Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Picture Production Company’s (PPC) DVD team has appointed Steve Thompson (picture) as Senior Designer. This follows the expansion of the department into further areas such as Universal Media Disc (UMD... Read more...
Toshiba has filed a lawsuit against German DVD disc replicator EDD Bizz GmbH for infringement of some of the company’s DVD patents. The suit was brought to the Düsseldorf Regional Court against EDD... Read more...
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. said Wednesday it will put off the launch of its PlayStation 3 by about six months until early November due to a delay in finalising specifications for its Blu-ray disc... Read more...
Warner Home Video’s Total HD format which includes both HD DVD and Blu-ray on a single disc, will not arrive in the second half of this year as planned, instead reaching the market in 2008... Read more...
In the UK, more than one in five pirate DVDs are currently sold in pubs and cafés, new research reveals. The organisation set up to highlight the problem of DVD crime, the Industry Trust for IP Awareness... Read more...
UK replicator The VDC Group has been certified under the internationally approved Anti-Piracy Compliance Programme of IRMA, newly renamed Content Delivery and Storage Association... Read more...
With only weeks to go before the first HD DVD players and movies are due to hit stores, US retailers are finding information about the launch sketchy and, when it is provided, often contradictory... Read more...
Movie studios have licensed an audio watermarking technology from Verance Corporation for Blu-ray and HD DVD. The technology, called VCMS, adds a digital signal to analog audio which can be used by players... Read more...
Sonopress, a subsidiary of arvato storage media group, is continuing the expansion of its international production network. The company – headquartered in Gütersloh, Germany – has become the first... Read more...
Bandai Visual USA is to release the first high-definition anime titles in North America – Freedom Volume 1 – in the HD DVD format... Read more...
UK authoring house Stream has completed encoding, authoring and design work on two new UMD (Universal Media Disc) titles for 2Entertain, The Mighty Boosh Series 1 and Series 2... Read more...
In a move seen as a blow to the HD DVD camp, backed by Toshiba and Microsoft, Blockbuster has decided to stock next-generation DVD titles in the Sony-backed Blu-ray format... Read more...
TDK, a founding member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, has announced that it is to begin shipping 25GB recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Disc (BD) media across Europe and will follow with 50GB media ... Read more...
Sales of DVDs have hit the one billion mark in the UK less than 10 years since the format’s launch, according to figures from the British Video Association... Read more...
TDK Corporation announced today it is withdrawing from the manufacturing of recordable CD and DVD products. The company is to shut down at the end of May the production facilities at its European subsidiary... Read more...
Due to a global DVD market slowing down in the past two years, and in particular the US and European markets reaching saturation, while China’s DVD export volume kept rising, the value fell in 2006, ... 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.
