Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Matsushita Electric will provide technical support to China HuaLu Group and China Film Group as they jointly announced the establishment of a Blu-ray authoring center in China. The center initially will... Read more...
Belgium custom officials have seized 50,000 DVDs of Indian films worth Rs16.5 million (€246,000) at Brussels airport. The custom officials in the Belgium capital, acting on a tip-off by the Shemaroo... Read more...
CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two Taiwan-based producers of optical discs, as well as Prodisc Technology, a second-tier maker, are unwilling to invest in large-scale production of either Blu-ray Disc... Read more...
A man working in an illegal DVD ‘warehouse’ in London, is behind bars after the court heard that 36,000 pirate and 7,000 hardcore pornographic DVDs were found there... Read more...
The home video industry’s two most widely supported trade groups – The Digital Entertainment Group Europe and Hollywood-based Digital Entertainment Group of North America – announced the formation... Read more...
Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which represents manufacturers, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, which oversees copyright entities, agreed to impose... Read more...
At the IFA in Berlin, LG and Samsung demonstrated their dual-format HD players capable of playing both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats... Read more...
The European Commission has recommended that a forum be established to determine the future of private copying levies. Some 21 of the European Union’s 27 countries impose surcharges on equipment that... Read more...
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Dutch police has dismantled an illegal DVD manufacturing plant factory in Velddriel, southeast of Amsterdam, after raiding it last week... Read more...
While the third quarter of each year is traditionally an off-peak period for blank disc makers, the third quarter of 2008 will potentially see makers facing an additional negative impact as polycarbonate... Read more...
At Berlin's DVD Forum Europe 2007 conference, the DVD Forum pointed out that it is the preliminary version 1.9 of Toshiba’s 51GB triple-layer HD DVD (read only) disc that the organisation has just agreed... Read more...
Opendisc has become the first certified anti-piracy site for content protection and security of digitally downloaded music and other copyrighted material to its customer base, according to the Content... Read more...
"Failure to alter strategy would open up Blu-ray to a possible upset defeat at the hands of HD DVD," says Forrester Research analyst J P Gownder in an interview with Reuters... Read more...
Following an investigation by the U.S. International Trade Commission, Sony, Sanyo Electric, Exceed Perseverance Electronic and Lucky Light Electronics, have agreed to license patents owned by a Columbia... Read more...
At its DVD Forum Europe 2007 conference in Berlin last week, the DVD Forum said it will have agreed the specifications for the recording of HD DVD Video content on red laser DVD disc by the end of the... Read more...
Italian packaging manufacturer Pozzoli and US-based Multi Packaging Solutions have entered into a strategic partnership to cross license, co-develop, and market their respective products and technologies... 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.
