Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
David Bishop, President, Worldwide, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, will make the opening keynote speech at this year’s Digital Entertainment conference, organised by Screen Digest, taking place in... Read more...
The new year has brought a host of new employees to Shorewood.blueprint – the new company recently formed by Shorewood Packaging and Blueprint Media. Julian Ward joins from Cinram as Commercial Director... Read more...
Now that the announcement of the death of HD DVD turned out to be exaggerated, as both formats are making market inroads, the battlefront has shifted in a more constructive direction. Both groups are ... Read more...
BDMO has been cleared of the patent infringement actions brought by Pozzoli against the Belgian packaging manufacturer's Double Push Tray technology. German, English and French courts ruled against the... Read more...
Blockbuster may be on the verge of financial collapse, according to industry analysts, reported by Cue Entertainment, as the company’s latest quarterly results show a net loss of $35 million during ... Read more...
Christmas has come early to hidef media fans as the big discount chain Wal-Mart lowered the price of the second-generation Toshiba HD DVD player (HD-A2 model) to $98. The store claims it sold 90,000 units... Read more...
Sonic Solutions and CinemaNow announced a collaboration that will enable consumers to legally burn Internet downloaded movies onto protected recordable DVDs for playback on standard and high-definition... Read more...
The Motion Picture Association of America announced that its member companies have won a breach of contract lawsuit against AKI Digital Electrical Appliance. The US District Court found that the company... Read more...
The DVD Copy Control Association is considering changes to its bylaws that will prevent OEMs from selling systems that make copies of movies, even for secure internal storage on a hard disk... Read more...
How will consumers behave in the future? Which technologies will prevail? A roster of experts are invited to the 8th annual DVD ENTERTAINMENT conference to answer these and other questions about upcoming... Read more...
Previously UK Chapter members of the DVD Association based in the US, industry participants on this side of the Pond have decided to cut the umbilical cord and launch a new group – DVD Europe – to... Read more...
A 38-year old woman from Cumbria, UK, was given a six month jail sentence at Penrith Magistrates Court today. Helen Louise Sharkey had earlier pleaded guilty to 18 charges of breaching trade mark and ... Read more...
CH-DVD (China High Definition DVD), the Chinese hi-def DVD format based on the HD DVD standard has an official new logo – approved by the DVD Forum, the association responsible for administering the... Read more...
Screen Digest projects that after five years of exploitation across all global media, the 132 medium-to-big budget films released by the leading US studios in 2006 will produce a pre-tax loss of $1.9 ... Read more...
Copy software company Slysoft appears to have cracked BD+, the copy-protection technology on Blu-ray discs, as the company released a beta version of AnyDVD HD, the software that allows consumers to make... Read more...
Sony has developed a 7-layer holographic disc by using a 'Micro-Reflector method', where multi-layer recording is carried out using holographic recording. This new 7-layer prototype was announced at ISOM... 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.
... Read More...
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.
