Sony's thousands of PS3 kiosks: Now that's a launch plan!

In contrast to the dead marketing plans of Microsoft Live, Gamepro.com has a great writeup on 24 details on Sony's new Playstation 3 (reprinted at MacWorld.com as well). Now I've complained that Sony is botching its launch plan by pre-announcing too many details, but a few of the details revealed here show that Sony hasn't lost its marketing mojo. Specifically:

15,000 [Playstation 3] kiosks across the nation by the end of November

Sony is doing a huge retail rollout of their newfangled system, and these units will be networked to provide updates and new content when necessary. Phil Harrison says that the days of promo discs inside these units is pretty much over. No more physical distribution hassles; new demos can be deployed nationwide in a matter of hours, securely, without assistance by us mere mortals. An elimination of demo discs also means more space on the delivery truck for things that can actually be sold, rather than being dedicated to promotional material. Also, the kiosks will use Sony Bravia HDTVs, which we understand are rather sexy.

There were a lot of other lovely little marketing touches, such as the built-in power supply (no XBox 360 power bricks), the touch-sensitive controls, and the bundled Blu-ray movies. And Sony's ability to promote two products -- both the PS3 and the Bravia LCD flat-panel TVs -- in one display is a nice little branding bonus. But the fact that there will be 15,000 self-updating kiosks out deployed pushing PS3 by the beginning of December shows that Sony will have the infrastructure to aggressively promote the machine as production ramps up. And that bodes well for sales after the Christmas holiday rush.

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