Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Heads of the international recording industry recently went to Brussels to raise what they call the serious piracy and market access problems they face when trying to do business in China. China has enormous... Read more...
Worldwide revenue for consumer electronics is expected to hit the $700 billion mark by 2009, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Consumers will spend $42 billion more on consumer electronics... Read more...
The fast-approaching holiday season is a key milestone in the success of High Definition disc formats in the USA, according to a timely market report by Understanding & Solutions. Performance of both ... Read more...
Test equipment manufacturer DaTARIUS Technologies has announced it is restructuring the business brought about through "the difficult trading seen in the optical media industries in the past three years... Read more...
Strong growth is expected from Asia-Pacific, with sales of both DVD players and recorders in the region expected to rise by 26.3 million units between the period 2007 to 2012, according to a recent report... Read more...
At its recent Steering Committee meeting in Los Angeles, the DVD Forum approved the DVD Download/DL logo and specification for downloadable video content, in response to the growth of internet-based electronic... Read more...
Responding to industry concerns that consumer education on next-generation format is key to HD market take-up, Intellikey Labs, a leader in high-definition quality insurance, released the first hi-def... Read more...
Even in light of a small decrease in overall consumer spending on DVD, the approximately $24 billion US home video market continued to be the largest segment of consumer movie spending by far, accounting... Read more...
Following landmark Black Friday promotions through major retail chains, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group announced that sales of dedicated HD DVD players exceeded the 750,000 mark. The data... Read more...
A master forger faced jail this week over a near-£900,000 DVD and CD scam uncovered by Wolverhampton Trading Standards officers in the UK... Read more...
IBM is seeking to patent technology that would place adverts at crucial points in DVD playback without the viewers ability to skip them... Read more...
The man behind Britain's biggest-ever domestic pirate CD and DVD racket was jailed for 38 months yesterday, John Croy, 61, was branded the Mr Big of counterfeiters after he was caught with almost £400... Read more...
On 4 December, the Blu-ray Disc Association officially verified and approved German production tool maker Infodisc’s Blu-ray Single Layer Disc production without limitation... Read more...
Samsung has announced that its BDP-UP5000 hybrid machine, capable of playing HD DVD and Bly-ray discs, will be shown at the upcoming IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) show in Berlin next month, with... Read more...
The UK's Home Entertainment Corporation Chairman Iain Muspratt (picture) is to lead a fourth anti-piracy initiative aimed at identifying local-level pirate DVD sellers in April... Read more...
TDK have launched two new write-once Blu-ray Discs capable of recording at 4x speed. TDK 4x 25GB BD-R Blu-ray Disc media and the 50GB version will both begin shipping later this summer... 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.
