Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
The DVD Association has announced the winners of the 2007 DVDA Excellence Awards presented Thursday 21 in the Chaplin Theater at Raleigh Studios, Hollywood. This is the industry’s oldest DVD awards ... Read more...
Nero, a leader in digital media technologies, announced that Samsung is sending out test samples in Europe of its Blu-ray disc devices together with a special test version of Nero 7 supporting the Blu... Read more...
The DVD Forum, the 220-member international association of hardware manufacturers, software firms and content providers that defined the DVD format, and now HD DVD, has chosen Berlin to hold its annual... Read more...
Pubs are set to be targeted as part of a massive nationwide awareness campaign to help stamp out DVD piracy. Around 36,000 pubs will be sent an anti-piracy pack as part of the campaign – the biggest... Read more...
Despite competition from Internet-based movie delivery, cable and satellite on-demand, and digital cinema, DVD continues to attract the majority of consumer spending on movies, according to the 2007 Annual... Read more...
Screen Digest has examined the changing pattern of DVD release strategies in Europe between 2002 and the first half of 2005. In the course of undertaking the analysis of the theatrical-to-retail DVD release... Read more...
The DVD Copy Control Association has indicated it wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection Content Scrambling System (CSS) technology. This would necessitate that the... Read more...
European consumers spend more on buying DVD than any other packaged media – DVD retail went up 10% last year, while music and games sales were down. The type of sales channel used by consumers varies... Read more...
The DVD Forum has developed new DVD specifications – DVD Download Disc for CSS Managed Recording (DVD-Download) – which specify a write-once media to record CSS encrypted DVD-Video contents via download... Read more...
For the first time since 1986, members of the French Video Publishers Association, SEV, have recorded a fall in turnover, from €1.32 billion in 2005 to €1.16 billion last year – a 12% drop in revenue... Read more...
Europe’s largest producer of optical discs and a leader in the covermount business, ODS is launching a new, DVD-5 capacity disc – the EcoDisc. Half as thick (0.6mm) as a normal DVD, the flexible disc... Read more...
Sonic Solutions announced record results for the third quarter ended 31 December 2005. Quarterly revenues were a record $40.8 million, up 28% from $31.9 million in the second fiscal quarter of the year... Read more...
The European Commission has stepped up its probe into possible anticompetitive practices in the format war over high-definition DVDs that pits Sony's Blu-ray against Toshiba's HD DVD... Read more...
Media service provider Sonopress has announced it is now offering a full range of services for the replication of memory cards. All conventional memory cards, with up to four gigabytes of memory for content... Read more...
Coventry City Council, UK, assisted by investigators from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, led to the arrest and successful prosecution of Wayne Harry Haywood, 41, sentenced to 12 months imprisonment... Read more...
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced that, from 28 March, PlayStation Portable owners will be able to purchase DVD-UMD bundles for movies The Grudge, Resident Evil, Underworld, Crouching Tiger... 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.
