Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
As DVD revenues begin to slow, Hollywood studios are looking to online video as a platform for incremental growth. Though currently in its infancy, by 2011 the online video market will have a retail value... Read more...
Following its recent move to new offices in Soho (London) within Goldcrest Postproduction facilities, high-end DVD design and production house The Pavement is launching two new Blu-ray services – Blu... Read more...
Panasonic announced that its DMP-BD30 BD player was shipped into the US market in time for this year's 'Black Friday.' This is the first player to incorporate Final Standard Profile 1.1 - a supplementary... Read more...
Pioneer claims to have developed read-only disc media with 16 layers offering a total capacity of 400 GB... Read more...
Europe's first independent replicator to install HD DVD pressing lines, QOL is also now the first French company to have a Blu-ray Disc replication line up and running... Read more...
Retec Digital Plc, one of the England’s largest providers of guided-selling solutions, has developed a digital-movie-download kiosk with media distributor Porto Media... Read more...
This month, Sony began selling in Japan the world's first television for the commercial market with an organic light-emitting diode display, or OLED. The 11-inch display on the TV called XEL-1 measures... Read more...
HD technology has reached a tipping point in Europe, with take-up across the region accelerating rapidly. But a large HD content gap will remain in 2012 with a majority of Europeans still watching standard... Read more...
US elecronics distributors PC Rush has placed an order for 10,000 of New Medium Enterprise’s 1080p HD VMD red laser-based multilayer players with a view to starting sales through their E-commerce site... Read more...
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is establishing a task force to define the parameters of a stereoscopic 3-D mastering standard for content viewed in the home... Read more...
Sony DADC announced recently that GamersGate, an online retailer of downloadable PC games, has selected its SecuROM product activation as the digital rights management (DRM) for its line-up of downloadable... Read more...
At a recent BDA press conference in Beijing, Sony DADC announced the start of Blu-ray Disc production in China and Australia. According to the group’s president, Dieter Daum, facility expansion at the... Read more...
Toronto police say they have shut down a sophisticated illegal DVD operation that was copying and distributing thousands of pirated movies, including some still being shown in theatres... Read more...
To support European market, where the HD household penetration is significantly lower than in the US and in Japan, Sony has decided to launch the BASE project – Blu-ray Authoring and Solution Europe... Read more...
Original Video, the UK’s only manufacturer of DVD vending machine – rental kiosks – has recently secured a £125,000 private investment to launch their company-owned units into outlets nationwide... Read more...
Trondheim Solistene's Divertimenti, released by Norwegian music label 2L, is the first record to combine a hybrid SACD with a Blu-ray "music only" disc in the same package... 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.
