Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Sonic Solutions released a new version of its high-end Blu-ray Disc production toolset, the Scenarist BD Workgroup, featuring options for encoding, authoring, debugging, and formatting premium entertainment... Read more...
Eclipse Data Technologies has added Fortium’s Patronus copy‐protection support to its premastering, glass‐mastering, and verification tools. The Fortium copy‐protection plug‐... Read more...
Berlin-based Fraunhofer Heinrich Herts Institute (HHI) demonstrated at IFA a 3D glasses-free system that goes a long way to solving the inherent problem associated with autostereoscopic method, namely... Read more...
Sharp put on display at IFA a prototype smartphone with built-in 3D cameras. Connected to a 3D TV set, the recorded pictures or videos can be watched with 3D glasses. On the smartphone itself, the content... Read more...
The ink is barely dry on 3D active shutter glasses technology that the same companies behind it are already announcing glasses-free 3D TV products. In what is likely to be a world first, Toshiba is planning... Read more...
France’s QOL, Europe’s first independent manufacturer to have moved into Blu-ray, has replicated its first 3D Blu-ray disc, commissioned by Panasonic France. 3D authoring and encoding have been performed... Read more...
Last week, for the seventh year, the UK’s communication industry regulator Ofcom published its annual 380-page “State of the Nation” opus on all facets of the domestic communication market. The ... Read more...
Disney has released a BD/PS3 combo disc that allow users to watch the original Toy Story 1 movie and play the Toy Story 3 movie-based game without swapping discs. The 'Toy Story 3 Hybrid... Read more...
Notwithstanding Blu-ray’s impressive gain – sales more than doubled in 2009 – it is not enough to compensate for declining consumer spending on DVD. HELEN DAVIS JAYALATH, Senior Analyst at Screen... Read more...
In a world first at the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, autostereoscopic technology developer Sunny Ocean Studios will showcase a 84-inch video wall offering 3D entertainment without the need for glasses... Read more...
Sales of Blu-ray players in Europe are set to reach a new record high in 2010. Around 4.6 million units will be sold in EU member states, more than doubling the previous figure (+110%), according to the... Read more...
A confidential document prepared for HADOPI, the French government agency created to monitor copyright infringement activity using a so-called ‘three-strikes’ legislation against illegal file sharers... Read more...
At a time when the home video market appears to be doomed in many countries, specially in those where piracy and/or digital usage are spreading at a rapid pace, Germany’s home video industry continues... Read more...
Cinema and audiovisual quality certification standard-setter THX has partnered with US Blu-ray testing facility BluFocus to address the challenges posed by 3D post-production. One of the biggest reported... Read more...
To get a better sense for how the world is watching video Nielsen recently completed a survey of more than 27,000 online consumers in 55 countries, asking simple questions about how they watch video... Read more...
VDC Group, the UK’s largest independent optical disc manufacturer, is to install a Blu-ray replication line, making it the first company in the country with in-house BD mastering and replication facilities... 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.
