Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
UK trading standards office and local police, assisted by investigators from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) seized fake DVDs and Nintendo Wii games with street value of nearly £300,000... Read more...
A recent telephone survey of 130 US households by the Leichtman Research Group shows that 18 percent of HDTV owners think they are watching high-definition programmes, when in fact they are watching standard... Read more...
Toshiba unveiled the first Cell-powered Regza HDTV set line to hit the market. The Cell technology has been used in other hi-def technology, such as the PS3 for its super-computer-like computational capabilities... Read more...
Over 53.5 million television sets were sold around the world in the third quarter of 2008, up 6% from the same time period in 2007, according to recent research by DisplaySearch. LCD set accounted for... Read more...
Digital audio technology specialist DTS is to establish its European headquarters at the National Technology Park, at Limerick in the Republic of Ireland. The new company – DTS Licensing Limited (DLL... Read more...
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Some 77% of European notebook computer users say "they could not live" without daily access to the Internet, according to a survey by pollster YouGov, sponsored by microprocessor vendor Advanced Micro... Read more...
Following UK Treasury reduction of the Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 15%, coming into effect on Monday, to jump-start a moribund economy, high-street retailers are scrambling to do just that if today'... Read more...
New research from media analyst Screen Digest finds that DVD and its successor Blu-ray Disc are set to remain the dominant force in home entertainment throughout the economic downturn and beyond. However... Read more...
A Macrovision-sponsored online survey of US and British consumers carried out in May 2008 by Futuresource reveals that around one third of all respondents in both countries admit to making copies of pre... Read more...
Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment and MTV New Media announced they will make available Jackass 2.5, the first-ever, studio-backed feature streamed in its entirety online, free, courtesy of partner... Read more...
UK internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing... Read more...
The Motion Pictures Association and the China Film Copyright Protection Association plan to issue 200,000 refrigerator magnets bearing martial art film star Jackie Chan's image and an anti-piracy message... Read more...
NEC Electronics Corp has announced it will start sample shipments of large-scale integrated circuit chips for use in Blu-ray Disc players soon and it expects to double sales of its Blu-ray products in... Read more...
Movie rental service MovieBeam, once backed by Walt Disney, Intel and Cisco Systems, closed down last weekend. Backers invested some $50 million in the venture before selling it a year ago for $10 million... Read more...
Sony, Toshiba, Sharp and other Japanese electronic companies are to join forces to speed up the development of Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) panels... 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.
