Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
“The Blu-ray Disc Academy forum, with its unique emphasis on live demonstration of advanced BD features, BD-Live and 3D BD, is striking a cord with the industry,” says Jean-Luc Renaud Forum Director... Read more...
The 100-member DVD Forum behind the creation of the DVD standard – and of the ill-fated HD DVD format – is seeking to redefine its future now that the maturing DVD has grown into today’s global $... Read more...
The British Video Association honoured the cream of home entertainment at a glittering 30th Anniversary Awards ceremony in London, presented by high-flying comedian Alun Cochrane, which attracted more... Read more...
A technical working group formed by members of the China High-definition Disc Industry Promotion Association (CHDIA), which promotes the development of the home-grown blue-laser standard China Blue High... Read more...
Blu-ray Disc software sales in the US continued to rise in the first quarter of 2010, up 74% compared to the same period last year. Some 34 million BD discs shipped to retail, according to figures compiled... Read more...
London-based Eyeframe is the UK’s first authoring and production facility to have acquired sofatronic’ Kaleidoscope platform to power interactive BD-J features for Blu-ray titles... Read more...
Leading independent replicator MPO France has beefed up its Blu-ray production capability with the installation of a CrystalLine Blu-ray Disc Mastering system from Singulus. The final acceptance test ... Read more...
AGI, a leading packaging solutions provider, has scooped a prestigious international award from one of the world’s leading health and safety organisations. The British Safety Council’s International... Read more...
The MEDIA-TECH Association has announced important changes to the roles and duties of the Executive Board and Advisory Board. After a members' meeting held in Germany, a new chairman and vice chairman... Read more...
Prague-based authoring and production facility Brickbox Digital Media has acquired what it describes as a significant stake in International Digital Management (IDM), based in Los Angeles and Sofia, Bulgaria... Read more...
New sales figures released by the British Video Association using data from the Official Charts Company reveal healthy year on year growth for the home entertainment market based on data for the first... Read more...
Sonic Solutions announced 3DAccess, a programme that provides professional authoring facilities with the tools and knowledge required to prepare 3D premium video entertainment for distribution on Blu-... Read more...
Contracting DVD, collapsing CD sales and razor-thin margins are taking their toll on media packaging suppliers. The latest victim is Uden, Netherlands-based Lithorade Packaging Solutions BV which last... Read more...
Stockholm, Sweden-based JakeBox AB, a creator and licensor of environmentally-friendly media packaging, has won the Austrian packaging design award 'The Golden Venus' for a box concept used by music label... Read more...
Augmented reality is an emerging technology that uses handheld devices to superimpose digital data on the real world: If, say, you’re in Paris and point your phone at the Eiffel Tower, the tower’s... Read more...
Sony Creative Software has announced Blu-print 6 Blu-ray Disc authoring application and the brand-new Z Depth 3D subtitle offset editing application. As one of the first professional 3D Blu-ray Disc authoring... 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.
