Sony Ships 50 Million PSPs Worldwide

50 million PSP units have been sold-in worldwide as of January, Sony  Computer Entertainment said today. Sell-in is the number of units sold to retailers, while sell-through refers to the amount sold at retail to consumers.

Sony’s handheld system, which debuted in Japan in December 2004, North America in March 2005, and September 2005 in Europe, began as a jack-of-all trades device. Consumers could buy games and movies on Universal Media Discs and take them anywhere. Ultimately UMD movies failed, and Sony has perplexingly not come up with a solution for customers the masses to get movies on PSPs, despite its Wi-Fi and Memory Stick capabilities.

To Sony’s credit, it has opened its PlayStation Store up on PSP since its release. Consumers can now download classic PlayStation and PSP titles directly to the handheld. While consumers can obtain movies and TV shows for PSP via a PC or PlayStation 3 download, they are still required to attach their PSPs to the respective device to get the video onto the handheld.

PSP’s only other competitor, Nintendo’s DS, has an installed base of 96 million worldwide, according to Nintendo numbers.