Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
DVDNow Kiosks, the world's largest network of independently-owned and operated DVD rental kiosks, is launching Costa Rica's first-ever DVD rental kiosks beginning this month. With Costa Rica, the company... Read more...
Beginning 1 July 2012, One-Red LLC became the authorised entity to administer a new joint DVD Disc and DVD Player license programme on behalf of its licensors - and owners - Philips, Sony, Pioneer and... Read more...
Now an annual fixture, seventeen employees from cinemas across the UK have been presented with awards totalling over £7,000 for their efforts in preventing illegal recordings taking place. Illegal... Read more...
Entertainment Distribution Company, Europe's largest independent CD and DVD replicator, is extending its reach into the Nordic region with the appointment of Steen Baunehøj Jørgensen as ... Read more...
MPEG LA, LLC announces a call for patents essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard - currently HEVC Draft 7. HEVC, also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is intended to improve video... Read more...
Anton Vickerman, 38, who set up and ran one of the world?s most visited pirate websites, surfthechannel, attracting more than 400,000 visitors per day and generating advertising revenues of at least $... Read more...
Two years in development, creative agency Livewire and printing and packaging solutions partner AGI-Shorewood have delivered their environmentally-friendly green card into the retail channel across Europe... Read more...
Total UK consumer spending during 2011 on video entertainment was £2.3 billion, representing the single biggest revenue source for the production of film and television drama in Great Britain, confirms... Read more...
ACTA, the agreement to improve the enforcement of anti-counterfeiting law internationally, was rejected by the European Parliament on Wednesday, and hence cannot become law in the EU... Read more...
Toronto-based global replicator and supply-chain service provider Cinram is to be sold to investment house Najafi Companies for an undisclosed sum. The sale involves all of Cinram's assets and businesses... Read more...
Lionsgate, one of the UK's leading independent film distributors, has joined consumer education body Industry Trust for IP Awareness to help educate consumers on the value of copyright to the UK's film... Read more...
Hiroshi Uchikoga, Founder and CEO of Tokyo-based Visionare and Co-founder of Veam Inc. in Silicon Valley will be speaking at the forthcoming London Video Rendezvous on 18 June, organised by DVD Intelligence... Read more...
At a meeting this month, the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union's ITU-R Working party 6C agreed the parameter values for the "next two generations" of TV transmission technology - the... Read more...
Dutch file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. It confirmed the attack on its Facebook page. "We're under a quite big DDoS attack. We don't know... Read more...
While DVD authoring software makes it easy to create and design template-based DVD menus, many of those templates have limitations and drawbacks that may produce a less-than-acceptable DVD menus, notes... Read more...
As video consumption increases and viewing devices vary, consumers are still using televisions most often to watch video, according to the Evolving Video Landscape study released by the Consumer... 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.
... Read More...
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.
