscriptions simply don’t offer at the moment.
While Sony and Microsoft both offer a variety of online gaming and game subscription services, neither one has tried to incorporate videos. Perhaps the next “Netflix of gaming” will actually include the content that made Netflix so successful in the first place.
