During its Gamers Day in San Diego, Sony Computer Entertainment America has announced plans to launch its long anticipated store for the PlayStation Portable, hopefully in time for autumn this year, reports Next-Gen.

"I think the advent of a long awaited and quite frankly long overdue ability to deliver a downloadable service for the PSP will help us out a great deal," said SCEA president Jack Tretton. "Hopefully we'll have it out there by the fall."

Tretton typically didn't go in to detail concerning the service, but it is widely predicted throughout the industry that the new store will offer video downloads amongst various other virtual delights. However, there are also those questioning whether Sony has entered the downloadable multimedia market too late, particularly in light of the dominance of Apple's iTunes Store, which has sold in excess of 50 million television programmes - that's a lot of South Park episodes!

Writing in an article for tech gurus CNet last month, Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey argued that the PSP had been in an ideal position to take advantage of the market for offering video downloads and the like, duly questioning just why it hadn't happened earlier. He also suggested that the Japanese electronics firm would need to open the door to third-party formats if it wanted to flourish in the sector.

Well, it surely can't perform as underwhelmingly as the UMD format has by itself... can it?