Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
A new IBM study of the media and entertainment market reveals that, as consumers adopt an increasing number of digital devices, four distinct new "digital personalities" are emerging. This shift is compelling... Read more...
Renesas Electronics, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, will incorporate Rovi's DivX Plus Streaming technology into its integrated circuit for connected home entertainment devices... Read more...
London Video Rendezvous - created by DVD Intelligence - is a new event aimed at addressing concrete, practical issues and concerns the authoring/post-production houses, their client publishers and independent... Read more...
Rimage, a leader in secure digital content management and delivery solutions, has launched its Blu Lock anti-rip copy protection technology for Blu-ray Discs at Las Vegas' NAB. The system integrates directly... Read more...
If one goes by Redbox movie-rental kiosk parent Coinstar's quarterly results, the announcement of the death of the disc is premature. Fueled by strong rentals over the past two months, the Bellevue, Washington... Read more...
KIT Digital founder Kaleil Isaza Tuzman has stepped down as chairman of the company - a leading global provider of video asset management solutions for multi-screen IP-based delivery - just days after... Read more...
hVault, a supplier of holographic digital data storage solutions, is setting up a company to develop and market what it claims to be the first commercially available archive systems based on holographic... Read more...
Dolby Laboratories and Philips have unveiled Dolby 3D, a 3D HD format and suite of technologies designed to enable broadcasters, operators, content aggregators, and hardware manufacturers to deliver HD... Read more...
The Pavement, the award-winning London-based creative studio - is the first Blu-ray/DVD authoring facility in the UK to license ZOO Digital's ICE software, for the creation of iTunes Extras and iTunes... Read more...
Giant supermarket chain Wal-Mart launched its UltraViolet-compatible, VUDU-based disc-to-digital service in earnest yesterday when it made 4,000 movie titles available for cloud-based conversion... Read more...
Last year, combined online video and TV VOD totalled more than 10% of video revenue in Europe, but the video market in the region remains driven by the packaged media business. TONY GUNNARSSON, from IHS... Read more...
German optical disc replication machine maker Singulus reported sales of $210m for the financial year 2011, translating into a 33.2% increase over the previous year ($157m... Read more...
Sony DADC has announced plans to construct a new, bigger UK distribution centre on the original site in Enfield, North London, where the company's national distribution hub was completely destroyed by... Read more...
Presenting the 2012 UK Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has announced plans to introduce tax relief for three of the UK's key creative industries from April 2013 - animation, video... Read more...
US audiences will pay to consume more movies online in 2012 than they will on physical video formats, marking the first year that legal, Internet-delivered movies will outstrip those of DVDs and Blu-ray... Read more...
Piracy must have crowd-pulling marketing power if one goes by Sony Pictures' latest release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which looks like a burned bootleg DVD-R copy with the movie's title... 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.
