Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics has revealed that it will focus on 3D TV and smart TV sales in the Middle East in order to strengthen its dominant presence in the large emerging market... Read more...
Testronic Labs, the global leader in quality assurance services for film and television, games, websites, hardware, and software, announced its membership of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem... Read more...
Kaleidescape, the leading supplier of high-end home media servers, has lost its case brought by the DVD Copy Control Association. After a four-week trial that commenced on 14 November 2011, a California... Read more...
Driven by strong increases in emerging markets, global consumer spending on movies is expected to rise for six consecutive years, expanding from $61.4 billion in 2010 to $68.9 billion in 2015, according... Read more...
Self-service DVD/Blu-ray rental kiosk Redbox achieved an entertainment milestone last weekend, crossing the two billion mark for movie and game rentals. The two billionth disc, Drive, was rented... Read more...
Walmart, the USA's largest home entertainment retailer, has partnered with five Hollywood studios to offer a disc-to-digital service to its customers via VUDU, the video streaming operation the giant ... Read more...
Multi-platform quality assurance services supplier Testronic Labs has announced the completion of an expansion of their central London facility. The bigger footprint at the Testronic Borough High Street... Read more...
The UK government has been given the green light to the implement of a French HADOPI-style measure contained in the Digital Economy Act after the final legal challenge by BT and Talk Talk was thrown out... Read more...
SeeFront, leading developer of proprietary glasses-free 3D technology has teamed up with Tobii Technology, global leader in eye-tracking and gaze interaction, to develop a glasses-free 3D version of the... Read more...
If you thought buying a movie on a DVD or Blu-ray disc or online was simple, straight-forward and took care of your viewing needs, think again... Read more...
Last week, the BD4C Licensing Group has changed its name to PREMIER BD. The group offers a worldwide portfolio of license for Blu-ray and DVD patents essential "to make, use and sell BD decoders, BD encoders... Read more...
Leading optical disc manufacturing machine maker Singulus Technologies delivered the first production system for rewritable Blu-ray discs (BD-R/BD-RE) to Asia. The replication line - called BLULINE BD... Read more...
While Technicolor Group's 2011 revenues dipped 3.5% €3,450 million from €3,574 million in 2010, the Entertainment Services division - digital production and DVD/BD replication - had a record... Read more...
UltraViolet, the cloud-based digital-locker controlled movie delivery system, has achieved a milestone of 800,000 household accounts in the United States, according to the IHS Screen Digest U.S. Video... Read more...
Two years after the HADOPI agency started to crack down on digital piracy in France, with the threat of cutting off the Internet access of repeat offenders, research shows that the appeal of piracy is... Read more...
MPEG LA announces the availability of the MVC Patent Portfolio License. The joint license includes patents that are essential to the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) standard for encoding and decoding 3D ... 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.
