Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Earlier this month, South Korean DVD distributors and consumer electronics companies launched the Blu-ray Film Festival next to the venue of the annual Pusan Film Festival, an event supported by the Blu... Read more...
Following an intelligence-led operation, a large pirate DVD factory was raided last week in a 3-bedroom house in south east London by the Safer Neighbourhoods Team and Federation Against Copyright Threats... Read more...
Just one month after obtaining certification from the Blu-ray Disc Association for single-layer BD25 production, French independent replicator MPO has just been certified to manufacture double-layer Blu... Read more...
At a briefing in Hamburg on the upcoming CeBIT computing show in March, Toshiba repeated its commitment to HD-DVD, which suffered a bad hit earlier this month with the Hollywood studio Warner abandoning... Read more...
Recently, the US Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (S. 2235) which would create an Intellectual Property enforcement "czar" within the administration... Read more...
Swedish equipment manufacturer M2 Engineering AB is completing this month the restructuring of its operations initiated last April in response to the continued slowdown in the demand for optical media... Read more...
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Mempile has claimed to be addressing tomorrow's archival storage needs with its TeraDisc technology that can store one terabyte (TB) of data on a single DVD-sized optical disc, and with a roadmap of up... Read more...
Swedish replication tool maker M2 Engineering has sold multiple CD and DVD replication lines to the VDC Group, the UK’s largest independent optical disc manufacturer... Read more...
In the shadow of the blows taken recently by the HD DVD camp, MPEG LA is still working on a joint HD DVD patent licence, and has expanded its call for "patents essential to the implementation of the HD... Read more...
The District Court Düsseldorf, Germany recently pronounced 12 verdicts finding that Greek DVD disc manufacturer Odeon Cineplex SA has infringed certain MPEG-2 patents as a result of Odeon’s manufacture... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises, developer of the high-definition versatile multilayer disc (HD VMD), the red laser-based hi-def disc format alternative to blue-laser HD DVD and Blu-ray, demonstrated the first... Read more...
Just in time for the start of this year’s peak season, arvato digital services is expanding its Blu-ray capacities to include an additional line. As of last week, the international media services provider... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises, the company behind the red laser-based multilayer HD format, announced at CES that its HD VMD players are now shipping into the US market at a manufacturer recommended price of... Read more...
According to a new report by Parks Associates, global Blu-ray standalone player sales will outpace most other consumer electronics items (including HDTVs) over the next four years as HD hardware see more... Read more...
Ron Sanders, President of Warner Home Video, is the latest keynote speaker announced for the forthcoming PEVE Digital Entertainment conference in Paris (17-18 April). Other speakers already scheduled ... 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.
