Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
French DVD sales have dropped 10.7% in value and 4.1% in volume in 2007, according to the national film organization CNC. French consumers spent nearly €1.5 billion on 130.4 million DVDs, of which 540... Read more...
The District Court of Düsseldorf, Germany, has found that DVD disc manufacturers Dicentia Germany GmbH and Dicentia A/S have infringed patents in the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License administered by MPEG... Read more...
According to DEG Europe – a non-profit, pan-industry body to promote awareness of high definition across the continent – and based on GfK tracking, the volume of next generation DVDs being sold in... Read more...
The participating members of the 43rd Steering Committee meeting of the DVD Forum held in Paris last week approved both the file system and physical specifications for the single and dual layer DVD-Download... Read more...
The 6 February official announcement by UK-based Spin Music Productions that it was to acquire the ODS Group turned out to be premature as news is coming that Danish replicator Dicentia A/S and ODS Business... Read more...
Memorex is launching a Blu-ray player for under $270 in November. The MVBD-2510 model features Bonus View Profile 1.1. not the more advanced Profile 2.0, so owners will not be able to download extra content... Read more...
The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) and the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA announced that the International Standards Organization (ISO) has approved ISO/IEC 10995, a ... Read more...
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Interactive video enabler Ensequence and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have reached an agreement in which SPHE will license and resell the Ensequence on-Q Create suite for Blu-ray Java (BD-J) to studios... Read more...
According to information from NPD’s latest report, 41% of dollars budgeted for movies and video was spent on DVD movie purchases, 11% for purchases of TV programmes on DVD, and 29% on DVD rentals (including... Read more...
A DVD counterfeiting duo in London have been sentenced to a total of four years and six months for running an illegal factory worth £5 million a year. It is the first case of its kind for the Film Piracy... Read more...
Around half a million counterfeit DVDs have been seized by Manchester City Council trading standards officers during a raid on a suspected distribution centre. The haul is one of the largest ever of its... Read more...
A father and son who sold counterfeit DVDs, CDs and computer games at boot fairs across Kent county have been successfully prosecuted by Kent County Council’s Trading Standards Service... Read more...
Thomson's Technicolor Services Division announces the establishment of a comprehensive Blu-ray Disc mastering suite and four new Blu-ray Disc BD-50 and BD-25 lines at its facility in Piaseczno/Warsaw, ... Read more...
French police have raided a store in Paris that sold large amounts of counterfeit Bollywood music and films, and one man was arrested. They seized an estimated 3,000 pirate CDs and more than 200,000 counterfeit... Read more...
The home video market in Western Europe is expected to generate total retail revenues of €11billion by the end of 2008, with 97% of those revenues coming from packaged media (DVD and Blu-ray) and 3% ... 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.
