Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
CMC Magnetics will not start commercial production of blank Blu-ray discs until the global BD market emerges to a greater extent, according to company chairman, Robert Wong, who reckons the global BD ... Read more...
MPEG LA has sued Opta Corporation and its subsidiary Opta Systems, formerly doing business as GoVideo, for breach of Opta Systems' MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License and 1394 Patent Portfolio License (Contracts... Read more...
Four pirate CD traders were today convicted for running a £5 million illegal operation that imported copyright-infringing CDs from the Czech Republic and sold them in shops and stalls across South East... Read more...
A husband and wife who owned a video store in Merseyside, UK, have been sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court for offences relating to the manufacture, distribution and sale of counterfeit DVDs, music CDs... Read more...
Multi-industry home entertainment media organization the Digital Entertainment Group said it is developing a multifaceted campaign featuring consumer education, retail training and public relations programs... Read more...
Rimage announced its on-demand digital publishing systems will support the Qflix technology licensing and certification programme based on the recently approved industry specifications for securely recording... Read more...
DivX Inc. has announced the DivX certification of an upcoming Panasonic-brand Blu-ray Disc player scheduled to begin shipping in March in Europe and Russia. It is the first such BD player... Read more...
SEVN, the association of French video publishers on DVD and online, is calling for a shortening of the theatrical window. The Chronologie des médias law currently imposes an exclusivity window of six... Read more...
At the latest DVD Forum Steering Committee all HD DVD topics were removed from the agenda, according to documents released from the meeting, but the committee is still spending time discussing the Chinese... Read more...
harp plans to launch a Blu-ray recorder with a 1-terabyte hard drive. Capable of recording 127 hours of high-definition digital programming, the 1TB model will go on sale 1 December in Japan for about... Read more...
"Dramatic increases in online piracy in Europe and elsewhere threaten our industry’s growth," the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) reported in a filing submitted last week to the U.S. Trade ... Read more...
While supply of components for use in half-height DVD burners has been running tight since the second quarter of this year, shortages have now extended to the DVD-ROM and slim DVD burner segments, according... Read more...
Gorden Noel Cullen from Wirral, North Wales, is the latest counterfeiter to be sentenced as a result of 'Operation Buzzard', a joint enforcement operation involving Trading Standards Departments, North... Read more...
Taiwan's IPR Police, in collaboration with the Taiwan Foundation Against Copyrights Theft (TFACT), representing the Motion Picture Association (MPA), raided a pirated DVD rental shop in Kaoshiung City... Read more...
Twenty-one percent of UK respondents to a survey released by Entertainment Media Research says they play PC games offline, 20% play PC games online, 17% play handheld games, and only 12% play console ... Read more...
Verbatim, the storage media specialist, introduces recordable and rewritable 8cm Mini Blu-ray media (BD-R/BD-RE) for video recording in high definition for Blu-ray camcorder users to the European market... 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.
