Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
In a new study, research firm SNL Kagan predicts Blu-ray will be the driving force in the market throughout the next decade, but it will ultimately be overtaken by video-on-demand-services... Read more...
Falling DVD sales threaten to cut down profit for studio owners Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom and News Corp., and may force them to write down the value of movies, analysts told Bloomberg... Read more...
Pioneer is planning to exit the television market due to the downturn in the economy, according to Japan's Nikkei newspaper... Read more...
The new year has brought a host of new employees to Shorewood.blueprint – the new company recently formed by Shorewood Packaging and Blueprint Media... Read more...
While few home network users currently have permanent connections between theircConsumer electronics devices and their home networks, those that do most commonly connect their game console, reports In... Read more...
David Bishop, President, Worldwide, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, will make the opening keynote speech at this year’s Digital Entertainment conference, organised by Screen Digest, taking place in... Read more...
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A state-of-the-art vending machine being deployed across the UK and Ireland is showing that for some businesses, the credit-crunch represents a window of opportunity... Read more...
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According to GFK International, video game sales reached $32 billion last year, with movie sales close behind with $29 billion - rentals not included. Video games accounted for 53% of the home entertainment... Read more...
UK trading standards officers are sending out the message crime does not pay following a Crown Court decision to jail and deport a Chinese national and strip him of assets to the value of more than £... Read more...
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has opened a Blu-ray Disc manufacturing plant in China with a production capacity of half a million discs a month for domestic and international markets... Read more...
According to the latest data released by the French video publishers association, SEVN, 2008 DVD sales revenues fell 7.5% to €1.38bn. Sales volumes dropped 5.5%. Over the past four years, the DVD market... Read more...
Philips breaks new ground in the realm of home entertainment with the world’s first ‘cinema-proportioned’ LCD television – Cinema 21:9... Read more...
Back to business!
Even though our website activities were on the back burner for over a year while we reshaped our operations, professionals from nearly 50 countries have kept logging in to tap into fifteen years of archives that uniquely chronicle the birth, the life, but not yet the death, of packaged media.
Though our service brief has been including coverage of new content delivery channels for several years, there is still enough activity on the DVD and Blu-ray Disc front – globally – on which to focus our reporting energy, especially as 4K UHD seems to be gathering pace.
While our company, Globalcom Ltd, remains based in the UK, we are running the website afresh from South Korea! Always looking for new challenges and a desire to share widely the knowledge gained, I took up a faculty position at Hannam University’s Linton School of Global Business (in Daejeon) where I teach globalization and communication technology courses.
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TECHNICOLOR has posted its results for the full year 2016. Group revenues increased by 34.8% at constant currency, reflecting the change in scale of Connected Home and Entertainment Services. The two segments combined recorded revenue growth of 48.2% year-on-year at constant rate resulting from the contribution of the acquisitions completed in 2015 and double digit organic growth in Production Services activities.
VODAFONE SPAIN is launching a new 4K TV service with 5 TV channels (10 by year end ) and VoD content for subscribers with convergent packages, like Vodafone One. The five new channels are Odisea 4K, Festival 4K, FunBox UHD, Insight TV and Slow Channel – and one 4K transmission of the best football match of La Liga every week. The company will be the first in the country to offer 4K VoD content with 850 titles including films, TV series and documentaries.
APPLE will make its first forays into original content in the “next few months”, according to Eddy Cue, the company’s SVP of internet software and services. Speaking at the Code Media conference in California, Cue revealed that Carpool Karaoke and Planet Of The Apps will become available “in most countries in the world” on Apple TV. Mac and iOS devices as part of Apple Music, the company’s subscription music offering.
MPEG LA ANNOUNCED that several patent owners in MPEG LA’s AVC Patent Portfolio License have filed patent enforcement actions in the Landgericht Düsseldorf, Germany, against both Huawei Technologies Deutschland GmbH and ZTE Deutschland GmbH for infringing patents essential to the AVC/H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) digital video coding standard used in mobile devices and other products. According to the complaints, Huawei and ZTE offer mobile phone products in Germany, which use patent-protected AVC methods without licenses with the individual patent holders or a portfolio license that includes these patents offered by MPEG LA. The suits seek monetary damages and injunctions.
DELUXE is to close its UK restoration operation at the end of March with the potential loss of 12 jobs.Recent projects worked on include the nine surviving silent Alfred Hitchcock films for the BFI. In 2015, the department won the Best Archive Restoration award at the 2015 Focal International Awards for its work on Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection for Arrow Films. The division was formed in 2011 through the merger of Deluxe Digital London (DDL) and Deluxe 142’s restoration operations following Deluxe’s acquisition of Ascent Media. Deluxe said it would maintain its restoration facilities in Madrid, Spain and Los Angeles, US.
MOBILE and desktop video consumption are running virtually neck-and-neck, with 86% of consumers saying they watch video on smartphones and other mobile devices, compared to 70% on desktops, AOL found in a fresh study that tracked usage trends across seven global regions. Additionally, 57% of consumers watch videos on a mobile phone every day, compared to 58% on desktops and laptops.
