Sony's E3 press conference at last opens the curtains on its video content delivery service for the North American PlayStation Network, making digital sales and rentals from a selection of almost 300 motion pictures and over 1200 television episodes live on the PlayStation Store.  The whole video catalogue includes offerings from studios like 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and Walt Disney Studios.  Video content will be available in both standard and high definition formats, though HD video appears to limited to only rentals at the moment.

Rental rates will range $2.99 - 5.99 USD, while movies available for purchase are priced from $9.99 - 14.99 USD.  Movie rentals from the PlayStation Store have a grace period of of 14 days, but viewers will have 24 hours to finish watching a video after first beginning playback.  According to hands-on reports, file sizes for SD video downloads range from 1.5 - 2GB, and HD content is expected to occupy 5 - 8GB of hard drive space on the PlayStation 3.

Sony has leveraged tech from Marlin Digital Rights Management for protecting and managing digital content.  As expected, users will be able to transfer video downloads between the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles.  This is nice, because you will not be able to view video downloaded from the new service using Remote Play.  Users can also browse the PSN video store via PC, but any video content purchased/rented this way will be for use with the PSP.

The PSN video store will be available for Europe and Japan later this Fall.

(Image Source: PlayStation.Blog)