Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
The Philippines' Optical Media Board chairman Eduardo Manzanohas convinced some Muslim traders involved in the selling of illegally copied movies on DVD and music on CD to shift to selling other merchandise... Read more...
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At CES, Pioneer Electronics (USA), in collaboration with Sonic Solutions, TitleMatch Entertainment Group and Primera Technology, demonstrated a fully-functional Qflix DVD-on-Demand Service with CSS encryption... Read more...
Plasmon, the storage solutions specialist, has appointed administrators on Monday “to engage with interested strategic and financial sponsors to acquire the business.” The company says it is currently... Read more...
Sony’s Blu-ray enabled PS3 game console and Microsoft’s HD DVD Xbox 360 add-on have done more to grow the high definition disc market than any other devices, making up 85 percent of global next-generation... Read more...
Global cumulative sales of Sony’s three PlayStation models has reached 185 million, of which over 67 million units in European markets... Read more...
The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) market is starting to show signs of maturation. These signs include expanding geographic availability of PVR products, particularly into Europe and Asia, and a leveling... Read more...
Warner Bros Entertainment has commenced releasing its films online in South Korea before they are released in the country on DVD, shaking up the time-honoured Hollywood distribution model and potentially... Read more...
Samsung is not planning to abandon HD DVD just yet. A Samsung spokesperson said that "Samsung was surprised by Warner´s decision to exclusively support Blu-ray but that it will continue producing the... Read more...
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According to initial data for 2007, SEVN, the French video publishers association, notes a fall in the DVD sell-through market for the third year in a row. Last year, retail sales dropped by 11% in revenues... Read more...
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Singulus Technologies, the German maker of replication line for CDs and DVDs, jumped for a second day in Frankfurt trading after Warner adopted the Blu-ray format for its hi-def DVDs... Read more...
Alliance Films, Canada's leading motion picture distributor, announces that they have utilized Sony DADC's eBridge technology to create a more dynamic marketing campaign for their latest DVD release Sex... Read more...
Sonic Solutions has announced that its Professional Products Group is ending sales of its Scenarist HD DVD authoring product line to focus its R&D resources "on the creation of new applications for authoring... Read more...
Denon, the high-end AV manufacturer, has unveiled what it is claiming is a true "high-end Blu-ray source", the DVD-2500BT, with a pricetag of £900... 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.
