Downloadable movies coming to PS3, Wii to dispense Sour Patch Kids

X-bit Labs has a story up today that mentions a quote from Sony’s European President Phil Harrison heavily hinting that downloadable movies would be coming to the PlayStation 3. Here’s the quote;

“I think PlayStation 3 needs to stand for gaming and digital entertainment in the living room pushing the envelope of high definition, pushing the envelope of broadband, and of course that includes more than just games. We don’t have the announcements that you’re probably looking for today, but it is digital data. We have a hard drive, we have a commerce engine, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out we will have that on the network very shortly”

As he said, it isn’t tremendously difficult to deduce their plans, but the question now becomes what form those movies will appear in. With a 60GB hard drive (at best), you couldn’t hold a library of Blu-ray encoded movies, and releasing movies in less-than-high-definition would run counter to Sony’s “WE HAS TEH BLU-RAY SO WE HAS TO WIN!!!!1!” strategy. Perhaps Sony is realizing that jamming all their eggs into one basket, no matter how pretty that basket is, isn’t the best idea …