Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Car rental firm Hertz has expanded its offerings to customers travelling in Europe, introducing portable DVD/CD players at more than 60 locations in nine countries... Read more...
US consumers are still downloading movies illegally despite the growing availability of subscription based movie download services according to a study conducted by Advanis... Read more...
An important copyright trial expected to test the concept of "fair use" began last week in San Jose, California, as Kaleidescape Systems and the DVD Content Control Association went to court... Read more...
LOVEFILM.com, Europe's largest online DVD rental and movie download service, unveils a new download-to-burn service, allowing consumers to download movies and securely burn them to a blank DVD... Read more...
Lovefilm, Europe’s largest online DVD rental group, has appointed Goldman Sachs to advise it ahead of a possible £100 million flotation, reports Timesonline... Read more...
Malaysian movie pirates have put a bounty on the heads of two sniffer dogs who busted a fake DVD ring with a seizure of discs worth about $3 million, media and officials said last week... Read more...
A stagnant DVD market combined with the uncertain outcome of the next-generation format war were ingredients to make Barcelona's MEDIA-TECH Conference & Showcase a well-attended gathering... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises, the company behind the HD VMD red-laser hires DVD format, has announced that MCA Technology has been granted exclusive distribution rights for its hardware in the French market... Read more...
MPEG LA announced that DVD replicators ODS Optical Disc Service, Dassow, Germany, as well as the ODS Business Services Group companies – ODS Optical Disc Replication GmbH, Germany, ODS Business Service... Read more...
Original Video is the first and only UK manufacturer of automated DVD rental vending machines and since launching in Gloucestershire last year the company has experienced growth, sales and placed numerous... Read more...
GMA lectures DVD vendors on piracy... Read more...
Ricoh has started shipping the new Double Layer DVD+R media with write speeds of up to 16x, significantly raising the standards for fast DL blank discs. Delivery of the first samples for hardware manufacturers... Read more...
Russia’s anti-piracy forces have uncovered the country’s largest ever pirate DVD factory, according to the Motion Picture Association. Capable of producing 100 million DVDs a year, the scale of the... Read more...
According to a new report by Screen Digest, Hollywood studios and other distributors sold almost 70 million DVDs to Chinese consumers in 2006, and they spent $115m buying them. The UK analysts forecast... Read more...
Sony will bring out in the middle of the year a new stand-alone Blu-ray player priced at $599 – $400 less than the company's current machine... Read more...
Sony NEC Optiarc Inc., which develops and manufactures optical disc storage drives, launches its new European sales company, Sony NEC Optiarc Europe, to be headquarters at Ismaning near Munich, Germany... 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.
