Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Uniting under the Lovefilm brand, the new company, that sees Video Island merged with Lovefilm, will ship two million DVDs to more than 500,000 subscribers in the UK every month and has a strong footprint... Read more...
The Digital Entertainment Group Europe (DEGE), formerly known as the DVD Entertainment Group Europe, the format-independent body that represents the interests of stakeholders across the home entertainment... Read more...
Panasonic, a subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial, said it will start selling a Blu-ray high-definition disc player in September for under $1,500 and sees up to 5 million of these new DVD players... Read more...
The DVD Association's 2007 DVDA Excellence Awards ceremony will be hosted by THX Best Practices Laboratory on the evening of 21 June 2007 in the Chaplin Theater at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, California... Read more...
Paramount Pictures and Xbox have announced the launch of the Xbox Movie Showcase that features free, high-definition, downloadable content from Paramount's movies on the console's Xbox live service... Read more...
FACT investigators were involved in the largest ever single seizure of pirate DVDs in a raid on premises in Dudley, West Midlands, UK, last week where five people were arrested... Read more...
The next-generation optical disc market is fertile territory for pushing the technological envelope if one goes by Dr Oron Zachar’s Polarizonics Corp work... Read more...
Ringleaders of music, film and games counterfeiting scam were jailed after amassing tens of thousands of pounds through sale of fake CDs, DVDs, games and extensive benefit fraud. This was the first sentencing... Read more...
Toshiba has launched the world's first HD DVD player in Japan, officially beginning the next-generation DVD format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray, set to launch this summer... Read more...
In an unanimous decision released Friday, the Helsinki District Court ruled that the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is “ineffective”. It means that use of de-cryption softwares... Read more...
A new DVD format may be elbowing its way into an increasingly crowded market. The format, dubbed VCDHD for Versatile Compact Disc High Density, has been introduced jointly by three businesses – Sprout... Read more...
In a wide-ranging interview, NEIL GOODALL, CEO of Testronic Laboratories, tells JEAN-LUC RENAUD how he wants anybody with quality problems in any part of the digital industry – packaged media, online... Read more...
Verbatim is Number 1 supplier of recordable CD and DVD media in Europe, according to Santa Clara Consulting Group... Read more...
In the US this month, the companies supporting HD DVD began spring marketing and retail campaigns, running in-cinema trailers to promote the HD DVD format. Toshiba is also offering a one month promotion... Read more...
UK High Street stores are to stop selling pre-recorded VHS tapes of the latest blockbuster film releases or television series... Read more...
Hitachi has developed a new technology that is capable of storing up to 500GB of data onto discs that have a super-resolution film on their substrate... 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.
