Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
In the competition between the two rival next-generation formats, HD DVD has gained a slight advantage by coming to market first, even though only a few titles are available, and the first round of players... Read more...
Americ Disc and The Dering Corporation announced a joint venture agreement to provide their combined optical media replication, packaging and distribution services to the mid-Atlantic market. The joint... Read more...
InterVideo, an industry leader in next-generation DVD and multimedia software, announced its commitment to support HD DVD. At WinHEC 2006, InterVideo showcased its plans for HD DVD playback support on... Read more...
Anti-piracy raids in Sao Paulo, Brasil, recently yielded 200 CD burners and over 30,000 pirated CDs and DVDs with a street value of more than $100,000... Read more...
According to film industry insiders Apple has been asking studios to include iPod-ready versions of their movies on future Blu-ray disc releases... Read more...
China Film Group and Hollywood-based Crest Digital have formed a joint venture partnership that will deliver a full range of home entertainment and technology software content via multiple digital platforms... Read more...
Christian Balbo (picture) has been promoted to key account & sales office manager of the Italian subsidiary of replicator kdg mediatech. He will also be responsible for building up and developing the ... Read more...
The consumer DVD recorder market experienced smaller than expected growth in 2006, but IMS Research estimates the volume of DVD recorders shipped worldwide in 2011 will reach 59 million units, generating... Read more...
LG has announced what may be the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorder to run at 4x speeds. However, the drive will not support dual-layer, 50GB media, only single-layer 25GB discs. LG has shown the GBW... Read more...
The DVD Association has issued its Call for Entries in the 2007 DVDA Excellence Awards, one of the industry’s longest running events and the only DVD awards programme judged exclusively by peers, who... Read more...
Lite-On IT plans to start volume production in July of this year of half-height (H/H) Blu-ray Disc optical disc drives based on technology from Philips as a result of the company taking over BenQ’s ... Read more...
The Federation Against Copyright Theft launched a major initiative aimed at reducing the sale of pirate DVDs in a London suburb... Read more...
LSI Logic Corporation, the pioneer in digital media processing technologies, announced two new DVD recorder system processors. With their high levels of integration and advanced features, these next-generation... Read more...
Home media server manufacturer Kaleidescape won a court case brought by the DVD Copy Control Association, claiming the company violated its standard licensing contract... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises has struck a deal with VDL-ODMS to design and build NME’s production lines for its red laser-based HD Versatile Multilayer Discs... Read more...
Swedish company M2 Engineering AB, producer of optical media manufacturing equipment, has announced that it is going to enter into a phase of restructuring of the global operations of the company... 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.
