Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Three further companies have signed up to be sponsors of the 2013 British Video Association Awards, to be held at London's Old Billingsgate on 2 May. Freeform.London and The Walt Disney Company have signed... Read more...
Inventor of the audio cassette and co-inventor of the CD and DVD, Dutch electronics giant Philips is selling its Lifestyle Entertainment business - Audio, Video, Multimedia and Accessories dvisons - to... Read more...
Optical disc replicator Cinram has joined the One-Blue Blu-ray Disc product licensing programme as a licensee. Cinram signed a BD-ROM Movie Disc and/or Data Disc License Agreement that grants the company... Read more...
A new video coding standard building on the ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, just agreed by members of the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU), aims to ease the burden on global networks... Read more...
Following in the footsteps of HMV in the UK, Virgin France declared insolvency and is set to close 26 stores in France, including its flagship store on Paris' Champs-Elysées boulevard that accounts... Read more...
Augsburg, Germany-based hardware and software solutions provider Silicon Philosophies has acquired the Cinema Craft product line from Japanese developer Custom Technology Corporation, for whom they have... Read more...
DVD-Video had a lot going for it. Sadly, all good things come to an end, and DVD is rapidly being discarded in favour of online distribution to web-connected and mobile devices. For content owners and... Read more...
Amongst the topics explored in its latest Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2013, consultancy Deloitte examines 4K television. The analyst reckons that it may be 18-36 months... Read more...
Total worldwide consumer spending on movies in 2012 reached $62.4 billion, up from $61.1 billion in 2011 and $60.1 billion in 2010, according to an IHS Screen Digest Cross Platform Movie Market Monitor... Read more...
The French market for packaged and online video entertainment was worth €1,317 million in 2012 - a fall of 5% over 2011 - according to figures from GfK and members of the French video publishers ... Read more...
Barely 48 hours after the UK's largest high street CD/DVD/BD retailer HMV began bankruptcy procedures, it is the turn of video rental specialist Blockbuster UK to call in the administrators... Read more...
Innovation within the TV displays business shows no sign of stopping, despite saturation in many of Europe's leading markets. DAVID WATKINS, Research Consultant at Futuresource Consulting, assesses the... Read more...
Multi-platform quality assurance services provider Testronic has upgraded its File-Based QC Lab to provide UltraViolet Interoperability Testing capabilities and related test automation services, including... Read more...
Rovi's DivX digital rights management used with the company's adaptive streaming format, has been approved by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE, of which ROVI is a fonding member) for ... Read more...
Utah-based Millenniata announced it will offer Blu-ray M-DISCs in the second quarter of 2013, increasing both the storage capacity and the accessibility of the DVD M-DISC. The technology guarantee data... Read more...
Resilience, adaptability and innovative delivery channels characterised the home entertainment industry in 2012, tells Digital Entertainment Group figures. Total consumer spending on home entertainment... 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.
