Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Apple has launched an upgraded iTunes Movie Rentals, a service that lets users rent movies and watch them on their computer, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. The Apple TV 2 version delivers DVD-quality video... Read more...
US retail chain Best Buy is reported to be about to lower the price bar of Blu-ray players to $100 with $100 in BD movie vouchers... Read more...
Police have uncovered what is believed to be Australia's biggest pirated DVD operation in Melbourne. More than 250,000 DVDs and 100 DVD burners were seized from a home at Sunshine North in Melbourne's... Read more...
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So far represented in the German market by a third party, the Belgian-French media packaging group BDMO has brought in house the sales of its products and services starting 1 December 2007, with Maurice... Read more...
AGI Media has launched a new lightweight, customised packaging solution for multiple discs called DigiLite+. With the patent-protected DigiLite+, AGI says it is able to offer a fast, automated fulfilment... Read more...
In a study that tracks broadband video consumption on multiple platforms in the US, six in ten internet users watch online video content weekly in 2007, up 36% from the previous year... Read more...
DVD sales in France have been falling sharply starting three years ago, losing 35% of their value. The latest figures from the French video publishers’ association SEVN reveal that 128.3 million discs... Read more...
Illegal internet downloaders are in decline if one goes by the findings of Entertainment Media Research’s 2008 Digital Music Survey produced in association with media law firm Wiggin. Attitudes towards... Read more...
The UK has seen continued growth in its DVD market, with total year-end sales hitting a new high of 250 million units during 2007, compared with 229 million in 2006, according to data from the British... Read more...
DVD market stagnation is hitting Playboy which is closing down its DVD division to concentrate on producing content for online viewing instead... Read more...
Interested buyers for ODS’s DVD manufacturing plant at Dassow, Germany, had until yesterday to submit their bids. There are four serious "finance and strategic investors" in the running, according to... Read more...
Prices of Blu-ray players have dropped by at least 20% over the past 45 days according to a TG Daily report. The price drops affect entry level Blu-ray players including the Sharp BD-HP20U, Sony BDP-S300... Read more...
The DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C) announced that it has revised its worldwide patent licensing programme beginning 1 January 2008, which offers reduced royalty rates on certain products and additional... Read more...
British Video Association announced an unprecedented 51.7m in DVD sales to the end of September, the UK’s best ever third quarter performance, up 6.5% on that of 2007... Read more...
The discovery of a DVD factory in Greenwich will make a significant dent in the market for counterfeit DVDs across London, according to the police... 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.
