Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Total UK video entertainment sales across all platforms amounted to £1.012 billion in the first half of 2011 – down 5.7% year to date, reports the British Video Association. “Predictably, given last... Read more...
A landmark High Court judgment has ruled that BT, the UK's largest internet service provider, must block access to Newzbin2, a website which allows members to download illegally copied films and TV programmes... Read more...
Despite the growth of on-demand video and recording technologies such as the digital video recorder (DVR), the vast bulk of consumer television viewing time is still expected to be devoted to real-time... Read more...
Testronic Labs, a leader in quality assurance services across the media platforms, is to launch Testronic On-Site, a service to deliver “quality on demand” by providing A/V, disc, metadata, DRM, tape... Read more...
Circuit City is to sell its remaining patent portfolio, consisting primarily of patents developed in connection with its former Digital Video Express (DIVX) initiative, to Imaging Transfer for a cash ... Read more...
GE Global Research, the technology R&D arm of General Electric, has successfully demonstrated a micro-holographic material that can support data recording at the same speed as Blu-ray discs. This result... Read more...
Sony plans to stop shipping portable MiniDisc Walkmans from September due to shrinking demand. With the electronics manufacturer pulling the plug on Walkman cassette players last year, the generational... Read more...
US consumers purchased an estimated 1.75 million Blu-ray 3D discs during the format's first 12 months on the market, and brought home another 1.7 million units as part of hardware/software bundling deals... Read more...
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) has finally launched its digital content access UltraViolet system. Beginning this fall, consumers in the US should be able to purchase select movies... Read more...
An overwhelming majority (91%) of senior executives of media and entertainment companies admit that they are not taking full advantage of customer data that can deliver customized content, leaving them... Read more...
If 2010 was about the growth of digital retailing of movies, known as electronic sell-thru or EST, it also produced ample indication that the long-term future of online movie transactions lies in digital... Read more...
Amsterdam and Beijing-based Irdeto, a global conditional access and media security technology company, is to acquire the BD+ protection solution from Rovi Corporation. The BD+ technology, which is designed... Read more...
By 2014 consumer spend on digital content across video (including paid for online and pay TV VoD), gaming and music will reach nearly $52bn, accounting for 46% of total global spend across packaged and... Read more...
Former engineers from Toshiba and NEC, whose HD DVD format lost to Sony’s Blu-ray Disc format in the competition to develop the next-generation high-definition DVD in Japan, have been providing support... Read more...
High-end BD/DVD mastering and audio/video post production house msm-Studios produced the 3D disc version of Lichtmond, the world’s first animation music 3D Blu-ray with 7.1 + 5.1 surround sound... Read more...
Connected Blu-ray Disc players turn out to be an important driver to watch broadband-delivered premium video content in the home amongst younger viewers. In a US survey carried out for EPIX, 44% of online... 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.
