Of course it's by Tiger, most of what they made was underwhelming. Although I could actually see an intended market for the VideoNow, it's a cheap durable video player for toddlers. If you were a parent and didn't want to give something fragile and expensive to a toddler, this was an option. Something like the PSP was expensive and fragile if dropped.
So much has changed by today, giving a small toddler a tablet or an old smartphone is pretty common. Something with a decent screen resolution isn't extremely expensive.
Are you going to focus on morals or acknowledge what happened in reality? In reality, back when the PSP was still available new(around 10-15 years ago) most people just bought it to mod as a portable emulation system. The hardware sold very well, the games generally didn't. Look back to early youtube reviews on the PSP, plenty of people brought up how great it is for emulation, but commented how it was otherwise underwhelming compared to the GBA and DS. If you were just buying a portable system for the exclusive games, get a Nintendo system instead.
I was in high school when it launched, and mostly saw it used in college. When it first launched a few early adopters were playing actual PSP games. Over the next few years people were mostly playing old SNES games like Super Metroid on it. As for playing PS1 games, most people back then would back up games they already owned rather than just download everything as bandwidth was limited and much slower back then. Plus PS1 games were dirt cheap as the PS2 was still popular with the PS3 just released. With emulating in general, people would download ROMs as most people lacked the hardware to backup their own games, and they weren't available for sale anyway in any official capacity at the time. This was all before the Virtual Console existed and old PC games were considered abandonware, they only became available for sale again because so much demand was shown for these old titles that were already long out of print and otherwise unavailable.
I remember youtube videos showing off the PSP running LucasArts adventure games with ScummVM, or emulating TurboDuo games like Rondo of Blood before the official PSP release was available. The hardware looked impressive for homebrew at the time. I don't recall many people pirating PSP games, most people would just use it for emulating other systems. When I saw people playing the system in public like on a bus, it was all emulation. If the system was limited to just legitimate PSP games and no emulation was possible, the system wouldn't have sold well. Nintendo was just better with games at the time.
All that pops in to my head when I think of UMDs is seeing a shopping cart full of UMD movies and TV shows at Fry's Electronics near the register with a sign saying "all UMDs $1 each". I went back to that store a week later and the volume in the cart wasn't all that much lower.
I bought them back at launch and was pretty amazed by the video quality. I remember watching Spiderman and Underworld: Evolution on it. The packaging looked great imo, I really liked the cases. Some films were advertised as having extra features not on the DVD.
Back before piracy, games on the PSP actually sold well. No one bought games when they could get them for free because it was so easy to pirate games. Take a look at Liberty City Stories then look at Vice City Stories. You could argue that Liberty City Stories sold because it included a save data hack, but, Vice City stories also sold over five million. The original Dissidia sold two million. There were a lot of games that sold well, but the more it became easier to add CFW to the system, the less and less games sold and the less developers wanted to even release anything to the system in the west. JP they still did as Japanese still bought games.
We could probably argue that the Vita despite not being hacked until very very very late in its life, years, didn't receive support because developers were afraid their sales would be lost due to CFW.
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To be on topic though, I don't watch portables to watch anything. To me it's a novelty and nothing more. If I do watch anything on my phone it's only because I'm somewhere with nothing to do and have my phone on me or I'm in the bathroom. If I need to look up anything I'll do it on my PC. I have like, six apps on my home page, everything else is pre installed.
From what I could find online, The PSP launched in North America in March 2005. The PSP was first hacked in May 2005. Within a few months of that homebrew and piracy was already possible and happening. There were various ways to run unsigned code from that point on but custom firmware was available by July 2006. It's not like piracy wasn't possible for a long time, the system was cracked wide open almost immediately after launch.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PSP/Homebrew_History