Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Consumers still prefer watching TV shows and movies on DVD or the TV to watching movies online via streaming or downloading, according to a study by industry trade group DEG: The Digital Entertainment... Read more...
CyberHome Entertainment (formerly Protop Innotech) has received OEM orders for portable DVD players from Sony, with shipments to begin early next quarter, according to the company... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises, developer of the red laser-based HD Versatile Multilayer Disc format, releases its latest commercial HD VMD player and discs into the European and US markets... Read more...
Six men and one woman have pleaded guilty to US federal piracy charges, having admitted copying Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith a week before its cinema release. The film was subsequently put on the Internet... Read more...
New Medium Enterprises, developer of the low-cost, red laser-based high-definition format HD VMD disc solution, announced that TV industry veteran Michael Jay Solomon has joined the company as Chairman... Read more...
London-based authoring facility Stream Digital Media kicks off the New Year with the addition of three new staff members for its design department... Read more...
German optical disc manufacturer Infodisc received delivery of the first BD ROM manufacturing line Indigo in Western Europe. The Oerlikon Blu-ray replication line will be installed in the coming days ... Read more...
Sonic Solutions and Technicolor have announced the production of the world’s first replicated discs utilising the advanced interactive modes of the Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD DVD formats... Read more...
Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG have announced today that they will exclusively support the next-generation HD DVD format on a worldwide basis. The exclusive HD DVD commitment will include... Read more...
The Blu-ray and HD DVD camps used the day before the official opening of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to fight for the hearts and minds of the media... Read more...
Announcing results for the three months ending 30 June 2007, leading adult publisher Private Media Group recorded a fall in DVD and magazine sales of 38% to €2 million, translating into a decrease in... Read more...
The first commercial next-generation DVD player, Toshiba's HDA1 HD-DVD machine, can already be pre-ordered for as little as $450. US online retailer Crutchfield.com is already selling the newly announced... Read more...
Sonic Solutions announced that its US Patent 6,944,621 for dynamic content revision has been deemed essential to the HD DVD specification for HD DVD players and optical media for the purpose of participating... Read more...
Verbatim Corporation has announced its new LightScribe 16x DVD-R media in 30-pack spindles that will begin shipping in Q1 2006. The company also is preparing to roll out LightScribe gold-background CDs... Read more...
Sonopress has expanded its worldwide Blu-ray and HD DVD capacities. The international media replicator manufactures both high resolution formats in Gütersloh, Germany, and at its Weaverville site in ... Read more...
Inside West Virginia's gold-domed Capitol, somebody has transformed a tucked-away basement office into a makeshift, taxpayer-funded studio to create pirate DVD videos and music CDs... 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.
