A tinybox for PS4

Sony announced on Monday the PlayStation Vita TV, a sub less than `10,000 game console that plays games from the PS Vita handheld on a TV. Sony’s new PlayStation Vita TV lets you play over 1,300 PlayStation Vita games on your television, essentially transforming the handheld platform into a low-cost, low-profile home game console.

But if Sony gets everything right — and that’s a big if — PS Vita TV could become much more than a low-cost alternative to high-end game consoles. It could itself become a high-end game console. As it stands, PS Vita TV is already a pretty attractive value. It’s a low-cost (9,954 yen in Japan, which will surely translate to `6500 in India) machine with a big library. In Japan, Sony has a massive collection of games on its PlayStation Network download service that will work with Vita TV right out of the box. Most of these games are from the libraries of the original PlayStation console and the PSP. Throw in the ability to play Vita native games and use video streaming services and it’s an attractive set-top box, something on the order of Apple TV or Ouya, but with all the power of PlayStation behind it.