Simultaneous to its retail store release, the iPhone has been added to Apple's online storefront with the same pricing, $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model.
Customers who are ordering online will have to wait however. Apple has posted an "expected 2-4 week" wait for online orders to arrive. Online users are also only allowed to order two at a time.
Reports surfaced about the iPhone's much hyped launch with customers complaining that many AT&T stores were understocked while Apple stores had more supply than demand. Overall numbers for the first day were not in yet, but rest assured we will post them when they become available.
Today, Sony gave word that the PlayStation 3 was finally in full production, now that blue-violet laser diode shortages were out of the way.
In April, the company announced that they had stepped up production of the diodes to 1.7 million units per month, as the diode is critical to the Blu ray drive. Shortages of the diodes are largely cited for the delayed European launch of the console.
“Production problems have now ceased, we're in full production as far as PlayStation 3 is concerned and there's a steady chain of supply in North America, Japan and Europe,” a Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also added that with the production issues a thing of the past, the company is confident the PS3 can match the success of the PS2, which has sold over 115 million units worldwide since its launch.
“We're aiming towards a much broader lifestyle for home entertainment enthusiasts, that's one of the reasons the PlayStation 2 went on to sell over 115 million units worldwide,” said the spokesperson. “Ultimately it will come down to content ... What it offers for its price is exceptional value for money – a quarter of the cost of a PC of similar capability and about the same as a commercial Blu-ray player.”
The latest PlayStation 3 firmware update, version 1.82, released yesterday by Sony, promises to improve AVC playback as well as backward compatibility.
AVC High Profile (H.264/MPEG-4) format video is a high image quality encoding method used by Blu ray discs among others.
“Hopefully this update is moving us closer to the audio playback features many of you commented about,” wrote Eric Lempel, director of PlayStation Network operations. “We’re continuing to evaluate and improve things across the board, including PS2 software compatibility. Thanks for all of your support and feedback, keep it coming!”
Along with the improved AVC High Profile playback, also improved is the backwards compatibility for PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games although no specific titles were mentioned.
The new firmware is just a small incremental update building upon the 1.80 firmware which added 1080p upscaling for backwards compatible games as well as DVDs. 1.81 added an RGB Full Range setting for HDMI users.
LeaseWeb, the web host that is caught in the middle of BREIN's crusade against torrent trackers such as Demonoid, announced that they will be appealing the decision of the lower court that said they must shut down Everlasting.nu and reveal the owner's personal details. LeaseWeb is also claiming "harassment" against BREIN.
"Leaseweb is to file an appeal against the preliminary injunction relating to the 'Everlasting' bit torrent site hosted by Leaseweb,” the release states. “This means that the court of appeal in Amsterdam will hear the full case against the Brein foundation again. The reason for this is that Leaseweb is of the opinion that upholding the judgment resulting from the preliminary injunction proceedings would constitute an unacceptable and unjustified violation of the freedom of expression which is inherent to the internet and the protection of privacy. Instead of awaiting the result of this, Brein has continued to harass Leaseweb and has not shown itself open to reasonable discussions.”
LeaseWeb also reiterated the fact that they remove "illegal" content when all proper channels are followed, and noted that BREIN used a process that is shallow, unsubstantiated, and undermined privacy and freedom of speech.
Last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called for a very aggressive re-write of criminal copyright laws, some so harsh that it even included prison time for "attempted" copyright infringement, a life sentence for using pirated software and the ability to use more expansive wiretapping on suspects.
On Wednesday, he went even farther, and the full text can be found here for those interested.
"IP (intellectual property) theft is not a technicality, and its victims are not just faceless corporations--it is stealing, and it affects us all," Gonzales said, at an intellectual property event sponsored by the lobby group TechNet. "Those who seek to undermine this cornerstone of U.S. economic competitiveness believe that they are making easy money; that they are beyond the law. It is our responsibility and commitment to show them that they are wrong."
He also reminded us that his department submitted the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 in May to Congress. The bill would allow for easier seizures of computers and other assets "used to commit copyright crimes", as well as punish certain attempted copyright crimes. The kicker of the bill is the fact that Homeland Security will be required to notify the RIAA of any attempts to import "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance."
Plextor announced its latest external drive offering earlier this month, following the success of its recently launched internal PX-800A & PX-810SADVD ReWriters. The new high-end external drive, the PX-810UF, is ideal for all users as it is compatible with both Mac and PC systems. It features Plextor's legendary quality and reliability in a robust matt black external unit.
From professionals and enthusiasts, through to anyone looking for a stylish addition or upgrade to their home/office set-up, the PX-810UF offers the ideal solution. The PX-810UF comes conveniently with a dual interface for extra flexibility, sporting both USB 2.0 and FireWire (IEEE1394) connectors. In addition, the drive comes with a software package suitable for all users including Nero 7 Essentials (including Nero Express 7), and Plextools Professional LE.
The drive is capable of the following write speeds...
CyberLink Corp. announced recently that its Hi-Def Suite was released with HLDS GGW-H10N, a universal drive supporting Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs. The combined solution lets users play high-definition movies stored on Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs, record high-definition video content to Blu-ray Discs, as well as burn and backup data to Blu-ray Discs and DVDs.
"The Super Multi Blue drive provides a neat solution that offers a lot of value to customers, with support for both Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs," said D.Y Roh, senior specialist of HLDS.
"CyberLink and HLDS have released a software-hardware solution that supports both next-generation disc formats, eliminating the complication and expense of users having to operate multiple single-format drives," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "Instead, consumers can access all the features they want via a single software suite and play any movie they want via the same disc drive."
The software titles included with the suite are PowerDVD, PowerProducer, Power2Go, InstantBurn and PowerBackup.
Sonic Solutions' Roxio division is now offering a version of Roxio Crunch, an application made to easily convert video content to formats required for Apple devices including iPhone, for the Windows operating system. The software offers a one-step process for converting a broad range of the most popular video formats including DVD-Video, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and DivX files into a format recognized by these Apple devices.
The application includes powerful transcoding technologies and pre-defined device profiles to ensure optimal playback regardless of the screen size. It can convert native QuickTime file formats, such as DV, AVI, MOV, and MPEG and non-QuickTime file formats, such as MPEG-2 and DivX. It can also convert DVD movies and discs created with Toast, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, and other DVD authoring applications.
Today, Toshiba announced that they had added functionality that will allow users of HD DVD standalone players to access exclusive web content.
The new functionality will allow the players to access and download exclusive content from the movie studio's servers. After it is downloaded, it is saved within the storage of the player for access.
Using the new functions, movie studios can choose to "lock" certain extra features on the HD DVD itself which users can only unlock by downloading a key.
"While others may talk about interactivity, HD DVD has proven time and time again that it offers true interactive features and capabilities for consumers which can make the enjoyment of movies a new experience every time they're viewed," Toshiba Digital AV marketing chief Jodi Sally said.
If you already own a standalone player, the new functionality can be turned on through a firmware update. Toshiba also said that an upcoming firmware update will give owners of the HD-XA2 and HD-A20 players the ability to play their movies at 24fps at 1080p which is the same framerate at which movies are usually captured.
Finally, Toshiba reiterated that they now hold 70 percent of the standalone market, most likely due to very successful promotions the last two months.
Taking its turn in the everlasting war against hackers, Sony has updated the firmware of the PSP to version 3.51 after 3.50 was recently discovered to be hacked.
Hackers found a way to exploit firmware version 3.50 using the game Lumines. According to PSPupdates.com and our own users here, if you have a legitimate copy of Lumines then the exploit is very easy. Unzip a few files onto your Memory Stick in a certain directory and then hold Start at a certain point during the first loading screen of the game and that is all.
The newest version, 3.51 does not include any other changes helpful to the PSP, so the update was made specifically to block hackers from downgrading using 3.50.
In an funny turn, sales of Lumines increased drastically after the exploit was announced just as sales of GTA: Liberty City Stories did when the PSP exploit for the game was discovered.
Michael Ephraim, the managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment Australia has said that the PlayStation 3 continues to outsell both the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 in the country and that almost 50,000 units had been sold since the console's late March launch.
Using stats from the market research firm GfK, Ephraim explained that the PS3 has outsold its rivals almost every week since launch.
"Based on GfK, since launch, PS3 has been the number one next-gen console, outselling Wii and Xbox 360 every week, except for last week," said Ephraim.
Ephraim also added that the sales boost were partly due to the fact that consumer electronics stores has begun selling the console, but marketing it as a Blu ray player more than a gaming machine.
"Since March 23, PS3 has been the number one selling next-gen console in Australia, and this is GfK figures.
"We've now sold 50,000 and we're very excited about the fact that it's being sold in retailers that are gaming retailers as a gaming device and other things, but as you'll notice it's now being sold in Harvey Norman consumer electronics stores as a Blu-ray player," he added.
After a month long promotion that sent sales skyrocketing, Toshiba announced that it would permanently lower the prices on its two entry level HD DVD players, the HD-A2 and HD-A20.
Beginning on July 1st, the HD-A2 will be offered at $299 USD while the A20 will be offered at $399 USD. Both are MSRP without any rebates necessary.
For the month, thanks to a $100 rebate promotion on both players, Toshiba saw stronger than expected results, with some retailers seeing 500% increases in sales for the players.
The HD-A2 is the cheapest standalone player available (not including the Xbox 360 add-on drive) and the new price reflects a $200 cheaper pricetag than the lowest priced standalone Blu ray player, the Sony BDP-S300.
Ken Graffeo, co-President of the HD DVD Promotions Group, seemed to state the obvious when he explained to Video Business that his organization "has found that price is the biggest motivating factor for consumers when it comes to buying a high-def disc player."
Between January and May 2007, site visits to the huge video sharing site YouTube grew by 70 percent, a number that seems to justify Google's $1.65 billion USD purchase of the site last year.
The 64 other largest video-sharing sites grew by just 8 percent during the same period, and YouTube had 50 percent more site visits then all those sites put together.
According to TheRegister, YouTube had 60 percent of the market share of US visits to video sites while MySpace, the site with the second largest share, has 16 percent. Google Video is in third with 7.8 percent followed by Yahoo! Video, MSN and Break.com, all with just under 3 percent. DailyMotion, AOL media, and MetaCafe brought up the rear, all with just over 1 percent share.
Search engines however, still account for over 20 percent of traffic to these video-sharing sites, which is an implication that users are having trouble finding what they want when they are at the sites themselves.
Stats from Hitwise show that the amount of internet users that leave search engines to go to video sites increased over 300 percent from May 2006 to May 2007.
Thanks to increasing competition from the rival rental giant Blockbuster, Netflix has announced they have lowered the price of their "2-at-a-time DVD rental plan" by $1.
Earlier this month, Blockbuster lowered the price of their 3-at-a-time DVD plan by $1 to hopefully gain some market share on its rival.
Now Netflix customers can have the 2-DVD plan for $13.99 per month and the 3-DVD plan for $17.99 USD, prices equal to that of Blockbuster.
This morning, MySpace launched the "separate but closely-linked part" of its networking site, MySpace TV.
The new page will bring the same channels and sorting features as YouTube but promises more vast social tools. Users will be able to track their favorite producers as well as tag clips "to put them into a profile" and personalize a video channel based solely on their past viewing history and their personal tastes.
MySpace also promised professional-made content from content providers such as Sony, news segments from New York Times and Reuters, and sports clips and games from the NBA and the NHL.
The page is still considered a public beta but it is available in North American as well as most of Europe and Japan. There is no word on when the beta will end but the company describes it as the "first phase" which will continue to improve until full release.
To the surprise of many, Warner announced today that they would be delaying the launch of their first Total HD dual Blu ray/HD DVD combo releases until at least early 2008.
Warner announced the hybrid format at the CES show earlier this year and it was supposed to hit stores by Christmas of this year. To date, all production and replication issues had been solved and the format was on its way which makes the announcement more surprising.
Warner senior VP of marketing management Steve Nickerson confirmed that there would be delays.
"There is no expiration date on the viability of this concept, so we're not in a rush to do it," Nickerson said. "We'll do it when it makes sense and when it's right."
Nickerson added that Warner now intends to launch the format with 10 to 20 titles which will "allow retailers to display them together in one section so they don't get lost amid the growing number of home video formats currently hogging store shelves."
Despite their faith in Total HD, Warner also noted that they had no plans to abandon Blu ray or HD DVD and that they will continue to release titles for both.
BREIN, the Dutch copyright protection agency that has gone on a crusade to rid the Netherlands of "illegal" torrent sites, has claimed that they have taken down Demonoid, a private tracker that has grown in popularity the past few years.
Last week, BREIN got another victory when the site Everlasting.nu was forced to close down and the owner's personal details sent to the group. Apparently, BREIN was not happy enough and demanded that the hosting company, LeaseWeb, shut down Demonoid as well.
Users trying to log in yesterday could not as Demonoid was offline, and BREIN was quick to claim victory.
"This outcome demonstrates that the content on offer on large international p2p-sites such as Demonoid is mostly illegal. These kind of sites make use of content supplied by its customers", says BREIN director Tim Kuik. "Sites like these do take the responsibility to refuse illegal pornographic material, but they do not care about the offer of evidently infringing content. That carelessness is calculated because they know that is exactly the content their users want. Many of such sites are hosted in the Netherlands and mainly by Leaseweb. Leaseweb is seen as a safe harbour for these sites. That has to come to an end. We have shown repeatedly that such sites are illegal under Dutch law and jurisprudence. We will continue to do so until none are left."
The BBC announced today that its iPlayer service will be available as a public beta on July 27th and a full launch will happen in the fall
The iPlayer is a standalone application for UK residents that allows for the downloading of TV shows up to seven days after it airs on the many BBC networks.
The shows are downloaded to the users HDD where they have 30 days to watch it before it expires. If you start the show then need to pause, you have 7 days to complete watching before it expires.
The timing restrictions are thanks to Microsoft DRM, which has recently generated controversy from Mac users and open-source advocates. The BBC says they are working on a solution and that Mac support is "absolutely on our critical path."
The application will be XP-only at launch, but a Vista version is forthcoming.
So far, 15,000 private beta testers have been using the application and the BBC said the "public beta" will still be "controlled" so most interested users will not get to try it out until the full launch later this year.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has started a new online promotion that offers "five free discs" with the purchase of any new Blu ray disc player, including the PlayStation 3.
From July 1st to September 30th, when you purchase any player you automatically qualify to receive 5 free Blu ray movies fo free. There are 22 titles available to choose from, including hits from Sony, Disney, Fox/MGM, Paramount, Lionsgate and Warner.
The movies available can be found here when the site launches on July 1st.
There are other deals available such as get 5 free Blu-ray movies with the purchase of a Panasonic DMP-BD10A which means consumers can get 10 free movies if they decide on that player.
Last month, HD DVD announced a similar promotion and there was a substantial sales spike. Blu ray is hoping for the same.
Today, the MPAA filed a lawsuit against both YouTVPC and Peekvid hoping to crack down on websites that allow users to view streaming TV shows and movies for free.
Although both sites provide access to some of the most popular movies and TV shows available, they do so by linking to other sites where the content is actually stored and do not host anything themselves. Both sites claim to do nothing illegal.
As the sites have grown in popularity, the MPAA has been keeping closer watch. Peekvid currently has over 50,000 unique visitors per day while YouTVPC pulls in just over 5,000 a day. Unfortunately for them, both sites are based in the US and are now an easy legal target for the MPAA.
In a statement, the MPAA added that both sites "profit handsomely from a seemingly endless stream of third-party advertising pitches" mostly provided by reputable companies like Google and Yahoo and so this lawsuit seems more about how the sites profit from what they do then the actual content, which is not hosted in the US.
A new Nintendo initiative, called WiiWare in the US and Wii Software in Europe will allow any developer in the world to produce new downloadable Wii games to be sold through the Wii Shop Channel.
"Wii Software provides developers with big ideas - rather than big budgets - an easy and very accessible way to create new games and bring them to the marketplace," European marketing director Laurent Fischer explained.
Fischer also added that the service would also offer "great additional value for Wii owners who will be able to download fresh new games."
Users can pay for the the games using Wii Points when the first titles launch in early 2008.
When the Wii was first announced, Nintendo said it intended the Wii Shop to host original downloadable games but so far only "Virtual Console" games have been available.
The Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 already support new game downloads but Nintendo hopes the unique motion-sensing control options of the Wii will give developers more fire to produce interesting software that cannot be found on its rival consoles.
According to the website ZuneScene, Microsoft is preparing the second generation model of their Zune media player and have dubbed the model "Scorpio". There will also be a new flash memory based Zune codenamed "Draco".
According to the website, Scorpio will have an 80GB harddrive and will enter production at the end of July. That could mean that both new Zunes might be available for the upcoming holiday rush.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they expected to hit 1 million devices sold by the end of the month and that they were very pleased with the sales.
The online rental giant Blockbuster has decided to settle with Netflix over accusations that it had infringed on a couple of Netlfix's online DVD rental patents when it launched Blockbuster Online.
In April 2006, Netflix accused Blockbuster of infringing on two patents and subsequently asked a judge to bar the company from allowing online rentals. The patents included the concept of the automatic queue and the concept of keeping DVDs for an unlimited amount of time "without incurring additional charges and to prioritize and reprioritize their own personal dynamic queue--of DVDs to be rented."
Netflix accused Blockbuster of completely ignoring the patents when they opened Blockbuster Online and Netflix added that the lawsuit "had to be taken in order to protect its business interests."
Blockbuster then countersued and accused Netflix of fraud and antitrust violations. The company also said the patents were very broad and therefore impossible to be enforced.
The terms of the settlement were not released but Blockbuster noted that it would not have any material effect on future revenue.
We have a new addition to our Guides section. It's another installment of Afterdawn's Digital Video Fundamentals series that explains the basics of Resolution and aspect ratios.
Shadowrun and Halo 2, the latest "Vista exclusive" games, have already been cracked by hacking groups that have released patches that will allow both games to function perfectly on computers using the Windows XP operating system.
In May, Falling Leaf Systems boldly claimed that they would be able to crack both games within months and they have delivered.
When the claim was made, CEO Brian Thomason added, "First [Microsoft] claim that it was impossible to implement DirectX 10 compatibility atop Windows XP, and now they also want us to believe that they couldn’t successfully launch two DirectX 9 based titles on XP either. We plan to expose both theories as patently false."
The classic cracker group Razor 1911 has also supposedly cracked Shadowrun to play on XP by simply replacing a few files although its effect on online play is yet to be determined.
This week, Dell unveiled a new Widescreen 24-inch LCD monitor that boasts what Dell calls TrueColor, a technology that gives the new 2407WFP-HC a greater color gamut than current LCD panels.
Currently, Dell offers the Ultrasharp 2407WFP which uses "Wide CCFL" technology and can only display anywhere between 50 and 70 percent of the NTSC color gamut. Dell claims that with the new TrueColor technology the 2407WFP-HC can display 92 percent of that Color Space.
Here are a few specs of the new monitor, according to Dailytech:
Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Response time: 6ms
Contrast ratio: 1,000:1
9-in-2 media card reader integrated into bezel
4 USB 2.0 ports
Users will still have to use expensive calibration devices such as ColorVision Spyder however, if they would like to guarantee a higher level of color accuracy.
There have been arguments that LED-backlights will still outperform CCFL displays with TrueColor due to LED-backlighting having better white point and brightness.
With the much hyped iPhone launch just a few days away many people are hoping to snatch up the 400,000 units on launch day from the thousands of Apple and AT&T stores around the US.
There had been minimum information leaked about the phone until last week when Apple told us about YouTube integration, a glass screen update, as well as a higher-capacity battery upgrade.
Today, more information was released with AT&T and Apple jointly announcing the rate plans that will be available for the phone.
"We want to make choosing a service plan simple and easy, so every plan includes unlimited data with direct Internet access, along with Visual Voicemail and a host of other goodies," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "We think these three plans give customers the flexibility to experience all of iPhone’s revolutionary features at affordable and competitive prices."
The base plan will be $59.99 USD and will get you 450 anytime minutes along with 5000 nights and weekend. The $79.99 plan bumps you up to 900 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends. The $100 rate plan will get you 1350 anytime minutes alongside unlimited nights and weekends.
The large computer manufacturer Toshiba announced today that it would begin bundling a free 30-day trial of the Starz Vongo movie download service with its Satellite and Qosmio laptops starting in July.
Thanks to their agreement with Vongo, the company will place a Vongo icon on each desktop to facilitate registration of the service. The service is usually $9.99 USD per month, said Starz.
Vongo is host to over 2500 videos and provides access to a live stream of one of the Starz movie channels. Vongo also offers several pay-per-view selections.
As of now however, the content is only available and viewable to those with Windows-based PCs.
Today, Robert Koster and Yutaka Yamamoto both pleaded guilty to selling almost $6 million worth of counterfeit software through eBay. The software was pirated versions of retail software produced by Rockwell Automation.
When they are sentenced, each could face up to five years in prison and $250,000 USD fines. The Justice Department said these two will join four other defendants in November for sentencing.
Rockwell creates software for factory management and the Justice Department said these latest two defendants made $30,000 USD in profits off 200 auctions of the counterfeit software from September 2003 to September 2004.
These two defendants are the eight and ninth convicted of being part of the same piracy ring.
Today, RealNetworks announced that they had released a beta for the latest RealPlayer, 11. The new version is completely different from previous versions in that it does not focus on desktop audio and video playback but instead on letting users download video from various websites.
After installing the software for the first time, whenever you visit websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion a "Download this Video" button will appear which will allow you to instantly download the videos off the sites. The new player also supports Flash, Windows Media and Quicktime in addition to RealVideo.
You can upgrade to a "Plus" version of RP11 for $29.99 USD which allows you to burn the videos to CDs and DVDs from within the player. Future updates promise direct transfer to iPods.
Direct2Drive announced yesterday that they had made an agreement with THQ to digitally distribute their PC games.
The hit games "Supreme Commander" and "STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl" are the first games to be released under the new agreement which will make them available on retail shelves and through digital distribution simultaneously.
"We’re proud to be the first to offer THQ’s roster of hit games to our consumers via digital distribution," said Direct2Drive's Jamie Berger.
"Our customers are passionate about great games and blockbusters like Supreme Commander, the award-winning Company of Heroes, and the full Dawn of War series are exciting additions to our unparalleled library of AAA games available for download."
Other top publishers that have partnered with D2D are 2K Games, Atari, Activision, Blizzard, Eidos, EA, Namco, NCSoft, SEGA, SOE, Ubisoft, and Vivendi-Universal.
Columbia House, the oldest and largest music and video club on the planet, has announced that they will be now carrying both HD DVD and Blu-ray titles before the end of the year. The statement was posted on the club's website.
The site added a general primer on what high-definition technology is and ended the primer with the following question, "Will Columbia House support both of these new formats?", for which the answer was "We plan to begin carrying both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs in the fall of 2007."
Although there has been no exact details on when they plan to begin selling the formats or what titles, the club has 14 million members worldwide and the addition of the formats should add significant awareness to consumers who otherwise had no idea they existed.
We reported two months ago that Hew Griffiths, the leader of the Warez group "DrinkOrDie" had pleaded guilty to copyright infringement after years of living as a fugitive. He was extradited from his home in Australia to the US for the sentencing.
Yesterday, he was sentenced to 51 months in prison for his guilty plea for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.
"From his home in Australia, Griffiths became one of the most notorious leaders of the underground Internet piracy community by orchestrating the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in copyrighted material," said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher in a statement.
DrinkOrDie is said to have been responsible for over $50 million USD in losses to software groups, record labels and movie studios during its run from 1993 to 2001. In the latter year the group was dismantled after 70 raids on their servers and homes occurred in the US, UK, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Australia.
Because Griffiths spent three years in a detention center in Australia the judge said he will only have to serve 15 months of his sentence.
According to a Microsoft representative, the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive is the "biggest-selling accessory" ever sold for the console and it is also more popular than standalone HD DVD players.
In April, the HD DVD Group announced that 100,000 standalone players had been sold in the US but did not include figures for the add-on or PC drives.
The representative said that 155,000 add-ons had been sold in the US and by "biggest-selling" he meant in overall revenue. Each add-on sells for an average of $200 USD.
With those numbers now released, we now know a ballpark figure as to how many HD DVD capable players there are and that number is between 300,000 and 400,000. That is small in comparison to the number of Blu ray players but most PS3s were purchased with the intent of gaming and not just movie watching.
According to CNET, "an average of one disc per Blu-ray machine is sold, compared to four discs per HD DVD machine".
However, Blu ray still leads in discs sold for the year.
The large public torrent tracker TorrentSpy, which has been ordered by a judge to start logging user activity, has now decided to give in and begin fighting piracy by adding a content filtering tool called FileRights.
The tool will filter content based on their hashes. FileRights however, will need movie studios and music labels to supply file hashes for their content if the tools is to be at all successful.
This seems to be a "good faith" effort by the admins of TorrentSpy in an effort to reduce penalties or sentences in their pending legal case.
TorrentSpy was ordered last week to log user activity but the site has claimed that they have never kept logs and therefore cannot produce any. The judge has said however, that the information necessary is in the server RAM and that TorrentSpy just needs to record it.
TorrentSpy is fighting the ruling with help from the EFF but have abandoned the fight over filtering. Their decision should show that they have no desire to incite infringement but it wont get them off the hook for the past years of infringement.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, MTV will, for the first time, release a full-length movie for mobile phones before it ever airs on television.
"Super Sweet 16: The Movie", an extension of the hit show, "My Super Sweet 16", will premier on Verizon's V Cast TV after it debuts a day earlier on Comcast's Movies on Demand service.
The movie will air on MTV on July 8th and be available for purchase on DVD two days later.
According to the network the movie "chronicles the story of two best friends trying to outdo each other as they both plan their long-awaited sweet 16 party."
Microsoft announced yesterday that it had strategically purchased a 1% stake in the major Chinese TV maker Changhong for about $12 million USD so that they can jointly develop entertainment products linking television and the Internet. Both companies hope to be part of the race for profits in the internet's growing status as a medium to distribute movies and other programs.
Microsoft and Changhong will begin exploring "a wide range of scenarios for digital entertainment needs," said Roger Chen, a Microsoft spokesman in Beijing.
"The project focuses on in-home network digital entertainment - how to connect PCs, TVs and the Internet to provide this digital entertainment experience," he said.
In recent months, Apple, Sony and other companies have announced their plans for devices that will allow downloaded movies and programs to be viewed on HDTVs rather than on the PC.
The fact that Microsoft chose China as a partner is no coincidence. It has the largest population of television viewers, cellphone users, and it is second behind the US in internet users. The country is also the leading producer of consumer electronics.
"Definitely China is a very important strategic market for Microsoft and on digital entertainment, a major potential market," said Chen.
Sony America has confirmed that the latest PSP firmware update, 3.5, has removed the software restriction that has capped the CPU speed of the handheld at 266 MHz.
The PSP is capable of a clock speed of 333 MHz, but it was locked at 80% of its full processing power most likely to lengthen battery life.
Now, thanks to the update, developers are able to code for the full speed and new titles currently in development will be coded for the new clock speed.
Take this news with a grain of salt however, because although the new games will run at higher frame rates, your battery will drain quicker.
Could this be the first step towards a complete overhaul and redesign of the PSP?
According to analysts participating at the Home Entertainment Summit: DVD and Beyond this week, standard DVD sales are down this year but sales for the year will remain flat thanks to next gen DVDs, namely Blu ray and HD DVD.
The analysts noted that "the disc gold rush days are long past", especially now that there is an 80% market penetration for DVD hardware.
“[The year could end] up flat, or slightly up, depending on the degree to which high-def takes off,” noted Kelly Avery, president of worldwide home entertainment at Paramount Pictures. “Box office for the summer is up 5% [compared to 2006], making it bigger than the last two summers.”
To date, worldwide spending on DVD purchases is down 2.6% from the same period last year, and in the US spending was down 5.2%.
Besides the falling sales, the participants added that they belive HD sales will help the industry stay flat or even return to growth.
“It’s in the very, very early days of our forecasts, but we believe that high-definition discs will help return consumer video spending to growth,” said Helen Davis Jayalath, senior analyst video at Screen Digest.
According to Screen Digest, gamers will have some impact on HD sales in the future, mainly due to the decent sales of the PlayStation 3 and its built in Blu ray drive. According to the group, by 2010, there will be 45 million next-gen consoles sold worldwide with many of those being the PS3. In the same period, there will be 30 million next gen stand alone players sold, with most of those being HD DVD players.
In another shocking statement by NBC's general counsel, Rick Cotton has once again pushed the limits of what can be seen as sane behavior. He has already said that law enforcement needs to spend more money on fighting piracy then on catching burglars, and bank robbers but now he has decided to show his support for the American farmer.
"In the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment."
I will leave this article with not much else to say but that movie theaters are doing great this year (read stickied article) and so are corn farmers. For that matter, pirates can still enjoy popcorn at home and I'm sure many do, considering it is much less expensive that way.
Finally, thank you Rick Cotton for another absurd comment.
This week at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, HBO announced that all of their HDTV programming will now be distributed in MPEG-4 instead of the standard MPEG-2.
By 2008, HBO will distribute 26 channels in HD MPEG-4, and the decision should have an impact on operators who work in an MPEG-2 environment.
The MPEG-2 operators will be forced to either transcode the HBO signal back down to MPEG-2 or upgrade their customer's set top boxes to be able to offer MPEG-4 distribution. Most operators will have to upgrade their networks as well.
Another complication of the decision is that HBO will encode their signal at 8 Mbps and mandate that there can be no further compression of the signal. That decision will give a competitive edge to cable MSOs and DBS networks that can easily distribute the signal and provide a better viewing experience. Operators using a DSL infrastructure will have problems, because the signal will become a "bandwidth hog" when compared to other signals.
Last year, the former NFL-player OJ Simpson announced that he was set to release a book in which he would detail what really would have happened had he actually committed the murders of his ex-wife and her friend. After weeks of consumer outrage, the book was canned and 400,000 copies were destroyed. This week however, a digital version of the book, "If I Did It", has been leaked to torrent trackers worldwide.
The book begins, “I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve heard the theories. And, of course, I’ve read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don’t know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.”
In 2006, the publisher Judith Regan called the book a confession. “This is an historic case, and I consider this his confession.”
This week, we reported that Michael Moore's "Sicko" was leaked to the internet, a week before its scheduled release date. It was first available on YouTube and then on P2P and torrent trackers.
Although Michael Moore has said that he does not mind people distributing his films online, the copyright owners are taking a different stance. Weinstein Co. has promised legal action if and when they find out who is responsible for uploading the film.
"Every DVD screener that comes from the Weinstein Co. is watermarked and traceable," Weinstein Co. general counsel Peter Hurwitz said. "We are actively investigating who illegally uploaded 'Sicko' to the Internet, and we will take appropriate action against that person(s)."
Although Weinstein Co. promised to find the uploader they may have a very hard time finding the individual or individuals. However, finding the person who was entrusted with the DVD screener in the first place should be much easier.
When Operation D-Elite began after the illegal uploading of Star Wars Episode III, the American uploader, Scott McCausland, got in trouble, especially because he was on an American-based torrent site and because he was also the administrator of the site.
The MPAA and the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) have unveiled their latest anti-camcording posters in an effort to curb piracy in US movie theaters. The posters' main aim is to raise awareness among moviegoers that camcording in movie theaters is now a federal offense.
Camcorded movies are still big business for pirates as camcorded versions are usually available online and on street corners within days of the movies' release.
“More than 90 per cent of newly released movies that end up on the Internet or in street markets around the world can be sourced to a single illegally camcorded movie from a movie theater. With these posters, we want to remind would-be camcord thieves that they can face serious consequences for engaging in this illegal activity and remind moviegoers to report any suspicious activity to theater management,” said MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman.
“Movie thieves are on notice that camcording in movie theaters is a crime. These new posters underscore our determination to stop illegal camcording in our theaters,” said NATO president and CEO John Fithian.
As of 2005, camcording in a US theater is a federal offense with convicted offenders being sentenced to a maximum five years in prison and/or a fine of $250,000 USD.
On the homepage of their new reality show "Pirate Master", CBS has been linking to .torrent files from several public and private torrent tracker sites. This may be useful if you have missed the latest broadcast, but it is also illegal, as in many countries it is copyright infringement to download TV shows.
The article image is directly taken from the Pirate Master homepage (courtesy of TF). The homepage is supposed to list news items about the show from blogs but it is instead showing torrent links from sites such as Mininova, bitDig and even private trackers such as Torrentleech.
Although it is unlikely that CBS is purposely linking to the files, they are most likely using an RSS feed aggregator that includes torrent trackers.
There is the chance however, that CBS has decided on purposely linking to the trackers. In April, CBS’s chief research officer David Poltrac spoke out about how YouTube and BitTorrent should be considered friends and not foes. He based his sentiments on a CBS poll that showed that people who download TV shows actually watch more TV.
Poltrack is also a believer in free TV over the internet, supported by ads. In his own words, “if [consumers] are going to steal it, give it to them anyway. But also make it easier to access and present it better than YouTube or BitTorrent or anywhere else.”
According to a new Smarthouse survey of electronics retailers, about 30 percent of Xbox 360 systems die prematurely and leave the users with the infamous "red ring of death" around their power button signifying that one or more components are not working properly.
An EB Games manager said that the failure rate is dropping as Microsoft "refines" the process, but that the rate is still much higher than those of the Wii and PS3.
Another anonymous retailer echoed the previous statement, "At one stage we were getting calls everyday however this has slowed down," he noted. "The failure rate must be well over 30% which when you look at a PC or iPod the failure rate is less than 2%."
The failures are mainly due to overheating generated by the 360's processor or graphics chip, both of which are still made using the same process introduced for the console's launch in 2005.
The failures are typically associated with overheating generated by the Xbox 360's triple-core processor or its ATI-made graphics chip, both of which are made using the same chip processes introduced for the console's November 2005 North American launch. There have however, been reports that Microsoft is shipping added cooling on replacement untis to help comabt the overheating issue.
Today, Apple provided an in-depth look into the upcoming iPhone, a week before the phone hits retail stores in the US.
Apple posted a 20-minute guided tour for the phone that showcases the many features of the phone and explains how to best use the touch screen.
The tour doesn't disclose anything major that hasn't been known about the iPhone, but it does provide a first look at many of innovations such as visual voicemail and SMS text messaging the works like the popular iChat program. According to the video, the iPhone's email client will support Microsoft Word and Excel documents, which is a new disclosure.
Stepping up its efforts to attract new high-definition customers, Cablevision said today that they will have the capability to carry more than 500 channels of HD programming by the end of the year.
In a somewhat surprising move, the 15 HD channels of Voom will become part of Cablevision's new offering, making 40 networks total available to customers. Voom is owned by the DISH Network.
"The VOOM channels represent the pinnacle of high-definition and we are pleased to extend our leadership position in this important category through the introduction of these exciting services," Cablevision senior VP John Trierweiler added.
Voom runs HDNews, Animania, GamePlay HD, World Cinema, and a few other HD networks.
HD is rapidly growing in popularity as consumers have been buying HDTVs in record numbers. DirecTV has said they will have 150 channels in HD available by the end of the year and Verizon has promised heavy HD focus for their FiOS product.
Comcast has been lagging so far but claims that it will offer 400 "choices" by the end of the year. The company defines choices as "both on-demand and broadcast channels combined."
According to data from a new NPD Group report, Apple's iTunes has surpassed Amazon and Target to become the third largest music retailer for music sales over the first quarter of this year. Wal-Mart finished in first with 15.8 percent of the overall market while Best Buy was second with 13.8 percent. Apple grew to 9.8 percent while Amazon and Target had 6.7 and 6.6 percent respectively.
NPD says they counted every 12 tracks purchased online as the equivalent of one physical CD album. The report does not however, include mobile music sales.
Russ Crupnick, NPD's vice president also noted that CD sales were once again down, while digital music sales continued to climb. "Digital continues to grow at a fairly strong clip," Crupnick said. "Obviously, physical sales have been soft this year."
EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg that DRM-free music was much more popular than DRMed music and that sales have been "good" since the label began selling its music without DRM this month on iTunes Plus.
Berkowitz noted that since iTunes Plus was launched, sales of the Pink Floyd classic "Dark Side of the Moon" were up 270 percent. Industry analysts have noted that digital sales for other EMI artists have risen but physical CD sales have fallen.
Although iTunes is currently the only store offering the music, Amazon, 7digital and f.y.e will begin to sell the unprotected music soon.
EMI seems confident that the unprotected tracks will continue to sell well, even after the initial hype fades away. We can only hope that sales continue well and other labels follow in EMI's footsteps.
According to a BREIN press release, a court has ruled that a Dutch web hosting company, Leaseweb, must shut down a private torrent site, Everlasting.nu. The identity of the website owner will also need to be divulged thanks to the ruling.
BREIN serves the same purpose as the MPAA and although it has been unsuccessful in obtaining personal information in the past, they have recently enjoyed success in taking down torrent tracker sites as well as eDonkey2000 indexing sites. BREIN boasts that they have shut down 150 indexing sites in total.
BREIN sent a cease and desist letter to Everlasting and Leaseweb but neither party chose to cooperate and so BREIN initiated legal action. The presiding judge obviously ruled in BREIN's favor. If Leaseweb continues to not cooperate, the company will face legal ramifications.
“Leaseweb is a known provider of illegal sites" says BREIN."This verdict is the beginning of breaking down this safe haven for illegality. More cases will follow. They must comply or BREIN will sue.”
Sony announced that it expects at least 380 new PlayStation 3 games for the next fiscal year and that it hopes the games will help boost demand for the console which is falling behind in sales behind its rivals.
To date, there are only 150 games available for the PS3, including PSN online titles.
CEO Howard Stringer said on Thursday, "Attractive game software is the key to accelerate PS3 growth over the next year".
Due to the start-up costs of the PS3, Sony's gaming division posted an almost $2 billion USD loss and investors were obviously not pleased.
Stringer said he expected 200 of the 380 titles to be packaged games, and that the other 180 would be available through PSN.
"PlayStation 3 going forward will be vital to our future and we'll succeed," added Stringer.
On Thursday, Creative updated its iPod Shuffle rival, the Zen Stone, by adding a "Plus" model.
The new model will have double the capacity of the original; 2GB, and will include a color screen, as well as FM radio and voice recording. The Zen Stone works just as the Shuffle does, including play and random features. The Zen Stone Plus will also hold about 500 songs if encoded at 128kbps. There are also silicone skins available that will allow consumers to change the color of their player to any of the five colors available.
The Plus follows the release of the original which hit shelves last month for $39.99 USD. When the Plus goes on sale in July it will have a $69.99 price tag.
The high-quality music site MusicGiants announced yesterday that they had begun offering DRM-free music, and that the new release of Paul McCartney's latest album, Memory Almost Full would be the first DRM-free tracks on the site. CEO Scott Bahneman added that the service will be releasing more DRM-free albums later in the year.
MusicGiants got itself noticed by offering high quality lossless tracks in WMA format when it launched last year. Lossless tracks should sound exactly as if they are on a physical CD. The company boasts that it is the only site to offer such high quality tracks.
The site is selling the new McCartney album for $15.29 USD, which is a premium over many other legal music download stores. It is good to see more and more stores moving towards consumer freedom.
Thanks to new third-party modification, Xbox 360 controllers will be able to sense tilting motions and then translate those movements in-game in the way Wii and PlayStation 3 controllers do.
The new mod, called the Tiltboard is basically a circuit board with ICs and solder points in a similar fashion to illegal mod chips. The board must be placed inside the controller casing and will require the soldering of seven separate wires.
The Tiltboard is very similar to the SIXAXIS controllers of the PS3 and it senses motion and maps it to the right analog stick.
The mod also adds two buttons to the back of the controller that enable or disable the tilting as well as adjust sensitivity, angle and inverted settings.
The Tiltboard is to go on sale online only in 12 countries including the US and UK for about $40 USD.
Today, StarTech released its SLIMDVDRW8U2 compact, portable burner for those lacking optical drives and users who prefer to use the same burner for multiple systems.
The drive, made by Panasonic is ultra-compact, measuring only a half an inch high. It has an max 8x burning speed for single layer burning and 4x for dual-layer discs. The drive can also burn DVD-RW and DVD-RAM discs at 6X and 5X respectively.
The drive is completely powered through its USB 2.0 connection and also uses a special tray-loading mechanism for ability to read mini CDs and DVDs that are used by the occasional camcorder.
The drive goes on sale today or $155 USD and is supported by almost all Mac and Windows PCs.
Izumi Kawanishi and Kanehide, two of Sony's technical officers, recently made comments that they believe there is room for a 30 to 40% improvement in the PlayStation 3 as an AV unit. They believe the improvement can occur in future firmware updates.
The pair also concluded that the upgrades would not have an adverse effect on fan noise, and even implied that there was a possibility of a fan-less model in the future.
"So far, we are not worried too much since we have plenty of processing power left even at peak usage," AV development boss Kanehide said.
Platform development boss Kawanishi agreed: "Nothing yet comes close to the load that Folding@Home applies. And I can see the possibility of a fan-less PS3 in the future, just like there was for the PS2."
Recent firmware updates have added upscaling support for PS1 and PS2 games as well as remote-play.
Finally, the pair added that future firmware updates would be mainly based on what consumers wanted, "The scary thing about the PS3 is that we can continue to add updates as long as there is space on the HDD," concluded Kawanishi. "We won't stop though, since adding new functionality is a lot of fun. We really enjoy getting feedback from the customers, and finding things we really hadn't thought of."
Media players that stream content from the Internet are nothing new in today's market, but VeohTV wants to put its gloves into the ring. On the heels of similar players such as Joost and AppleTV, VeohTV hopes that its set of features will be enough to catch its own market share in this growing industry.
Although still in the beta phase, VeohTV claims to have already made agreements with "thousands of video sources" including the likes of NBC, Fox, Fight Channel, Car and Driver, as well as sites like YouTube, to name just a few. Currently, the software that runs VeohTV is on an invite only status where you fill out your information, and the company will send you a direct download link to the beta trial.
VeohTV will be a free software that you download, install on your dedicated media server PC and watch or even record your favorite media from many different Internet sources. Thats not all. VeohTV will offer users an experience complete with an interactive guide to browse favorite media subjects and if your media server comes equipped with a remote control, you can even control the guide through it. Additionally, VeohTV acts much like the popular TiVo where it can actually "learn" what you like to watch and, if allowed, fetch similar Internet programs for you to watch at your leisure. All media streamed through the software can also be "recorded" to your hard drive for viewing at a later date. Its too early to tell what type of copy protection, if any will be implemented.
Today, Warner Home Video announced a pact with Dark Castle Entertainment that will mean a series of direct-to-video horror sequels will be coming to both HD DVD and Blu ray.
The line will be the first ever movies to come direct to next gen discs, although the films will also be released on the internet as a legal download and on standard DVDs.
Warner said the first movie will be released in October, entitled "Return to the House on Haunted Hill" a sequel to the 2000 blockbuster "House on Haunted Hill".
The HD versions of the movie will include interactive "navigational cinema" technology that will allow to viewer to make seven choices as the story unfolds, for a total of 90 different variations of the film.
"We are continually looking for fresh and edgy ideas for our films and for our fans to experience," Dark Castle co-founder Joel Silver added.
BD Plus Technologies LLC announced yesterday that it had begun issuing specifications to content providers that would allow use of its patented BD Plus copy protection system.
The copy protection, usually known as BD+, allows for added levels of copy protection on current Blu ray format specifications. With the announcement, the technology is now ready for implementation by content providers and surely Hollywood will be implementing it as soon as possible. Since Blu ray's launch last year, many major Hollywood studios have expressed interest in added security for their movies, not wanting to see a repeat of what happened to standard DVDs with DeCSS
FOX and MGM stopped shipping new high-def titles in April, saying they would again when BD+ became available.
So far, no studio has announced they will be using the technology, but rest assured the announcements will be coming soon.
Fans of the Cupertino California based company Apple have long awaited the famed iPhone for its promise of being the all-in-one gadget to own. With its ability to play music, watch videos and much more along with being a cellular phone, now anxious consumers can add one more feature to its healthy list.
Apple has announced that users of the iPhone will be able to stream video through Wi-Fi connectivity directly from YouTube. While YouTube has enjoyed great success for streaming videos to desktop users, there hasn't been much attention paid to mobile users. YouTube says they are now working on encoding a new format for their video streams to work seamlessly with cellular technology. Their hopes are that the new format will help aid in conserving battery life as well as keeping video quality up to the standards of the mobile user.
The Apple iPhone will be the first mobile device to receive YouTube's newly encoded content and is claimed to have some 10,000 video streams available when the iPhone launches on June 29th. YouTube also claims that new content will be added and available each week after the initial launch.
While the phone will use service from AT&T primarily, it will not get the benefit of the company's high speed cellular data links. In response, Apple claims that the YouTube content will operate fine and efficiently over the phone's short range Wi-Fi network connections.
Hostel: Part II director Eli Roth has blamed the lackluster box office sales of his latest movie on "rampant piracy".
"Piracy has become worse than ever now, and a stolen workprint (with unfinished music, no sound effects, and no VFX) leaked out on online before the release, and is really hurting us, especially internationally," he said.
He then insulted critics who reviewed a leaked "workprint" copy of the movie that surfaced weeks before the actual release date. "Critics have actually been reviewing the film based off the pirated copy, which is inexcusable," he says. "Some of these critics I have actually known for a few years, and while I wouldn't dignify them by mentioning them by name, I know who they are, as do the studios, and other filmmakers, and they will no longer have any access to any of my films."
As for his future, Roth proclaimed, "I am not directing Cell any time soon, and I most likely will take the rest of the year to write my other projects. Which means I wouldn't shoot until the spring and you wouldn't see a film directed by me in the cinemas until at least next fall." He goes on to say that in Hollywood, "the R-rated horror film is in serious jeopardy. Studios feel the public doesn't want them anymore, and so they are only putting PG-13 films into production. The only way to counter this perception is to get out there and support R-rated horror."
On Monday, Microsoft announced that it had filed suit against Immersion, just weeks after the company settled its legal battle with Sony. Microsoft said there was a breach of contract due to the settlement, which was over the patent right for rumble controllers.
"We entered into a binding licensing agreement with Immersion and are seeking to have that agreement honored," Microsoft Associate General Counsel Steve Aeschbacher said to CNET in a statement. "Microsoft licenses technology both in and out and relies on these agreements to be honored and enforced. Our request to the court is that all companies and industry partners should play by the same rules and that the binding agreement we signed with Immersion be honored."
Throughout 2002 and 2003, Immersion was trapped in legal battles with Sony and Microsoft over their vibrating controllers and Sony eventually lost while Microsoft negotiated a royalty payment program with Immersion.
"In particular, it provides that if Immersion settles the Sony Lawsuit ... for an amount up to $100,000,000, Immersion shall pay Microsoft the sum of $15,000,000. If Immersion settles the Sony Lawsuit for an amount between $100,000,000 and $150,000,000, Immersion shall pay Microsoft an additional amount equal to 25% of the amount of the settlement in excess of $100,000,000. If Immersion Settles the Sony Lawsuit for an amount in excess of $150,000,000, Immersion shall pay Microsoft an additional amount equal to 17.5% of the amount of the settlement in excess of $150,000,000."
On Tuesday, the huge social video site YouTube launched nine localized versions of its site to countries around the world. The navigation and functionality of the new sites will be in the countries native language.
Eventually, the local YouTubes hope to offer localized content including featured pages targeted towards the consumers of the countries they are in.
The nine initial countries included are Brazil, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
Users in those countries can continue to keep YouTube in English or switch to their language using the menu bar at the top of the page.
Each YouTube will also not only be subdomains of youtube.com, the company in each country except Italy has purchased the domain for their specific country.
Many bloggers and analysts believe that the move was a long time coming. "Opening up the site to a non-English speaking audience will drive a new wave of growth that will further cement YouTube's place as the leading online destination for on-demand internet video," said Duncan Riley of TechCrunch.
Although his resignation was announced a couple months ago, Ken Kutaragi, the father of PlayStation, officially stepped down today from his position at Sony.
Sony Computer Entertainment will now be lead by Kazuo Hirai, who is currently the president of the worldwide branch of the PlayStation division.
Hirai is considered an ally of CEO Howard Stringer, who was known to be at odds with Kutaragi before he announced his resignation. Sony has said Kutaragi will stay with the company, but solely in an advisory position.
It is also well known that Kutaragi's stubbornness and argumentative personality may cost Sony in the long run. He questioned the manufacturing practices of the console and went way over budget in development. Sony's gaming unit may not see a profit on the console for a couple of years because of that fact, and the PlayStation 3's current price is so high because of it.
Either way, his resignation is the end of an era, and Kutaragi will always be remembered for his work at Sony.
Yesterday, the Blu ray camp got an unexpected new exclusive backer, the Starz Home Entertainment, which announced its exclusive support alongside the release of its feature "Masters of Horror".
The news came at the Sixth Annual Home Entertainment Summit when Starz Home Entertainment President Bill Clark revealed the exclusive support for the camp.
Although no other titles were announced, Starz did say many more in their catalogue would follow 'Horror'.
The news is even more noteworthy because Starz owns the catalogue of Anchor Bay Entertainment, one of, if not the, most popular independent genre suppliers for standard DVDs.
A few in Anchor's library are the classics, 'Halloween,' 'The Evil Dead,' 'Re-Animator' and the original 'Night of the Living Dead.'
More importantly for Blu ray, Clark said that they had no plans to release any movies for rival HD DVD.
Sony has started making what it calls "minisodes" of various television shows available online. Each minisode is comprised of a television that's been stripped down to just be just 3-5 minutes long. The shows, which are sponsored by even shorter ads from Honda, can be seen on MySpace, and even added to individual MySpace pages. Sony also has a website which hosts what they're calling the Minisode Network, where you can find links to the minisodes.
According to a release from MySpace, new ones will be added each week and more than 500 total will be online by the end of 2007. It's not clear whether this means that new shows will be added as well or if the 'minisodes' will remain restricted to the current 15.
The creative minds behind Joost have begun talking about including Joost support into televisions and cellphones via embedded support.
Analysts feel this move would and could be a very good move. Joost has a nice arsenal of channels but faces the problems of all other IPTV services. The service is centered around the home PC instead of the home TV and entertainment center. Everyone can agree it is easier to sit around the plasma and enjoy TV then sit around the PC monitor, and clearly Joost understands this.
Joost's new CEO Michelangelo Volpi had this to say, "Joost is a piece of software and it can reside on a variety of platforms… It could be on a television set-top box. Or potentially it could be embedded in a TV set with an Ethernet connection, or on a mobile phone, or in some alternative device that might come out in the future."
Joost might have some issues however. They will have to compete with Akimbo and Slingbox which have been offering video content to televisions for years. Joost however, is free unlike those competitors. Joost's biggest problem will most definitely be getting the large TV manufacturers to include the software with their TVs which will certainly not happen without an extensive revenue-sharing deal.
In response to a lawsuit filed in April by Hitachi, LG Electronics has filed a countersuit claiming Hitachi is infringing on their plasma display panel patents. The two electronics giants have been working on a licensing agreement since 2005, but seem to have a fundamental difference of opinion over what is covered by each company's patents.
Jeong Hwan Lee, executive vice president and head of the LG Electronics intellectual property center, vowed to "uncompromisingly protect" LG's intellectual property and blamed competition in the global display market for the number of lawsuits that have cropped up in the industry.
According to the latest MPAA study, all-media revenue for 2006 was 8% higher than 2005, and reached $42.6 billion USD. The "all-media" references money made from home video, television, theatrical and pay TV entertainment.
The confidential report disclosed that all-media sales grew by 10% in the US and 5% in the top 25 international markets.
In 2005, sales were down and all-media revenue decreased 8.2% from the year before.
Canada, recently deemed a "haven for piracy", showed the biggest growth in terms of dollars by adding $341 million USD, a huge jump of 23%.
Russia, another so-called haven of piracy, moved up to become the 13th-ranked purchaser of U.S. filmed entertainment, a 50% hike from last year.
Theatrical revenue in Europe was $2.1 billion, matching 2004's record. Other notable stats included the death of the VHS which fell to 1% of overall all-media market share for the year.
The survey covered revenue recorded by the Walt Disney Co., Paramount Pictures Corp., Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Film Corp., Universal City Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
The only question that remains is, where are all these multi-billion dollar losses due to piracy?
According to paidcontent.org, Sony has decided to close their Connect music and video download division and instead focus on their struggling PlayStation group.
Of Connect, only the eBooks division will remain with the leftover employees transitioned over to work on the PlayStation. The decision was almost certainly based on the digital music market in which Apple has a huge, almost insurmountable share.
The Sony Connect cheif will leave the company and it is not known whether the eBooks division will keep the Connect name.
Sony Connect was doomed from the start, mainly because of its decision to only include the Sony proprietary format in its downloads, a format that could only be read by Sony's players. There was also a lack of marketing, possibly due to internal disagreements over where the division was heading.
Apple announced on Monday that they have updated the upcoming iPhone and that the estimated battery life was now two hours longer than anticipated. Apple also said they had upgraded the plastic face to optical-quality glass.
Battery life is one of the most common complaints for smartphones and most heavy users are forced to carry around their chargers or a second battery just to make it through the day. With the new upgrade, users should have 8 hours of talk time and 6 hours worth of data.
Apple also claims the device can remain on standby for 11 days and play 7 hours of video, a figure that seems very high.
The new display makes the device more resistant to scratching and better for video viewing.
As always, CEO Steve Jobs released a statement hyping the product and its updates, "There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can't wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today".
Today at NXTcomm, a major telecommunications industry event, Microsoft announced the most recent updates to its IPTV platform. Microsoft Mediaroom, as the platform is now known, has been updated to include features for sharing music and images from your home computer, multiple picture in picture capabilities, and a development environment for creating custom multimedia applications. It also now includes support for DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) signals.
“In the highly competitive television market, a well-regarded brand can be a very strong asset,” said Christine Heckart, general manager of worldwide marketing for Microsoft TV. “By leveraging Microsoft Mediaroom as an ingredient brand, service providers can take advantage of the worldwide awareness, positive attributes and consumer preference for Microsoft-based solutions.”
World's largest movie rental chain, Blockbuster, has decided to drop HD DVD from its local store selection and opt for Blu-ray only strategy. Company has 1,450 rental outlets and 1,200 of them will expand their Blu-ray selection in next month.
Company has run limited trials since late last year in 250 stores that have carried both, HD DVD and Blu-ray, titles and according to the company, people have opted for Blu-ray title in more than 70 percent of the cases.
Blockbuster will continue its HD DVD selection in 250 stores and also in its online rental service, but all remaining 1,200 stores will be Blu-ray only starting July, 2007.
Blockbuster's decision might spark a "domino effect" through the movie rental industry, if other large rental chains follow the suit.
According to an earnings call with Laine Goldstein, the Take-Two CFO, $50 million changed owners as Microsoft secures downloadable content for GTA IV. With this hefty amount of money, Xbox 360 will get two content packages.
"The first 25 [million dollars] is for the first episodic content package that’s supposed to go out and that is in March of ’08.", "The second 25 [million dollars] will be for the second episodic, the episode, and that will be later in fiscal ’08," said Laine Goldstein about money paid by Microsoft.
Nowhere is mentioned PS3 exclusives or episodic content, and asking the difference between Xbox 360 and PS3 version of the game Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two comments, "Obviously we’ve episodic content coming for X-Box 360 for the title and because the consoles do differ, there will be some differences in the games." This doesn't exactly raise the hopes of PS3 owners, but it is still a bit too early to say.
A thread over at AVS Forum has been running for weeks now, discussing what many have discovered; "Blu-ray disc rot". Some users are reporting finding small spots on their discs that render them unplayable, particularly with "The Prestige". However, as it usually goes, many other users are reporting that their discs are still working correctly and do not show the dreaded signs of rot.
It's impossible to use a forum to judge how widespread a problem really is, but in the past, forum posts have lead to product recalls. If you check your Blu-ray titles now and find that the data side seems to be showing signs of rot (picture below), you should seek a refund or replacement disc immediately.
Here is an image posted by the user Venom5 on AVS Forum...
YouTube is attempting to keep up with some of its competitors by offering video editing capabilities to its users via an online editing tool provided by Adobe Systems. The tool, dubbed "remixer", will allow users to easily create more professional looking videos by splicing together media such as video clips, photos, music, graphics and other effects, according to information found on the site.
Photobucket and Yahoo Video already offer similar services to users. Yahoo acquired Jumpcut last September, a pioneer in Internet-based editing tools. Photobucket launched an Abode-branded editor back in February. The online editing tools cater well to amateurs, particularly users who have just discovered digital video production in general.
Sites like YouTube have sparked a broad interest in the creation of professional-looking videos, with users of the sites often competing with each other or commenting on each others video editing/effects skills. This has created an opportunity for the developers of video editing software to market low-priced tools that can perform tasks that would cater well to amateur web video creators.
We rarely report about early movie leaks on the Internet unless there is some significance to it other than piracy. Examples would be the outrage when Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith leaked early and was a main reason for "Operation D-Elite".
Another example is how rampant piracy of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 caused news outlets to report about a video of Moore explaining he is happy that his movies, books and TV shows are shared as long as its not for profit, and does not really agree with copyright laws.
However, Fahrenheit 9/11 was being shared heavily on the Internet "after" its theatrical release. This time around, a copy of Moore's highly-anticipated "Sicko" movie is being snatched up by thousands of pirates well ahead of its June 29th release date. What makes this interesting is how Moore's personal views on file sharing and copyright applies to such an early leak.
Of course, this could be exactly what Sicko needs and might not even be accidental. If you have been following the news, you know that the U.S. Government is investigating a trip Moore took to Cuba with workers from the World Trade Center site so they could receive health care they could not get at home. There was speculation that Sicko could have been "impounded" by the federal government due to the Cuba issue - so much so that Moore found it a necessity to stash a copy of the movie in Canada.
According to NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton, today's society is wasting its time battling crimes such as home burglary, bank robbery and fraud. The incredible statement was made to suggest that more effort should be put in to battling piracy due to the financial damage it does to the entertainment industry.
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
The argument is hardly convincing, especially since the industry's own nit-picked reports claim much less than "hundreds of billions of dollars" in losses per year. For example, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) cites a study from Smith Barney in 2005 that puts their annual loss at less than $6 billion.
Also, you might have a tough time finding an example of how somebody was stabbed or shot during an intellectual property crime, whereas people are often attacked and even killed while being burgled and bank robbers do shoot hostages and employees. Perhaps somebody should suggest to Cotton that protecting against the theft of physical property and of course, protecting human life, is more important than intellectual property protection.
Google Inc. has sent its Google Video service further down the search engine path by adding clips from other popular video sites to its database. The updated Google Video service still shows the results of its own videos and YouTube results, but now also offers results from Metacafe, MySpace, BBC, and Yahoo Video. Search results will show thumbnail snapshots of videos hosted from these sites.
Earlier this year, the company had announced it planned to turn Google Video into a search service for multimedia content online after questions were raised about its fate when Google acquired YouTube. The company continues to expand on its offerings to the online video revolution despite constant copyright complaints and criticism of its services.
YouTube, which is currently being sued by Viacom Inc. for over $1 billion, is testing out "video fingerprinting" technology that could identify clips that have been uploaded without permission and give content providers an option to delete them. Such technology could also be developed further to act as an automatic shield against uploading of such videos.
AT&T has announced plans to step up efforts against Internet piracy being carried out on its network. The company will work closely with Hollywood movies studios and record companies to produce technology that can identify offshore content pirates that upload thousands of illegal files through AT&T's network. Privacy advocates have already voiced concerns about the plans, particularly because of how little details have been given on how it operates.
"What we're trying to do here is see if we can devise a technology that can address the problem,"James W. Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said. "Then we'll have to address the legal issues that flow out of using such a technology." Cicconi acknowledged that AT&T's interests have become more aligned with content providers.
AT&T offers its own television service to consumers to compete with cable and satellite providers (and also Verizon Communications Inc.). "We've been considering these issues of piracy, and we do feel the interests of our shareholders are aligned with the interests of the content community," Cicconi said. "We very much have a stake, as they do, in trying to stem illegal appropriation of that content."
According to the latest NPD sales figures, the Nintendo Wii continues to dominate the North American market, with Nintendo selling more consoles than both Sony and Microsoft combined.
During the month of May, 338,000 Wii consoles were sold, compared to 155,000 Xbox 360s and only 82,000 PlayStation 3s. The Nintendo DS did even better, moving 423,000 units during the month. The Sony gaming handheld, PSP, sold 221,000 units mainly thanks to a recent price cut. The PlayStation 2 continued to sell well, pushing 188,000 units for the month.
Overall, console sales rose 79 percent during the month to hit $221 million USD.
In an update to our previous aritcle here, Sony has sent an apology letter to the Dean of Manchester Cathedral, apologizing for any offence caused by their hit game Resistance: Fall of Man.
The letter states, "It was not our intention to cause offence by using a representation of Manchester Cathedral in chapter eight of the work. If we have done so, we sincerely apologize."
However, Sony does not accept "that there is any connection between contemporary issues in 21st century Manchester and the work of science fiction in which a fictitious 1950s Britain is under attack by aliens.
We believe a comprehensive viewing of the work will make its content and context clear."
The letter also included an offer for Sony officials to meet with Church officials. The Dean said the Cathedral will accept the offer and hope to continue discussions over Resistance being withdrawn or Sony making a donation towards the Church's initiative against gun violence.
In a joint announcement, Yahoo Japan and Apple have said that Yahoo has replaced a Sony-affiliated music download service with the iTunes platform as the default music store on Yahoo Music Japan.
The partnership is very good news for Apple, due to the fact that Yahoo is Japan's hottest portal site, reaching 84 percent of the country's internet users. Users who visit Yahoo Music Japan will be able to access iTunes through a very prominent one-click access link.
The old download service, Mora, will still be available but it is no longer the default. Users can change their preferences after logging into the service.
Google has been gathering a few of its top executives for an international press conference in Paris next week and there is speculation that an announcement of a local version of YouTube is upcoming for European countries where English is not the primary language.
A French public TV channel, France 24, confirmed that they have been in talks with Google which fueled the rumor even more. Google however, has not commented on France 24 or the speculation.
YouTube is already very popular in Europe, but the interface is solely in English. Effectively adding more local languages and local TV content would help to boost popularity even higher and help YouTube compete with homegrown alternatives such as DailyMotion.
DailyMotion, which can be viewed in many languages, had 6.6 million unique visitors in April, compared to 5.8 million for YouTube. In Germany however, YouTube was the most viewed with 7.6 million visitors, slightly ahead of Germany's own MyVideo.de.
If Google was to cut deals with European TV programming, it would help avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits and would continue in Google's strategy of joining with media providers for providing content.
Thanks to a new service called MusicStation, European customers will be able to download an unlimited amount of music to their mobile phones.
MusicStation launched in Sweden on Tuesday, and it will hit major markets in the rest of Europe, as well as Asia and Africa over the next few months. The company says it has agreements with 30 operators and hopes to serve over 100 million phones within the year.
North American plans for the service were not specified at all during the announcement.
The service would be like a Napster of sorts, which instead of charging per song, instead there would be a weekly charge of 2.99 euros for unlimited downloads. Your only limitation is the amount of memory your mobile phone has.
The company also said that eventually the tracks would be able to be transferred to your PC, but that part of the service was not currently available.
"MusicStation's launch today heralds the beginning of the next generation of mobile music," Rob Lewis said, CEO of the service's parent company Omnifone.
Over 1 million tracks would be offered by the service, including music from the "Big 4", Universal Music, Sony BMG, Warner Music, and EMI.
Yesterday, the MPAA accused the large torrent tracker site TorrentSpy of withholding evidence that was stored on the site's servers.
TorrentSpy is involved in a court battle with a few media companies over copyright infringements. According to CNET, a federal judge has decided that, for the first time in history, the electronic trail in a computer server's RAM must be turned over as evidence during litigation.
The judge ordered the site to begin logging user activity and IP addresses and turn the data over to the MPAA. The judge gave TorrentSpy until Tuesday to file an appeal as well as allowing the site to mask the IP addresses of its users for the time being.
TorrentSpy responded to the judges' decision by saying, "We have spent the last year challenging their relentless campaign against the 1st Amendment and personal privacy laws Worldwide. We have succeeded in delaying the court order to turn on logs while we appeal it. TorrentSpy will not create logs of what you do on the site without your consent."
TorrentSpy has also said they will not release any user information and have never tracked IP addresses.
The highly anticipated Apple iPhone hits stores on June 29th, and many rumors as well as debates have come with its hype.
The latest specification that has come to light is the fact that you will be required to have an iTunes Store account if you ever plan on setting up and configuring your new phone.
Apple is well known for confining their users to its many different services, and this is no different. The account will be a seperate account from the one you can sign up with AT&T, the phone's exclusive distributer, and this move would force non-regular Apple customers to have to subscribe to the store thus expanding the store's market.
Electronics giant Samsung will be releasing the world's largest commercially available LCD TV when it launches the 70" LN70F91BD in Korea this month.
The new TV will also have an LED backlight instead of the traditional CCFL backlight and the new light should improve picture quality.
"I am pleased to introduce the 70" Full-HD LCD TV with innovative Local Dimming Technology," said Samsung Digital Media President JongWoo Park. "Samsung will continue to strengthen its LCD TV leadership, enhancing Full-HD and large screen LCD TV line-up."
Samsung also said a new technology they dubbed "local dimming backlighting" will help to produce deeper blacks, a problem that has plagued current LCDs. The "local dimming backlighting" will allow for maximum brightness when the LEDs are at full power, or clearer, deeper blacks when the LEDs are completely turned off.
Because of the LED backlights, Samsung says the TV has a very nice dynamic contrast ratio of 500,000:1 and power consumption is cut by up to 50 percent. The TV will also have ACAP, three HDMI 1.3 ports and a single USB 2.0 port.
The TV will be available outside of Korea later this year, and currently has an astonishing price tag of $63,000 USD.
Sony boss Howard Stringer has reiterated that the company understands consumers overwhelmingly would like the cost of the PS3 dropped, and said Sony is working on "refining" how far it can afford to drop the console's price.
According to his interview with the Financial Times, Stringer noted that "While people have not bought as many PlayStation 3s as it looks, it is no different from PS2 and PS1 in terms of percentage of sales...I think that the public would like the cost to be lower, there’s no question about that."
When the interviewer asked how much Sony could afford to cut the price, Stringer responded, "That’s what we’re studying at the moment; that’s what we’re trying to refine." Stringer also confided that the "refinement" would be done before Christmas and that he understood that the recent price cut of the Sony gaming handheld, PSP had sent sales "into an upward spiral".
"So I think PlayStation 3’s travails are usually solved by time. And it will have an instant gratification environment, not only in life but in the press as well as everything else. It’s a good story right now, 'Will PlayStation 3 get to Christmas?' And the answer is, of course it will get to Christmas."
The giant music label EMI has begun allowing more legal music downloading stores to use its catalogue, DRM-free.
PassAlong Networks, a company that provides the technology for online stores such as f.y.e and 7digital, a UK online music store, have secured licenses to use the catalogues and both plan to sell the tracks at a higher bitrate then iTunes currently uses.
iTunes encodes the EMI catalogue at 256 Kbps, but the new licenses can go even higher, as high as 320 Kpbs. The new services will also use MP3 instead of Apple's AAC format.
"We applaud EMI Music's bold decision to test the DRM-free waters," said PassAlong Networks' CEO Dave Jaworski. "Music consumers have demanded interoperability and ease of use and we hope that by offering EMI Music's DRM-free music files, we will simplify and improve their digital music experience."
Just as the HD DVD Promotional Group is set to cut global sales forecasts for HD DVD players, Sony has said that shipments of its Blu-ray disc players could jump to about 600,000 this year. The company attributes growing demand for Blu-ray to movie titles released exclusively for the Blu-ray disc format.
Out of the top 20 blockbusters "there were 14 or 15 that were exclusive to Blu-ray", Sony's Randy Waynick told a meeting in San Francisco, according to Bloomberg. Sony is relying on exclusive movies to drive demand, having shipped only 100,000 units in 2006.
The U.S. sales target for HD DVD players has been lowered to 1 million from the previous 1.8 million prediction. "Obviously we are going to have to lower our previous global estimate,"Toshiba's Yoshihide Fujii said. The HD DVD group is claiming that it has sold 150,000 dedicated HD DVD players, giving it the lead when you exclude the PS3 (Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on also excluded).
Kyte.tv, which allows users to create their own TV channel and broadcast it on websites, blogs, social networks, and mobile phones, has received funding from the private equity and venture capital arm of Nokia, the worlds largest handset maker. The service is funded by top venture capital firms including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Atomico.
Rob Trice of Nokia Growth Partners said in a statement that the vision for Kyte is to, "bring together social networking, user-generated content, and mobile services." Users can share Kyte channels with others, or have other people take part in their shows by adding their own content, voting, and chatting live.
YouTube, which receives 100 million video views and more than 65,000 new videos on a daily basis, already has a deal with Nokia to let mobile phone users view YouTube content on their cell phones via broadband links.
Just five months after announcing a milestone of 1 billion (1,000,000,000) torrents served, Mininova is now boasting that it has served 2 billion torrents to its users. The amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year. TV Shows were the most popular torrents, accounting for 40.11% of all downloads.
Music dragged along behind, accounting for 21.21% of all downloads. Next, as you would guess, Movies accounted for 17.89% of the torrents downloaded. Games and Software were next with shares of 6.59% and 5.61%, respectively. The rest were as follows: Anime 3.61%, Books 3.04%, Other 1.42% and Pictures 0.53%.
"Of course this is not the end, if the growth keeps continuing we might be able to reach the 4 billion mark by the end of this year! Watch out, Apple iTunes," the blog post reads.
After 18 months of complaints and concern regarding the Xbox 360 heat problems, Microsoft seems to be ready to take a step forward, however that might not be the leap everyone is waiting for.
Several Xbox 360 owners have confirmed that the cooling solution of their console have been upgraded while in repair. The improvements include a completely new heatsink for the Xenos GPU. Microsoft hasn't officially confirmed this, neither is there any proof that the improvements would be fitted inside upcoming retail consoles.
A long wait is over for some of the 360 owners, and hoorays are echoing from the Xbox 360 community after tragic "Red Ring of Death" and "My PS3 just killed my 360" incidents. But it remains to be seen, is it a new company policy or just couple of unorthodox cases.
Today, Microsoft announced that it had concluded its multi-player beta of the upcoming Halo 3 game and noted that it was a huge success which had attracted over 820,000 unique participants and 12 million hours of game play.
Microsoft is now turning its focus towards Halo-related merchandise by allowing pre-orders of accessories such as special edition controllers and headsets. There will also be a special edition Halo Zune and a Marvel comic series by September.
Microsoft and Bungie launched the beta last month and the strain on XBL was huge. Downloads of the beta equaled 350 terabytes of data.
"The participation in the 'Halo 3' beta was staggering," said Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios. "Witnessing such a great reaction to a small portion of the game has been inspiring."
After reports surfaced that hackers had cracked the PlayStation 3's anti-piracy software, Sony America has declared that it will "aggressively pursue" anyone who is caught doing so. They have said the activity will merit legal action if caught.
"Unfortunately, hackers will try to exploit any hardware system software," SCEA spokesperson Dave Karraker said.
"The best we can do as a company is to make our security that much stronger and aggressively pursue legal action against anyone caught trying to use an exploit in an illegal manner."
According to CVG.com, hackers have cracked the PS3 firmwares 1.10 and 1.11, which allow the consoles with those firmwares to boot pirated games.
Although the games boot, so far hackers have not gotten any pirated games to actually play.
So far, despite diligent efforts, all consoles have been hacked but there are some repercussions besides legal action. Hackers run the risk of bricking their expensive consoles, as well as getting banned from the PlayStation Network.
"Naturally, any use of an exploit on the system software does void the warranty on the PS3 system... Which could be a costly mistake to see if you can run an old SEGA CD game on it," said Karraker.
In the constant struggle for who will emerge on top of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray battle, Toshiba unleashes a new pair of devices that should surely get Sony thinking of its next strategy.
The Vardia RD-A600 and RD-A300 feature not only an HD-DVD recorder but either a 600Gb or 300Gb hard drive, respectively. The hard drives themselves are all that separate the two units from one another. That, and about $200 in the final price tag. Armed with a pair of digital hi-vision HD tuners, Firewire, and HDMI these dynamic duos weigh in at a lofty ¥200,000 (about $1,643). I'd start making your holiday gift lists early.
While details of this are sketchy at best and there are multiple court orders to not release details to the public, it appears that the developers for the ARccOS encryption destroying software RipIt4ME and FixVTS have been heavily pursued by an Australian court.
In a copyright lawsuit issued Digital Digest, two separate court orders have been issued to seek out personal data as well anything related to the RipIt4Me software. In the first search, the courts were looking for anything related to the users involved, the actual use of the software as well as information leading to the development process. In particular, they were looking for information that shows the intent to circumvent the ARccOS corruption mechanism instilled on many Sony released DVDs. In a second search, one of the developers had personal items seized from their residence targeting again, information regarding the development of RipIt4Me as well as parties involved in its creation. Another person involved with the project was specifically named in the court order in which lead to the RipIt4Me website being taken down.
In a final order issued on May 3rd, Digital Digest was ordered to not include any forums that discussed DVD backups at all. In addition, the administrator of the site has been banned from providing any DVD backup support on any website.
Several big name movie studios have announced that they are fearful of the future of their film industry should the Cupertino, California based company Apple succeed with its Apple TV offering.
Released earlier this Spring, Apple TV seemed poised to take on the movie industry by offering select downloads from their iTunes service featuring a robust catalog of movies. With Disney already on board with Apple offering new releases and several other smaller studios offering titles from their older collection, Apple already offers some 500 movies. This new wave of film availability has sent the bigger movie moguls reeling.
The likes of Sony, Universal and 20th Century Fox will be missing from the iTunes list until they can see Apple implement a more viable plan for battling internet piracy. Additionally, these studios, along with a few others, believe that offering the convenience of downloading movies for a discounted rate through Apple's service will inevitably drive the price of DVDs down. With DVD sales being the industry's bread and butter, and with many poised to make their money from the next generation disks, this poses a huge business threat for future productivity.
CinemaNow Inc., a movie download source, has announced it will start selling music videos again after failing 2 years ago. The company hopes that demand for content to view on thriving portable players will drive sales. Music videos from Warner Music Group will be available initially and will go for $1.99. With iTunes having some success selling music videos now, it is a good idea for CinemaNow to re-enter the business.
"We were a little bit premature," CinemaNow chief executive Curt Marvis said Monday. The company first launched its watchmusicherenow.com website back in 2005, but the portable devices on the market that could play the videos never caught on. The new music videos on sale will be just under DVD quality and can be transfered to a total of three devices running Windows Media software.
"This year, consumers headed to the Web for short-form content in record numbers, and we see great potential in music video downloads," Marvis said. Around 1600 videos exclusively from Warner will be available until July 21st. After that, more videos from Warner and other major record companies will become available.
In another move to further its rapid subscriber growth, Blockbuster has made some price changes to its onlien movie rental system. In its fierce competition with the dominant player in the market, Netflix, Blockbuster has dealt a few noticeable blows. It's "Total Access" program is an example of how the company is using its large physical store presence to boost its online offerings.
A new Blockbuster plan will let customers place online orders to rent 3 movies at a time for a $16.99 fee, $1 cheaper than the Total Access plan. The only difference is customers on the cheaper plan, dubbed "Blockbuster by mail", will not receive a free rental when hey return DVDs to a store instead of mailing them back.
Through the Blockbuster by Mail plan, they will get a coupon for one free rental per month though. The company also said it would offer more limited plans for as low as $4.99. Its rival Netflix charges $17.99 for a three-out at one time plan and a $4.99 plan for up to two rentals per month.
Netflix recently began a streaming service also to give customers more options and make it a more attractive venue for new customers than Blockbuster. Blockbuster has done some damage recently though, beginning 2007 with 2 million subscribers, which jumped to 2.8 million by the end of March. The 800,000 extra subscribers is almost double what Netflix received (487,000) in the first quarter.
Maven Networks, which provides hosting services for Internet TV, is set to make an announcement tomorrow regarding support for Microsoft's new Silverlight technology as a video delivery vehicle. Using the Silverlight technology, Maven's users can leverage familiar Windows Media technology as well as workflow automation, publishing, and player creation capabilities of the Maven Internet TV platform.
Silverlight, which is currently in Beta release phase, is considered as a rival to Adobe's flash technology. Maven plans to support SIlverlight once it becomes available later on in the summer. "That means that [users] can leverage their existing investments in the Windows Media format while at the same time providing new and engaging user experiences,"Todd Boes, vice president of product management, said.
"Our collaboration with Maven will help provide compelling and innovative Silverlight-based solutions for content creators looking to differentiate and maximize their online media offerings," said Microsoft's Sean Alexander, director of Silverlight Media, in a statement released by Maven. "Silverlight ushers in a new level of online experiences with improved video streaming capabilities that can scale up to HD and incorporate rich interactivity, all with a lower total cost to operate."
Google Inc.'s YouTube video sharing site is to test a new video identification technology with Time Warner Inc. and The Walt Disney Co. The technology was developed by Google to help content owners identify uploaded videos that were posted without permission. "The technology was built with the Disney's and Time Warner's in mind,"Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said.
The "video fingerprinting" tools can identify unique attributes in the video clips. The feature will be available for testing in about a month according to a YouTube representative. Google has been using similar technology (audio fingerprinting) with record labels for some time now.
Once the tools identify improperly posted videos, content creators can choose to have them removed. Once the technology is proven to work adequately, it could be used as am automatic shield against the uploading of many popular copyrighted videos.
YouTube's lack of content protecting features has it in the bad books of many major content providers. Viacom Inc. is the best example, as it is currently suing YouTube for more than $1 billion.
After disappointing sales in the United States, Toshiba Corp. has announced it will lower its sales target for HD DVD players in the United States to 1 million units in 2007, down 44% from the 1.8 million previous estimate. "Sales in the U.S. have been slower than expected, and we are going to have to lower our U.S. sales forecast," said Yoshihide Fujii, head of Toshiba's digital consumer business.
"Obviously, we are going to have to lower our previous global estimate (too)," he added. He declined to give any new sales target for now. The HD DVD promotional Group recently claimed that more than 150,000 dedicated players have been sold, accounting for 60% of all HD players sold, excluding gaming console hardware.
"Consumers who are buying Playstation 3 are buying it as a game console. They're simply not buying it for watching as many high-definition movies as Sony said they would," said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment said when spoke at a news conference announcing the release of Toshiba's Vardia-brand HD DVD players in Japan.
The Court of Appeal in Sweden has today upheld a 20,000 kroner fine imposed on a 45-year-old man from Borås by his local District Court for distributing music (uploading while using P2P) on the internet. The man had originally been fined for uploading four copyrighted music tracks without permission using DirectConnectP2P software.
"This is a victory for copyright and we are, naturally, pleased that there was a guilty verdict. Copyright is the foundation of the whole music industry. If the industry is to continue to thrive, clear and effective copyright enforcement is vital", said Ludvig Werner, chairman of IFPI Sweden.
He continued: "The sentence related to only four songs and the fine imposed of SEK 20,000 (US$2,831) means that it cost the perpetrator SEK 5,000 (US$708) per song. In addition, the injured party has the opportunity to seek damages. It is clearly an expensive business to share files illegally, when there are legal and affordable alternatives on the internet today."
The HD DVD Promotional Group has taken a leaf out of the Blu-ray Disc Association's (BDA) PR book by claiming it is winning the format war - at least in stand-alone player sales. The group claims that 60% of all all the high definition set top players sold use the HD DVD format. In addition, the group said that its HD DVD players have a four to one movie "attach rate" over the competing formats.
All in all, the HD DVD Promotional Group said that 150,000 dedicated HD DVD players have been bought up by consumers. The HD DVD format has seen strong sales and growth lately due to aggressive promotional efforts including a $100 instant rebate on its entry-level HD-A2 HD DVD player.
"Toshiba's latest promotional efforts are clearly resonating with consumers and showing that price is king when it comes to hardware," said Craig Kornblau, chairman of the North American HD DVD Promotional Group. "Behind the increase in sales for hardware and movies, you're seeing fundamentally lower manufacturing costs and ease of authoring for HD DVD. That's the type of model that can scale."
Jericho, a TV drama canceled by CBS earlier this year, was soon after granted an extra seven episodes as fans showed their anger with the decision by sending 25 tons of peanuts to CBS in protest. Now that the show has another seven episodes to show what it can do, there is a discussion about why its ratings were failing in the first place. Actor Brad Beyer thinks he knows why.
"The biggest problem with our show is that so many people were watching it on the Internet or Tivo (which doesn't count toward Nielsen ratings), so I think the fans are now aware to watch it when it's on," he said. He isn't alone either! Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, told the New York Times that if fans want the show to keep running, they need to watch it as it broadcasts.
"We want them to watch on Wednesday at 8 o'clock... and we need them to recruit new viewers who are going to watch the broadcast," Tassler said.
Bon Jovi is bundling a digital iTunes copy of its new album, Lost Highway, with advance tickets for October concerts in Newark, New Jersey. American Express cardholders can use the online presale program from June 12 through June 14 and the general public can use it from June 15 through June 22. On June 23rd, tickets without the bundled downloads will be available.
Those who purchase the tickets will receive a code from Ticketmaster to download "Lost Highway" from iTunes beginning on its June 19 release. The tickets that include the downloads cost $9.99 extra - the price of an album download on iTunes - so its not exactly a promotional offer and will count towards SoundScan and the album's Billboard chart position.
For those fans who have already pre-ordered "Lost Highway" from BonJovi.com or iTunes, Bon Jovi and Ticketmaster have arranged for iTunes to provide a passcode that will enable them to purchase a single presale ticket for $9.99 less without adding the digital album.
The program is similar in concept to past initiatives by Ticketmaster, but this is the first "all-in" presale that bundles together a ticket and a digital album as a single transaction sold via Ticketmaster.com.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with a coalition of public interest groups, trade associations, and businesses, urged a federal appeals court Friday to overturn a damaging lower court ruling that puts companies that provide remote computing technologies at risk of copyright infringement liability. The ruling involved CableVision's plan to create a Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder for its users.
The Remote Storage DVR, or RS-DVR, would have meant Cablevision wouldn't have to install hundreds of thousands of digital set-top boxes in subscribers' homes. The company has already installed more than 500,000 set-top boxes in customers' homes, and the planned RS-DVR would have saved the company a substantial amount from administration and maintenance costs by allowing users to remotely store recordings instead.
Twentieth Century Fox, the Cartoon Network, and other television networks filed suit, and a district court in New York ruled against Cablevision, reasoning that Cablevision, not its customers, was making the copies. That ruling has now been appealed by Cablevision.
"The Supreme Court has already ruled that consumers have a fair use right to time-shift TV shows," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "It should not make a difference whether the copies are stored inside their set-top boxes or back at Cablevision headquarters."
After months of speculation ever since the iPhone was first introduced earlier this year, Apple Inc. has confirmed that there will be support for some third-party applications. However, developers will be able to create applications using the full Safari engine instead of writing code that works directly with the handset.
The announcement was made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. This move means that Apple is able to keep its iPhone interface secure. Developers will be able to use standard Web 2.0 + AJAX coding to create applications that will be able to be integrated with the iPhone services.
Apple also said that no software development kit (SDK) will be necessary, developers will only need to understand web standards. The company also revealed that there is no secret 12th application as has been speculated. "Third party apps can be live from day one", Jobs said. "This is how Google do it, how Saleforce do it and it means that the phone will stay secure."
TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, has been ordered to log the activities of its users. The order was made by federal Judge Jacqueline Chooljian on May 29th. Chooljian however, has granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal. The appeal must be filed by June 12th according to TorrentSpy's attorney, Ira Rothken. TorrentSpy's privacy policy specifically states it does not log user activity.
"It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users," Rothken said. "If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise." The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued TorrentSpy back in February 2006, accusing it of, "making it easier to download pirated files."
According to Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who called the ruling "unprecedented", the decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites. The EFF is currently reviewing the courts decision and von Lohmann said so far it is a "troubling court order."
As reported earlier, a rumor has been circulating that the Xbox 360 might see a price drop soon.
Microsoft's David Hufford however, has said that there are no plans, at least in the near future for a price drop on the console.
Talking to Gamerscoreblog.com Hufford said: "With Xbox 360s selling well at their current price point, Elites selling out at $479, and an insanely great portfolio of games in the market, there's no reason to announce any kind of price drop any time soon.
"The comment, which is accurately reported, unfortunately has now been taken way out of context and being reported as if I am signalling a price drop. I was not, I am not," he added.
Cal IV Entertainment, a country music publishing company that owns copyrights to many hit singles including a few by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill filed a class action lawsuit against YouTube last week.
The company alleges that the video sharing site is home to more than 60 copyrighted songs and accuses YouTube "of direct, induced, vicarious and contributory copyright infringement."
"YouTube has failed to adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for the termination of repeat-infringing YouTube subscribers and account holders," the complaint reads. "YouTube also fails to monitor works it [had] previously been notified are being infringed."
YouTube is under fire from a few lawsuits including ones from the English Premier Soccer League, David Grisman, and the state of New Jersey.
Cal IV complaints that it is very hard for the company to track down work that may be infringing due to the random nature the videos are tagged by users. The company also alleges that although they are enrolled in YouTube's Content Verification Program, new copyrighted material is found on the site daily.
Yesterday, the Church of England demanded an apology from Sony, claiming that a re-creation of Manchester Cathedral in the hit PS3 game Resistance: Fall of Man was used without permission and that the re-creation upset the local area which has been trying to shed its bad reputation for gun violence.
The Church also said it is considering legal action depending on Sony's response. "It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem," The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, told ITV News.
"For a global manufacturer to re-create one of our great cathedrals with a photo-realistic quality and then encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible.
"Here in Manchester we do all we can to support communities through our parish clergy, we know the reality of gun crime and the devastating effects it can have on the lives – it is not a trivial matter," he said.
This morning, Sony responded to the allegations and they seem to be apologetic without necessarily accepting blame.
"Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is aware of the concerns expressed by the Bishop of Manchester and the Cathedral authorities about the use of Manchester Cathedral in the game Resistance: Fall of Man, and we naturally take their concerns very seriously," the statement reads.
"Resistance: Fall of Man is a fantasy science fiction game and is not based on reality. The game is set in an alternate and mythical version of Europe in the 1950s, in which the enemy are strange looking alien invaders seeking to destroy humanity.
The video codec company DivX announced they are looking for a few individuals to help beta test "secret" items the company is creating. Although it is not entirely clear whether the company is testing hardware or software, the company has built a streaming media set top box named GejBox, named after DivX's creator.
According to Gej's post on the DivX Labs site, "Here at DivX we’re always looking out at the horizon, trying to figure out what the future holds. We’re aiming for peace, love, happiness, and goodwill to all mankind. We have a few slightly shorter-term sights as well, and the team in the labs have concocted up some pretty impressive stuff. This time, however, we want to include a few avid DivX fanatics to help us make sure we’re building the best technology we can come up with. We can’t go into more details just yet, but if you meet the following criteria, please fill out our application survey, we’d love to have you on board!
* You need to have a home network and a computer that’s fairly modern (let’s call it less than 2 years old)
* You’ve gotta have a few hours every week to use the technology, and give us feedback on it
* You have to have an existing DivX media library"
According to The Financial Times, Apple is in "advanced" talks with major American film studios over launching an online film rental service that could challenge conventional cable and satellite TV operators.
The report, although not officially announced by Apple, said that a film would cost $2.99 USD for a 30-day rental. The DRM on the films would allow for movement from a computer to portable device such as the iPod.
Although Apple already sells films through its iTunes platform, many studios have not allowed their movies to be distributed due to concerns that digital sales would take away from physical DVD sales. The report said the Apple is hoping to launch the service by the end of this year.
A studio executive quoted in the report, the service would "compete against cable companies and anyone else offering VOD (video on demand) into the home."
In the past months, buyers of the Toshiba HD-XA2 have complained that the HD DVD player has low bass issues when using the 5.1 analog audio connections.
Since those complaints first surfaced, Toshiba has released a few firmware updates, but none completely fixed the issue. The latest firmware, V 1.6 however, seems to include a temporary fix for the glitch.
According to High Def Digest, "It turns out that the low bass is a symptom of defective speaker and bass management controls inside the player's audio decoder. For viewers with small main speakers who rely on the decoder to redirect bass from other channels to the subwoofer, the player wasn't making any adjustments no matter what settings were entered. Likewise, if an owner had no center channel and needed the dialogue redirected to the left and right front channels, that wasn't working either. As a result, only viewers with a complete set of full-range large speakers were hearing movie soundtracks properly."
The fix is thanks to testing and experimenting by AVSForum members, who discovered that if you change the "Digital Out SPDIF" setting in the player from Bitstream to PCM re-enables bass and speaker management over the analog audio connections.
Yesterday, NBC Universal and News Corp. announced that they had added several prominent cable networks to their online video venture that is expected to launch this summer.
The venture, which is designed to rival YouTube will include short clip media and full length original programming. Gemstar-TV Guide, Fuel TV, Oxygen, Speed, and the Sundance Channel where the latest channels to agree to provide content.
The announcement also said the content would be available through MySpace, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Comcast.
Wow, yet another year has passed and our little website is having its birthday again, for the 8th time. Yes, that is correct. Exactly eight years ago our site was officially launched.
I've written these "birthday journals" year after year and it always gives me an opportunity to take a look in the past and analyze what we, as a company and a site, have achieved during the past year or so.
As most of our readers know, year 2006 was rather bad for us as a site, as our home country, Finland, adopted the EU copyright directive to its legislation, forcing us to remove tons of content from our site. Since then, we've tried to "reinvent" our site slightly, tried to figure out what bits and pieces our site is currently missing that would benefit our users. That led us to launch an "innovation contest" last year where we asked our users to tell us what they'd want to see on our site in future. We got hundreds of suggestions and have tried to go through that list, tried to put all the ideas into larger picture and to build a framework where we want to take our site in the future. One of the most visible changes sparked by the innovation contest feedback was the redesign of our homepage last autumn.
Internet radio providers such as RealNetworks and Yahoo have sent letters to politicians to raise awareness of a troubling provision in the Copyright Royalty Boards's (CRB) new fees for Internet radio broadcasters that demands a minimum of $500 per "channel" every year to cover the administrative costs of SoundExchange. In the letter, the Internet radio providers said this would force them to give SoundExchange billions of dollars in addition to significantly higher royalty rates.
RealNetworks, for example, offers over 400,000 channels through its Rhapsody music service and so could be forced to pay an annual fee of $200 million. The letter explains how SoundExchange does not necessarily plan to distribute these administrative fees to artists, and has provided no explanation of how the fees are used.
The letter also points out that the fee was capped at $2,500 per webcaster until 2005, but the new rules have no cap at all. When Ars Technica spoke to Internet radio provider Live365 a month ago, it discovered that Live365 handles all of its station administration and licensing itself and merely submits reports to SoundExchange "as a single service." So why does SoundExchange need $500 per channel for administration when licensing and administrative services are already largely handled by Internet radio providers?
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a public notice on Friday, looking for comments on the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. The proposed merger, which is values at $4.7 billion, has seen a lot of industry lobbying, congressional hearings and intensive Wall Street analysis since it was announced back on February 19th.
The FCC is trying to determine whether it is in the public interest for both licenses to be controller by a single company. In 1997, the FCC granted each company a license which stated that one licensee will "not be permitted to acquire control" of the other. The clause was there to ensure "sufficient continuing competition."
The proposed merger is subject to approval by theDepartment of Justice, which will examine possible competitive harm from the combination. The acceptance of the applications for filing starts an informal "shot clock" at the FCC. The FCC tries to finish its its review of mergers within 180 days.
If it is to succeed, the Department of Justice will have to conclude that the merger of the country's only two Satellite Radio providers can not be considered anticompetitive and the FCC would have to allow both to break the condition of the licenses that forbids such a merger. In their defense, Sirius and XM say that a lot has changed in 10 years and now satellite radio competes with all forms of "audio entertainment," including HD Radio, MP3 players and even mobile phones.
Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, has denied rumors that the company is about to offer music downloads without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. The rumors, which surfaced yesterday, indicated that the company would follow EMI Group by selling DRM-free tracks via Apple Inc.'s popular iTunes download service.
"The rumor is completely untrue,"Peter LoFrumento, Senior Vice President at Universal Music Group told Pocket-lint.co.uk. Many in the market for music downloads hope that the record industry will eventually scrap Digital Rights Management. Steve Jobs pointed out in an open letter earlier this year that DRM on downloads of tracks that are available on unprotected CDs is unnecessary.
EMI is currently selling its catalog, DRM-free, through iTunes at a premium rate. However, Apple has been criticized for quietly embedded personal information (users name and account email details) into each DRM-free track sold. The move was made to discourage file-sharing of DRM-free downloads, as the downloads aim to remove restrictions on personal use, not to permit unlimited sharing.
YouTube.com co-founder Steve Chen has said that consumers in many areas of the world will be able to access videos from YouTube through mobile phones by next year. He made his comments to a group of enthusiastic Web users at a forum on Internet developments in Taipei. The Taiwan-born entrepreneur said he expected that clips between 30 and 60 seconds would attract commuters on subways or buses.
As for those who travel by train, clips of up to 10 minutes will be most popular to pass the time, he believes. He said that as technologies continue to develop at a rapid pace, web sites should keep up by offering richer content and greater mobility so users can access the content from almost anywhere.
Chen and his family emigrated to the United States from Taiwan when he was eight years old. In 2005, he setup the video-sharing website in San Mateo, Calif., with colleague Chad Hurley. The company, which was once run mainly out of a garage, sold to Google for $1.65 billion last year, and all because Chen and Hurley needed to find a way to get videos to each other that were too big for email.
We reported a few days ago about Alienware's Hangar18: HD Entertainment Center that allows you to record and play back high-definition content in up to 1080p via an HDMI output, delivers the pristine audio quality of an onboard 5.1 surround sound amplifier and offers up to 2TB of hard drive space to store a lifetime's worth of digital media content. However, the inclusion of a Blu-ray burner was originally planned for Hangar18, but the company ran into difficulties.
"When we first started working on Hangar18, we'd qualified it under Windows XP to work with Blu-ray, and it worked flawlessly," product manager Marc Diana said. However, the company waited for Windows Vista before releasing Hangar18, and discovered during testing that everything wasn't working as it should be.
"What we saw was that the Blu-ray playback support wasn't working correctly with our integrated nVidia 6150 graphics. The nVidia 6150 is a great integrated graphics choice because it has on-board HDMI support and PureVideo support; it's the most recent integrated chipset on an HDMI-supported board. But we saw stuttering with the Blu-ray playback. It would look like frames were being skipped," Diana said.
According to a report by BusinessWeek's Peter Burrows, Apple Inc. may have a pleasant surprise for iPhone seekers looking to pick up their own iPhone on June 29th. Burrows cites industry sources as saying that three million iPhones will be available through Apple and AT&T stores around the United States at launch. If true, it would mean that pretty much all consumers interested in buying a model at launch will get one.
"Still, Apple will need to execute flawlessly. In units built and shipped, the iPhone launch will dwarf anything Apple has attempted," Burrows wrote. "It plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29, two sources say." The report noted how the iPod wasn't a huge hit when it launched in 2001, but now has sold over 100 million units, helped by constant production increases.
"Jobs did so expertly, often creating a sense of scarcity by running slightly short of demand," Burrows implies. "With all the buildup over the iPhone, pumping up demand will be the least of his concerns."
In an interesting turn of events, the world's largest music label Universal Music thinks that it can get a better market share for legally downloaded music if it drops their current DRM practices. In a business study, Universal wants to dabble with the idea that financial gains from the sell of unprotected music just might outweigh the production costs and slump of sales in DRM encrypted downloads.
This experiment from Universal comes just two months after EMI decided to bed with digital giant Apple. This could be a good move on their part to combat competition in the music industry, but rivals such as Warner Music feel that a move like this would just open the floodgates on piracy.
Universal's experiment will last for only a short time, in which they will gather data and come to a conclusion on whether or not this is a good move later this year. Other companies such as the second ranked SonyBMG stated that if the music conglomerate decides to drop its current copy protection standards that it and other companies will be forced to do the same to stay competitive in the market.
In contrast, Warner has inked a deal with Lala.com to provide copy protection free music available for share, provided the company gets royalties on a per-play basis. Warner has also stressed that other means such as this need to be put in place, but DRM should not be taken away.
The National Hockey League has inked a deal with Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox. The Slingbox allows users to stream media from your television or DVR to any computer in the world. This deal is part of a push for their new service Clip+Sling which takes on a service similar to the popular YouTube website. The NHL has agreed to allow users to not only stream their favorite games, but they can take specific clips from games and upload them to the Sling Media website. The NHL also promises to upload their own original content for the masses to consume.
In contrast, another sports group, Major League Baseball doesn't feel that this service does their franchise any justice. To quote an MLB representative, Slingbox will allow users to ""redistribution of content without MLB’s express written consent". The MLB feels that allowing users to stream home games to anywhere in the world would interfere with their own already available content. The MLB hasn't made any moves towards legal actions to stop Sling Media from doing what it does best, but from the looks of it, it doesn't look like baseball fans will be able to partake in the same goodness.
Looking at a market analysis and seeing how well rival Nintendo is doing with its $250 Wii, the people over at Microsoft have started to turn around the ideas that they need a $199US console on the market. Thats what product manager David Hufford has hinted at. Hufford stated that he believes the $199 price point is the sweet spot in the console market and even stated that Nintendo's strategy of bundling a game with the console is a fine idea.
Microsoft comments that its fully aware that Sony's PS2 is still selling strong at its $129 price point and was a good deal since mid-2002 when it was reduced to $199 just after 2 years on the market. Sony boasts some 120 million PS2s shipped with a majority of them being sold post-2002.
Microsoft claims that even though they already take a hefty loss per console sold, that its ready to take an even bigger hit to have the opportunity to sell more units. They believe in their product and feel that the sell of games will make up for the loss in the cost of console production. Hufford also was heard at hinting of emulating Nintendo's sales tactic and could possibly include a pack-in game to coincide with the price drop.
Sony Corp. has updated its BRAVIA LCD line-up again with 40", 46" and 52" TV sets. The new XBR5, XBR4 and W series all feature 1920x1080 (1080p) 10-bit panels. They include BRAVIA Theatre Sync for hassle-free multimedia viewing as well as Xross Media Bar (XMB) interface and Sony Digital Media Extender (DMeX).
Using DMeX, users can use a BRAVIA Internet Video Link module can hbe used to access (high-definition) video content from sites such as Grouper and AOL. "Our BRAVIA flat-panel LCD HDTVs have the leading market share because they deliver an outstanding level of picture quality and style that people appreciate," said Sony Home Products VP Randy Waynick, senior vice president of Sony's Home Products Division.
He added: "The new line elevates our commitment to full HD1080p televisions displays, while offering many more choices." The W series TVs support x.v.Color technology, BRAVIA Engine EX video engine and can play from 1080/24p and 1080/60p sources. The XBR4 and XBR5 support 120Hz "Motionflow".
Most models will ship in August, with some coming in September, with prices that range from $2,700 to $5,100.
According to memory module makers (particularly in Taiwan), an NAND flash-based iPod video is in Apple Inc.'s plans as has long been speculated. However, the company has set no launch schedule for such an iPod model. Currently available video-capable iPod models come with conventional hard disk drives (HDD), which are supplied by Toshiba and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for storage.
Besides the iPod Shuffle and Nano, all iPods include a HDD. Using NAND flash for storage in MP3 players has key benefits in access times, power consumption and product lifespan. Some memory makers in Taiwan have reported that over the third quarter Apple placed monthly orders for about 20 million units of NAND flash, suggesting the company is planning for increased demand.
However, based on current price trends, Apple may have to hold off the NAND iPod video model for another while as the product would not be competitive.
VidaBox has announced that it is shipping CableCARD-ready systems for customers looking to tune and record HD Cable directly on their media centers. "We're absolutely excited to finally ship systems with CableCARD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD support – everything in one box," said Steven Cheung, a co-founder of VidaBox.
He added: "These systems answer the prayers of many of our customers who’ve been clamoring for a total, turn-key solution with the latest in HD technology. Now complete with life-like HD cable support, our customers can finally realize their HDTV's full potential beyond just Blu-ray & HD DVD."
The new CableCARD feature is available in the LUX & MAGNUM systems, which are already packed with a silently cooled nVidia 8600GTS video card to render back crystal clear video in full 1080p, support for up to 7.1 Dolby Digital HD and DTS HD surround sound, and options for 2 additional OTA HD tuners (for a total of 4 tuners), 4GB of RAM, and up to 5TB & 9TB of onboard VidaSafe-protected storage on the LUX & MAGNUM, respectively.
"CableCARD-ready VidaBox systems can also act as a safe & secure digital media repository," Steven continues. "Recorded HD Cable content can be streamed and played back on up to 5 connected Xbox 360 systems, while music, pictures, video, and DVDs stored on the system can be streamed to 10 VidaBox media extenders. This is perfect for users who want to access their content anywhere at home – regardless of where they are."
Sony's eSupport site has posted a firmware update for the Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player. The main updated feature is support for Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD audio decoding. Here is some more information...
Improvements over firmware version 1.60:
Adds Dolby® TrueHD and Dolby® Digital Plus Audio decoding functionality.
Improves BD-Java compatibility to enhance interactivity with some BD-ROMs.
Enhanced playback compatibility with certain BD-ROM format discs.
Additional improvements over original firmware:
Enhanced playback compatibility with certain BD-ROM format discs.
Improves BD-Java compatibility to enhance interactivity with some BD-ROMs.
Enhanced customer support capability
Compatibility with the newly released BD-R/RE format (BDMV).
Corrects the output signal status information for audio output and display when Linear PCM 5.1 channel soundtracks are played via HDMI.
Sony confirmed today their PlayStation 3 console had reached the 1 million units sold milestone for Europe and Australia.
According to Sony Europe, the milestone was hit in just under 10 weeks, a timeframe quicker than its predecessors the PlayStation and PlayStation 2.
The PS3 was released in Japan in November 2006 but sales have been sluggish in the region. According to the data collector Media Create, only 910,000 units have been sold since then.
Data from NPD in North America showed that 1.3 million units had been sold so far in the region since its release late last year.
In what is being called the world's first "3-Dimensional Sound Reality high-def music experience" , Surround Records has announced they are releasing an audio-only HD DVD entitled "Uncommon Bach" on June 15th.
The producer, Alexander Jero says the the title presents the music of the legendary Sebastian Bach using "virtual instruments and modern synthesis," in such a way that Surround Records has called it "3-Dimensional Sound Reality."
According to the press release, the title procss promises a "clarity and sonic perception of these classical works [that] will open a new vision of the original masterpieces."
"Uncommon Bach" is the first audio-only HD release to hit North American shelves, and the company says the complete release will be 57 minutes.
High Def Digest included some tech specs of the movie, which are, "DTS-HD Master Lossless Audio and standard DTS 5.1 surround options. (Note also that 'Uncommon Bach' is compatible only with HD DVD players with HDMI or optical outputs.)"
Amazon has the movie on pre-sale for $19.95 now, and there is no word if any video material or bonus features will accompany the main track. There is also no word on whether a Blu ray version is in the making.
Seeing the success of Toshiba's HD DVD promotion, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has begun an online promotion that will offer the "third disc free" on Blu ray titles at participating retailers including Amazon.
Consumers who purchase 3 Sony Blu ray movie titles will receive the third title free. Although the full Sony catalogue is not included in the promotion, the high selling titles Black Hawk Down and Casino Royale are.
So far the promotion has only been spotted at Amazon and DVD Empire and each offers the same list of movies although Amazon's are slightly lower priced. You only receive credit for the lowest priced title in your checkout cart, for example if you were to select a $20 movie and a $27 movie from Amazon then you would only receive a $20 credit for the final movie.
So far the promotion seems to be working as 8 Blu ray titles have jumped into Amazon's 100 best selling DVDs list. Sony did not give word on how long the promotion will last.
Yesterday, Sony President Ryoji Chubachi suggested to a Japanese newspaper that the company was not "ruling out" a price cut for its $600 USD PlayStation 3.
Chubachi's comments add fuel to the fire that started last week with the news that Sony's BDP-300 Blu ray player would hit stores with a retail price of $499 USD, a price $100 less than expected.
"Sony does not rule out the possibility of lowering the price of the PS3", said Chubachi to the Japanese daily paper Yomiuri Shimbun. He added that the company was making a "full assessment" of the situation before it made a decision on pricing.
With Blu ray production costs lowering daily, Sony could take the opportunity to lower the price of its game console which is still lagging in sales behind the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Xbox 360. Many consumers and analysts blame the large price tag for its lagging sales. Although the comments have certainly caused a stir, a price cut is not set in stone. All that is true as of today is that Sony can no longer claim the PS3 is the lowest priced Blu ray player on the market.
Comments made recently by TiVo CEO Tom Rogers appear to open the door to working with DirecTV once again. Both companies previously parted ways as DirecTV's owner, News Corp., decided to back the technology of its NDS subsidiary. With DirecTV now getting the presence of Liberty Media, working again with the DVR maker is a possibility.
At a Deustche Bank conference, Tom Rogers said that he believed there may now be a possibility that the two companies could work together again, and why not? TiVo's best period of consumer growth was during its partner ship with DirecTV. Right now, TiVo could really use the boost.
Analysts say that concerns over the DVR manufacturer's capabilities to attract new customers is a big drain on its stock price.
According to an Associated Press report, Amazon may be about to buy online movie rental (and now video-on-demand) service Netflix, in a deal that could cost over $1.5 billion. At least that is what's coming from a Jackson Securities analyst named Brian Bolan who has "heard buyout speculation from industry contacts."
"[Amazon has] excess currency, if you will. Netflix, on the other hand, has been facing stiff competition from Blockbuster and everyone else, so they've seen their stock go lower," the AP quotes Bolan as saying.
Netflix's rental service delivers DVDs through the mail. It has faced tough competition from rival Blockbuster, which has gotten much more competitive in recent times. The company also launched a video-on-demand service earlier this year called "Watch Now", similar to Amazon's Unbox service.
Yesterday, Warner Home Video announced that their dual-release megahit Planet Earth had become the best selling HD release to date.
Warner, the North American distributor for BBC Video, announced the set had generated $3.2 million USD in revenue since its dual release launch in late April.
The Hollywood Reporter estimated that the sales figure translates to over 42,000 units, which although less than the 100,000 units sold of the hit "The Departed" still translates to more revenue due to the roughly $70 USD price tag. The company says The Departed has so far generated 2.8 million in revenue.
A Warner exec boasted after the announcement, "The consumer response to 'Planet Earth: The Complete Series' on both high-definition formats has been absolutely incredible, and we are truly proud to be a part of it," said Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders. "This landmark series was made for high definition, and 'Planet Earth' will be an iconic staple in our natural-history documentary library for a very long time."
With the iPhone set to begin selling on June 29th, AT&T and Apple stores in the United States are preparing for a rush. The iPhone is easily one of the (if not "the") most anticipated products of the year. Apple fans are expected to line up in the early hours of the morning outside some stores in hope of getting their hands on one.
Stores are not expecting to see a lot of stock available. Some are saying they expect about 40, while others set the number lower than that. "If I were you, I'd probably try going to some little store in New Jersey that nobody knows about," a sales representative from the AT&T store in Times Square said.
Even Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was noted as suggesting that technology pundit Arianna Huffington go to an AT&T store where lines might be smaller. "There's no question there will be high demand for the iPhone, at least initially,"Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research said. "People buy new versions of the Mac operating system in droves when it comes out. You don't see that kind of demand when Microsoft launches a new version of Vista."
Intel plans to add a next-generation DVD playback option to its Santa Rosa platform in the second half of 2007, according to Intel mobile graphics spokesperson Mike Choi. The company will use a third-party hardware decoder to bring support for both Blu-ray and HD DVD optical disc formats to versions of Santa Rosa with integrated graphics processors (IGPs).
When the support for HD playback arrives, Intel's graphics solution will be optimized for Windows Vista. Vista currently loses some of its Aero effects during HD playback, but Intel's optimizations will allow users have both the Aero experience and HD experience simultaneously.
Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD are currently slugging it out in a format war, fighting to be the next standard. While the stakes are very high, it is far too early to make any sure predictions. Hopefully, production costs and hardware prices will fall, bringing in more consumers to decide their favorite.
Warner Music Group and online retailer AnywhereCD have settled a dispute over the scope of an agreement the pair had related to selling digital music. Both parties also agreed to dismiss related lawsuits. The current agreement will be terminated on September 30th. AnywhereCD sells audio CDs with immediately available corresponding MP3 format albums for downloading.
However, it was the fact that the MP3s sold contained no digital rights management (DRM) protection at all that brought about the dispute. Warner demanded that the company stop providing DRM-free tracks, accusing AnywhereCD of violating their their agreement.
AnywhereCD sued Warner for breach of contract, business defamation and trade libel and Warner responded with its own suit asking the court to enforce Warner's termination of contract with AnywhereCD. Thanks to today's agreement, albums from Warner artists including Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day, will continue to be available for sale without DRM until the end of September.
Dell has denied widely reported claims that the company is going to stop making LCD TVs. Websites and blogs started reporting on the alleged plan after a Taiwanese newspaper, Economic Daily, reported that Dell was set to exit the LCD display market as early as this month to focus on selling more profitable PCs. The company did acknowledge that it will make changes to its TV line-up but will continue to sell screens of 37 inches and smaller.
"We will soon offer a wider assortment of televisions from leading manufacturers that feature the latest technology and meet Dell's high standards for performance," said Dell spokeswoman Rachel Lyon. Back in February, Dell started selling Sony LCD televisions with screens between 40 inches and 46 inches on Dell.com. Dell also now sells TVs from Panasonic, Samsung, Viewsonic and Pioneer.
Dell is currently undergoing a corporate reorganization which includes laying off 10% of its 88,100 workers to rebound from falling market share and sinking profits. The company is also changing its core business model. In late May, the company announced it will sell desktop PCs in Wal-Mart retail stores, a step away from its "direct sales" model.
CyberLink Corp. has announced that the Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD movie playback software PowerDVD Ultra now supports the high-definition playback and content protection technologies of Intel's GMA 3000 series integrated graphics chipsets. It now supports Intel chipsets with GMA 3000 series integrated graphics along with Broadcom Media PC products to provide a robust and secure path for high definition playback including Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD.
"The Intel 3 series chipsets, featuring Intel's GMA 3100, X3100 or X3500 graphics, enable robust and cost-effective solutions that provide high-quality movie playback for standard and high-definition content, including Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs," said Richard Malinowski, Vice President & General Manager of Intel's Chipset Group. "PowerDVD Ultra's optimization for Intel's GMA 3100, X3100 and X3500 graphics, ensures exceptional performance, enabling users to enjoy high-definition movies on many mainstream mobile & desktop PCs moving forward."
"By working closely with Intel to optimize PowerDVD Ultra for the Intel GMA 3000 series integrated graphics chipsets, CyberLink is very happy to deliver a high-performance solution for the home entertainment PC market," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink Corp. "As the leading software enabling playback of Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs on the PC, CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra features the latest video and audio technologies, and supports content protection mechanisms to deliver reliable playback of high-definition movie content."
We have just launched a new section at AfterDawn.com. The hardware section lists specifications of a growing number of flat panel televisions, flat panel monitors, mobile phones, DVD players (including HD DVD and Blu-ray players) as well as other devices. In addition to technical specifications, price information from our partner stores is also shown (when available).
In addition to reviews and ratings you, our users, can suggest new, missing products to any of the categories, or submit product pictures for devices that are missing one. We will be adding new categories for other types devices during the summer.
The selection of devices is currently focused mainly on products available in Europe. This is because we are based in Finland, Europe, and launched the hardware section originally on our Finnish site. The number of products aimed at the North American market will surely increase quickly!
We have a new guide in our Guides section. It's actually the first in a series of guides I'm calling Digital Video Fundamentals. The series will be aimed toward beginners who want to understand the basics. Today's new guide is on Frames and Framerates.
On Wednesday, NBC announced that it will allow users to post clips
of popular NBC news and sports shows on their personal websites and blogs.
Rival station CBS announced the same idea last week.
According to the announcement, initially Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News
with Brian Williams, Dateline NBC and programming from NBC Sports,
DotComedy.com, and iVillage.com will be offered.
Until today, NBC had allowed users to post clips of the popular shows Heroes
and Saturday Night Live only. The web site owner can post the video clips the
same way YouTube does, by the use of a widget.
Late last month we reported that mod-resistant Nintendo Wii consoles had hit Japanese retail outlets in an effort to curb piracy. Now it seems that those same consoles are making their way to North American shelves.
Although Nintendo hasn't done much in terms of changing the hardware, they have made the PCB connections alot harder to interface with the current generation of mod chips. The three pins that are currently used by mod chips are physically cut making it almost impossible to modify the new consoles.
Many modders from forums around the net have purchased the new consoles to see what they are up against. Many have concluded that this round of consoles is just temporary until Nintendo can release a completely new chip set that will make it completely impossible to modify.
The Federation Francaise de Tennis, the French national tennis organization and Ligue de Football Professionnel, the country's top soccer league, have joined legal action against Google's video sharing giant YouTube. Both joined a class action lawsuit that accuses Google of copyright violations. Bourne, a music publishing company and the English premier league filed the lawsuit last month.
YouTube has claimed that it has protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against being found responsible for the millions of copyrighted clips uploaded by third party users without permission to the service. Viacom sued YouTube for $1 billion back in March. Those in the class action lawsuit want unspecified damages and an injunction forcing YouTube to change its business model.
"We formed a firm conclusion that on Google and YouTube there is rampant copyright infringement,"Louis Solomon, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the suit, said. "We think it's wrong and are eager for a judge to decide the issue." New York-based Cherry Lane Music Publishing also joined the class action lawsuit against YouTube. It owns more than 65,000 copyrights, including the publishing rights to music from Elvis.
Google Inc.'s YouTube service has gotten its first content agreement with an independent TV station. The company announced a partnership yesterday with Hearst-Argyle Television, which will bring local TV programming from five markets — Boston, Manchester, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore - to dedicated YouTube channels. "We have invested significant resources in our growing digital media efforts,"Terry Mackin, executive VP of Heart-Argyle Television said.
He added: "With Google and YouTube, we can now better engage users and advertisers with our award-winning local video content and with new user-generated content while further broadening our reach beyond the boundaries of our media markets." The content currently available is mostly news clips, but it will expand to weather, "entertainment videos," local high school sports, other local TV shows, and local amateur entertainment.
YouTube also recently announced a deal with EMI that will bring music videos to the service and a strategic deal with NBC/Universal to get exclusive clips and content from NBC TV shows. Apple Inc. also recently announced that YouTube videos will be accessible through the Apple TV device.
A Silicon Valley based start-up, Lala.com, announced on Monday it will launch an "iPod compatible" online music service that will use free-play of online songs to attract potential buyers. The service will be offering music from the world's fourth largest record company, Warner Music Group, when it launches. It "says" it will sell DRM-free downloads, but considering they only offer downloads directly to iPod, and not to PCs, that kind of defies the point?
The company is in talks with other major record companies to expand the service with more music. Lala will offer free online song play without advertising, hoping to make up for licensing costs of playing the music online with sales of songs. "We believe over the next two years we might lose $40 million," founder Bill Nguyen said in an interview with Reuters.
He added: "We expect up to 70 percent of people will be freeloaders just listening to the music but around 30 percent will be buying music." With CD sales dropping 20% in the first quarter of 2007 and digital downloads unable to make up for it, the music industry is willing to experiment with new models and new ideas.
DivX Inc. and NXP Semiconductors have announced the DivX Certification of a series of processors designed to power a variety of device categories, including IP set-top boxes (STBs), digital media adapters, personal media players and in-car media players. Specifically, the NXP Nexperia processors PNX0190, PNX0191, PNX9520, PNX1501, PNX1502, PNX1503, and PNX1520 are now DivX Certified.
The chips will play back DivX video content at Home Theater resolutions and will support DivX Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, enabling compatibility with download-to-own video services. The NXP processors are among the first DivX Certified chipsets for the IP set top box market, which will provide another way for end users to enjoy DivX content from the Internet or their PCs directly on their televisions.
"Certification of the NXP chipsets represents the expansion of the DivX common media language to important new device segments, like STBs and digital media adapters, which will provide users with the seamless ability to enjoy digital content anytime and anywhere," said Kevin Hell, President, DivX, Inc. "We’re pleased to work with NXP to enable new categories of DivX Certified consumer devices that will meet the global demand for a high-quality DivX media experience."
According to figures from Internet analysis firm Comscore, Google Inc. has become the leading online video property, serving up 1.2 billion video streams and 57.4 million unique people streaming videos in March. Google's YouTube video sharing service drove the numbers up for the company to a 16.7% market share, serving 53.5 million unique streamers and delivering 1.1 billion streams alone all by itself.
Yahoo came in second with 434 million streams, followed by Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, with 421 million, Viacom with 260 million, Time Warner with 222 million and Microsoft with 151 million. 71.4% of U.S. Internet users streamed videos in March, with three in ten streaming from YouTube.
An average of 145 minutes of video was watched per viewer. The total figure of video streams was more than 7 billion.
Corel Corporation has announced it will demonstrate its InterVideo WinDVD high-definition playback software with Intel Clear Video Technology during Computex Taipei this week. WinDVD is one of the most popular software applications for movie playback on PCs and using Intel's Clear Video Technology, it can deliver a rich HD playback experience.
Intel Clear Video Technology is included on all Intel G965, GM965, G33, and G35 Express chipset-based platforms. It is a combination of video processing hardware and software technologies that deliver enhanced high-definition video playback, sharper images, precise color control and an advanced display capability.
In addition to hardware decode acceleration, Intel Clear Video Technology uses Advanced Deinterlacing and ProcAmp color controls to deliver sharper, more vibrant video images. "Hardware decode acceleration support and advanced de-interlacing deliver stutter free playback with clearer, more detailed images by eliminating many of the jagged edges associated with interlaced content," explained Blaine Mathieu, Vice President and General Manager, Products and Strategy, Digital Media at Corel.
Yesterday, Sharp added three new models to its XR series of projectors. The new XR-30S, XR-30X, and XR-40X all have enhanced definiton but "real awareness of HD".
Each projector has DVI inputs with native HDCP support that allows the models to display encrypted video from certain Blu ray and HD DVD discs. The projectors can also play some content stored on PCs with Vista installed.
Each model also has component inputs as well as RCA and S-Video. Each model boasts a new image processing chip for better overall quality and better colors.
According to Sharp, the XR-30S is "built modestly with an 800x600 resolution, a 2,300-lumen brightness, and a 2,000:1 contrast ratio; the XR-30X steps up to a sharper 1024x768 resolution as well as a clearer 2,200 contrast ratio. The XR-40X tops the line with an extra-bright 2,600-lumen image."
All three models will hit retail shelves in July with MSRPs of $700, $800, and $900 USD respectively.
The late singer Bob Marley realeased his excellent "Exodus" album in 1977 as vinyl record but now the record label has decided to re-release the album, not on vinyl, not on CD, but on a USB flash drive.
Island Records, a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, produced 4000 of the drives for the re-release and loaded them with the original 10 songs plus additional tracks and exclusive concert footage of the singer. The drives will cost a hefty $44.99 USD.
The label says the high price relfects not only the extra content but the fact that the drive can be formatted and reused after the songs are taken off and put on your PC.
Last year, the Barenaked Ladies released their album on USB sticks as well as CDs and the drives have sold almost 1000 copies at $25 USD a piece.
“Once you upload the music to your computer, you have a piece of hardware,” says Adam Smith, who manages artists at the Nettwerk Music Group, “If you’re buying a U.S.B. stick, the cost is not so much different to buy it loaded with music from your favorite band.”
HTC, the large Taiwanese phone maker, introduced its "Touch" mobile phone on Tuesday, boasting many of the features of the Apple iPhone.
The phone maker, which usually sells its phones directly to mobile carriers which then rebrand the phone as its own is putting alot of faith in the phone as it believes it can contribute significantly to the company's financial performance.
The Touch has a 2.8 inch color LCD screen and is based on the Windows Mobile 6 OS. Also included is a 2-megapixel digital camera, built in Wi-Fi and EDGE, and a microSD slot for added memory. In total the phone is a bit thick, measuring in at 14 millimeters.
HTC said the first carrier to recieve the device would be the European Orange and the carrier is expected to begin selling the phone next week. The rest of Europe as well as Asia will receive the phone later this month and the Americas will recieve it later this year.
While in Europe the Touch will keep its HTC brand, when it hits North America, T-Mobile will launch it under their own name.
The Touch will include HTC's "TouchFLO" technology, a technology that will allow the phone's UI to act similarly to the iPhone.
"This was a smart move for HTC, provide a really cool, local optimized, touch screen device when the iPhone launches in all the markets where you won't be able to get one immediately," JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg said.
Bill Gates took time recently to speak about his vision for the future of gaming, and his vision includes a control system where the players would swing a bat or racket just like they would in real life, yet he says it wont be the same as the Nintendo Wii.
Gates made the comments during a panel interview last week in which he and Apple head Steve Jobs spoke. Gates' response came about when the subject was turned to "how the role of the PC was evolving" and he answered, "As we get natural input, that will cause a change... Software is doing vision and so, you know, imagine a game machine where you just can pick up the bat and swing it or the tennis racket and swing it."
When told by interviewers that the Wii used such a control system, Gates replied, "No, that’s not it. You can’t pick up your tennis racket…And swing it. You can’t sit there with your friends and do those natural things.
"That’s a 3D positional device," Gates added. "This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what’s going on."
In the past, Gates was critical of the Wii and Nintendo's strategy with the console. He was quoted as saying, "Look at the resolution you get with a controlled experience like that. Say to yourself, how in terms of using a game for a long period of time, what kind of accuracy and capability do you want?"
Brash Entertainment announced today that they had secured $400 million USD in investments that would go towards funding the development of video games based on television, music and movie properties.
The company claims that to date they have received over 40 licenses through their partnerships with 5 major film studios and that 12 games are currently in production including titles based on the blockbuster hits "300" and "Saw".
"Brash is founded on the simple premise that top Hollywood creativity plus top game talent should equal great games," said CEO Mitch Davis.
"We are laser focused on delivering high quality games. The other aspects of our business are left to the experts – best of breed partners we've tapped for their specific expertise."
The company said the $400 million funding came from a syndicate led by ABRY Partners. For its part, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will be the distributor for Brash and hopes to cash in on Brash's ambitions.
"We are very excited about working with Brash as they grow into a major force in the gaming space," said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros.
"We believe that our global game distribution services fir perfectly with the Brash strategic mission."
Toshiba Corp. has announced it aims to put HD DVD hardware into all of its laptops starting next year, pushing the HD DVD optical disc format forward once again. "The demand is there: people want to watch their favorite movies in high-definition on the road," Toshiba Senior Vice President Hisatsugu Nonaka told reporters at a news conference. Sony equips PS3 consoles with Blu-ray Disc players to guarantee Blu-ray playback capabilities in millions of homes.
According to research firm IDC, Toshiba sold about 9.2 million notebook PCs in calendar 2006. Presumably, adding HD DVD hardware to all of its laptops, even next year, would push up the prices and could affect overall sales. Meanwhile, Sony shipped 5.5 million PS3s by the end of March, selling 3.6 million of those units.
Toshiba also announced that it will begin selling laptops that use flash memory for storage from June 22nd. NAND prices have fallen enough to make notebooks with 64GB of flash, needed for Windows Vista. "We think flash laptops are about ready to break into the consumer market, and will start to catch on around next summer," Nonaka said. While flash laptops have many benefits like being lighter and quieter, they are priced at around 400,000 yen ($3,286).
Alienware has introduced the new Hangar18: HD Entertainment Center. Enhancing the way you watch, listen, share and download entertainment, the Hangar18 allows you to record and play back high-definition content in up to 1080p via an HDMI output, delivers the pristine audio quality of an onboard 5.1 surround sound amplifier and offers up to 2TB of hard drive space to store a lifetime's worth of digital media content.
"Alienware's new Hangar18 offers more than just a home theater solution, it lays the foundation for a truly unforgettable high-definition experience," said Frank Azor, senior vice-president and general manager of Alienware's Worldwide Product Group. "Benefits such as HD video playback, massive storage capacity, convenient wireless capabilities and onboard theater-quality sound bring new meaning to the phrase 'all-in-one.'"
It includes a built-in 5.1 surround sound amplifier pumping out up to 200 watts per channel of high-octane audio. There is also an onboard HDMI interface so you can connect all your video and audio through one cable source, while enjoying crystal-clear viewing at full 1080p resolution with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) enabled. Wireless functionality that allows you to stream music, videos and pictures to other Windows PCs, mobile devices and media extenders in your home.
Yet another defendant in a copyright infringement case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) crackdown on file sharing has decided to fight back with strong accusations. Suzy Del Cid has filed a counterclaim against the trade group that mirrors one filed by Tanya Andersen in October 2005. UMG v. Del Cid is being heard in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
Del Cid has accused the RIAA of computer trespass, conspiracy, extortion, and violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act in her counterclaim. It claims that, "these record companies hired unlicensed private investigators—in violation of various state laws—who receive a bounty to invade private computers and private computer networks to obtain information—in the form of Internet Protocol ('IP') addresses—allowing them to identify the computers and computer networks that they invaded."
Of course, if Del Cid had a shared folder on KaZaa, she may have a hard time convincing the court that MediaSentry trespassed. However, she did allege that the RIAA used private investigators unlicensed by the state of Florida to track her online activities in violation of Florida law. She also claims that the RIAA violated Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by "knowingly collecting an unlawful consumer debt," referring to the Settlement Support Center's attempts to settle the case before the lawsuit was filed.
Melodeo Inc. announced plans on Tuesday to help music fans expand what they can do with their iTunes digital music collections, going beyond the desktop computer and iPod. The company will offer a service that will stream personal libraries to mobile phones. The idea is to let consumers listen to their digital music on the go without having to bring portable players with them.
The service would also let users access songs from their library on more than one personal computer. Melodeo's vice president for music services, David Dederer, said revenue could be from monthly fees for the service, software download fees, or audio advertisements. The company would have to pay the same fees paid by Web-based radio services, or a tenth of a cent per song play.
"We're doing everything we can to follow the current legal guidelines and standard industry practices where the legal guidelines are not crystal clear," said Dederer. He said he expects the first version of the service to launch in six to 12 weeks. At first the service will be limited to iTunes libraries, but will expand to other digital music services after.
If you live in the United Kingdom and pay your TV license, then the BBC Trust (the body that oversees the BBC) wants to hear from you. The body wants to know what the public thinks about about the BBC's proposed new high definition (HD) television channel. The development will be funded through license fees paid by citizens, so BBC Trust is giving you the opportunity to have your say on the matter.
Starting in 2006, the BBC ran a trial of HDTV broadcasting but for the scheme to develop further, it must be approved by the BBC Trust body. The closing time and date for receipt of responses is 5pm, 19 June 2007. The group is taking feedback via its website, but users can also write directly to it or email it instead.
According to Enterbrain, a Japanese publisher that tracks video game console sales, Nintendo's Wii games console outsold Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) console by more than five to one during the month of May. The firm said that Nintendo sold about 251,794 Wii consoles in Japan in May, while the PS3 trailed behind with 45,321 sales.
The figures indicate that Nintendo is continuing to extend its lead over Sony in Japan, with the Wii outselling the PS3 by about four to one in April. Nintendo has seen impressive sales for its Wii console across the world since it launched last year, and the company's portable offering, the DS, has seen very strong sales in its market.
Nintendo has sold about 2.49 million Wii consoles in Japan since it was launched back in December. Sony has sold about 928,642 PS3s in the territory since last November.
In a decision which is devastating to the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) campaign against file sharing, both parties in Atlantic v. Andersen case have agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice. This means that Tanya Andersen, a disabled single-mother of a nine year old daughter, is the prevailing party and the door is now open to recovering attorneys fees.
The Oregon woman was accused of sharing gangsta rap music using the KaZaaP2P client. She completely denied involvement in distributing tracks like "Hoes in My Room" using the P2P network and filed a countersuit accusing the record industry of racketeering, fraud, and deceptive business practices in October 2005. The RIAA alleged that she shared the songs with the handle "gotenkito."
Last month, Andersen filed a motion for summary judgment, saying that the plaintiffs have "failed to provide competent evidence sufficient to satisfy summary judgment standards" to show that she was guilty of copyright infringement. A forensic expert hired by the RIAA also completely failed to find any evidence whatsoever on her hard drive to support the RIAA's allegations.
Do you remember that Microsoft's Soapbox service was closed to new users due to fears that users were uploading copyrighted content without permission? Well, the service is again open to the public after two months and now has several "proactive automatic filtering technology" products implemented that were produced by Audible Magic (as well as some of its own).
"As a software company, we have a deep belief in the responsible use and aggressive protection of intellectual property and see these as important steps to ensure the viability and success of our user-generated video service over the long term,"Rob Bennett, general manager of Entertainment and Video Services at MSN, told Ars.
Audible Magic's technology enables the service to check for "fingerprinted" content. Uploaded videos would be compared against Audible Magic's database to check if the audio track is the same as that of any protected content. This feature should work pretty fast and should be very effective.
"In addition, Microsoft is building tools to help content owners with automating certain parts of notice and takedown for anything that might not be caught during proactive filtering," Bennett said. "These tools do not use fingerprinting—they help content owners find content that might have slipped through the filtering, then allow them to more easily determine if it needs to be taken down, and to let us know in an easy, seamless fashion."
Sony Corp. had a pleasant and welcome surprise for anybody who was waiting for its BDP-S300 player, announced back in February, to become available with a price tag of $599. Sony announced today that the Blu-ray player will cost $100 less, retailing for $499 instead. That figure is half of what the company's first Blu-ray player was priced at just six months ago.
The new player has essentially the same capabilities as the older BDP-S1 but is smaller. Sony cited lower production costs and growing demand for Blu-ray disc products for the surprise price cut. On the other side of the battlefield, Toshiba is now selling a HD DVD player for less than $300, about 14 months after Toshiba's first player hit stores in the United States.
Neither format has caught on strong enough to have a "definite" advantage over the other in the market, but declining prices combined with the growing number of homes equipped with a HDTV set could set the stage for a big showdown as earlier as the 2007 holiday season.
Broadcom Corporation has announced new media PC solutions that enable playback of high-definition (HD) video content across the widest range of PCs in the industry. By lowering CPU utilization, and integrating seamlessly into Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows XP environments, Broadcom's media PC solutions enable mainstream PCs featuring integrated graphics to play back high definition content from either a Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD, as well as from HD downloaded or broadcast content.
The new Broadcom media PC solutions are available in three add-in card formats (including desktop PCI Express, PCI Express mini-card or ExpressCard 34), and as a chipset solution for PC motherboard applications. HD DVD and Blu-ray offer new and exciting features such as high definition video at 1080pResolution, picture-in-a-picture, high definition multi-channel audio, 3D style graphics and user interactivity (for games, trivia, web-enabled content, etc.).
Toshiba Corp. has announced its new slim HD DVD-RW drive for notebook PCs that can read and write and rewrite to HD DVD-RW discs, and read and write to HD DVD-R discs and to standard DVD and CD discs. The new SD-L912A makes it possible to backup the large capacities of PC hard drives to the reusable format of HD DVD-RW discs, and store data-rich HD digital content. The drive's ability to rewrite to HD DVD-RW also opens the way to a wide range of applications involving storage and rewriting of large volumes of data.
The new product also supports high speed read and write for standard DVD and CD discs, and the complete library of different DVD and CD formats. The new drive is compliant with the EU RoHS 3 directive on environmentally hazardous substances, which came into force in July 2006. Toshiba will feature the new drive at the Toshiba Digital Media Network Taiwan Corporation booth (booth: B1234) at Computex 2007, which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan from June 5 to 9.
Sample shipments of the new drive are scheduled to start next month.
Plextor today announced the immediate availability of the TurboPlex PX-810SA DVDSuper Multi Drive. The new model addresses growing customer demands for DVD burners that support Serial ATA, the evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. The PX-810SA also includes a new bundle of value-added software applications for tasks such as data backup, video editing, and DVD authoring.
OEMs, VARs, integrators, and consumers all gain benefits from Serial ATA technology. End users enjoy fast 150 MB/sec data transfer rates. The interface supports one device per controller connection, eliminating master/slave configuration jumper issues for installers. SATA also provides a substantial pin count reduction from Parallel ATA, while thinner cables help air-flow and improve cable routing—big pluses for OEMs and integrators.
"Our first internal SATA drives were designed specifically for manufacturers, resellers, and integrators, but we found there was also demand from professional and business users for these drives," said Michael Arbisi, vice president of channel sales for Plextor. "The new PX-810SA is a return to the Plextor legacy of creating drives that appeal to professional and business users who need mission-critical recording reliability and quality, combined with a rich set of software tools and features. Support for SATA makes the drive even more appealing to users who need to quickly transfer and record large volumes of data."
Through a program it calls "Ignition", Microsoft hopes to give new music artists the chance to get discovered by the 30 million MSN, Zune and Xbox Live users.
Participating bands in the program will recieve a month's worth of "prominent placement" on the Zune Marketplace, Zune.net, MSN's entertainment Web site, and Xbox Live Marketplace.
Microsoft announced that the first band to participate is "Maximo Park" coming from the UK.
Before participating the bands must agree to an exclusive contract with Microsoft and promise to provide exclusive music and music video to Microsoft's entertainment properties.
"Consumers are looking for ways to find new music, and Ignition helps connect artists with potential new fans by giving them multiple opportunities to listen to, watch or read about the artist across Microsoft's online platforms," Zune music marketing head Christina Calio added.
Microsoft will allow free downloads of all Maximo Park's music from Zune.net and access to videos on Xbox Live.
Yahoo will soon be raising the cost of its online subscription music service by $1 to $3 USD depending on the current customer's plan.
When Yahoo launched the the service in 2005, it had a low price of $4.99 per month. After the raise in price, Yahoo Music Unlimited will cost $11.99 monthly when purchased for a year. If you were to buy the service monthly instead of annually, it will cost you $14.99 now.
Yahoo will still have a version of Yahoo Music Unlimited without the ability to transfer music to your portable device and that will now cost $8.99 monthly, and $5.99 per month with the annual commitment.
In an update to last night's article here, Microsoft corrected a translation error that came from a response Steve Ballmer had given a German magazine. We reported that the Zune player was coming to Europe, but not until 2008 and now the company has said there is no set timeframe at all.
The comments by Ballmer, correctly translated should have said "we decided not to enter new markets so far and will not do so until after we have reached some of the goals outlined. When this will be the case, I cannot tell you today."
Cesar Menendez, the Zune's product manager also tried to clarify the situation by adding, "We will not expand the device family or our geographical footprint until we are positive that we can provide the best experience from the start."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has begun criticizing Apple over its practice of embedding user information into its DRM-free purchased tracks from the iTunes store. The group feels that practice poses a security risk to its users.
Embedded within the files are the customer's name and email address, and the EFF claims that the data can be pose a privacy issue to many users. If, for example your iPod is stolen, the information can be uncovered rather easily by the theif. Although there is not sensitive data embedded, such as credit card numbers or phone numbers, the addition of DRM-free purchases makes it even easier for the information to get stolen.
Although Apple has never given a specific reason for the watermarks, most believe it is because they would like the ability to track files if they end up on P2P networks.
"Bottom line: DRM-free doesn't mean that Apple suddenly supports piracy," Erica Sadun wrote for The Unofficial Apple Weblog last week.
According to an announcement by Lions Gate Entertainment, 15 movies it has made available on Xbox Live has helped to boost digital revenue by almost 50 percent. The company revealed that over 150,000 download rentals had been made for those films.
The company released the films on XBL in February and were priced at 320 Microsoft points for standard DVD rentals and 480 points for HD rentals. In dollars, those points are equivalent to $4 and $6 USD respectively.
Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer said that video-on-demand (VOD) sales for the film Employee of the Month "exceeded USD 3 million on a film that grossed about USD 27 million at the domest box office".
He added, "Our VOD revenues grew by approximately 50 per cent in fiscal 2007 from the previous year... Our Internet delivered digital revenue grew by a multiple of seven in fiscal ’07 compared to the prior year, although obviously from a relatively small base."
Lions Gate president Steve Beeks also added, "This is an extremely promising sign for our entire library and the power of the virtual shelf space of digital delivery."
Finnish police forces have raided several Direct Connect hubs and users today in Finland. Raid was targeted against several large DC hubs in Finland and authorities have arrested four people during the raids.
According to media industry's anti-piracy group in Finland, called TTVK, the hubs targeted had thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of illegal music and video files were shared through them.
"Today's raids shouldn't come as a suprise to anyone. The hubs raided today each have had thousands of users sharing hundreds of thousands of music files and tens of thousands movies. Specially DC hub operators should be worried now and also in the future, as we plan to ask police to investigate even more DC hubs", said TTVK's operations manager Antti Kotilainen.
The raid was also praised by the IFPI boss John Kennedy, who said that "IFPI is pleased with the raids carried out by Finnish police today against the illegal hubs."
Direct Connect and DC++ are among the most popular P2P networks in Finland and other Nordic countries.
When Microsoft launched their Zune player in the US in late 2006 it was expected that a European launch would follow sometime in 2007.
In an interview with the German Wirtschafts Woche, Steve Ballmer has now said that the Zune launch for fall 2007 has been canceled indefinetely. He blamed the delay on the fact that the Zune is still not profitable in the US. In late 2006, a Microsoft spokesperson mirrored Ballmer's announcement and said a European launch might not occur until 2008.
Microsoft recently announced it had almost sold 1 million units and expects to do so by the end of the month. New Zune models are anticipated for Christmas this year as well.
SunBriteTV has released a 46 inch all-weather resistant LCD that is an upgrade to their current smaller LCDs with the same features.
The SunBrite 4600HD will debut at InfoComm next week. It has a "corrosion resistant enclosure that protects the internals from the elements." It also has a built-in filtered fan system for very hot days and a heater that lets the TV work in temperatures of 24 degrees Farenheit.
The TV also includes many inputs such as HDMI, component, S-video, composite, and RF and has a nice 1366x768 resolution at a 1600:1 contrast ratio.
The TV will be expensive however, $5000 MSRP, and there are no accessories as of yet that would protect your HD sources, but hopefully some are coming.
According to a report by the TimeOnline, British Members of Parliament are using their taxpayer-funded expense accounts to buy plasma televisions and iPods amongst other things, according to unnamed insiders. The report alleges that Finance administrators have approved such items despite widespread public concern about abuses of the parliamentary expenses system.
It also alleges that MPs have re-mortgaged their homes to get thousands of pounds, and are using their allowances to cover the repayments. "There has been a successful claim for a very expensive, large plasma television and for a fish tank. After discussion among officials in the fees office, both were waved through," the report cites an insider as saying.
"Also, in the run-up to Christmas last year, a lot of MPs suddenly started claiming for iPods. The system really is outrageous." The row over the £87m annual expenses bill erupted last month when MPs backed new legislation to exclude themselves from the Freedom of Information Act.
"It is public money and it should be accounted for. I don’t believe MPs ought to be exempt under freedom of information and I thought the vote was a shameful day. This is precisely the sort of thing that gives MPs a bad name,"Mark Hunter, a Liberal Democrat MP opposed to the new legislation, said.
P2Pnet's Jon Newton recently had contact with Russian MP3 site AllofMP3.com. Record companies accuse AllofMP3 of illegally selling music downloads to international customers. AllofMP3 is known for selling its DRM-free downloads at a fraction of the price iTunes and similar authorized services do. This fact, for a time at least, made AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in the music download market in the UK.
AllofMP3 told p2pnet that is now has 5,500,000 registered users worldwide. When asked about U.S. pressure on the Russian government with regard to Moscow's 13-year-old bid to join the WTO, specifically about the existence of AllofMP3, the response was...
"It is disappointing that United States Trade Representative Susan Schwab completely and deliberately mischaracterized AllofMP3.com. Furthermore, it is irresponsible to use AllofMP3.com as a negotiating instrument in an attempt to extract concessions from Russia in return for US support for accession to the World Trade Organization.
AllofMP3.com is a Russian business that is in complete compliance with Russian law."
Furthermore, the company claims to never have been contacted by the Russian government, Susan Schwab or anybody from the U.S. trade office or from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or any of the four major record companies. AllofMP3 hopes to keep up with the growth in income and Internet access in Russia to provide "customers a web-friendly site and great functionality at an attractive price point."
Japanese electronics firm, Hitachi Ltd. and U.S. software company, Oracle Corp., will jointly market wireless tags in China that can help in the fight against intellectual property theft by providing a means to identify authentic products. Piracy of branded and copyright goods is rampant in China, causing friction with its trade partners. The Chinese Government is taking steps to improve protection of intellectual property and to crack down on counterfeiting operations.
As a result, Hitachi and Oracle are expecting an increase in demand for integrated circuit tags for a wide range of products. The IC tags are tiny chips that store information on where a product was produced and by who. A reader can be used to access such information and also to confirm that the product is authentic.
According to a Nikkei report, the IC tags will cost about 10 yen (about $0.08) each. In an initial step, both companies will target tickets for events such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
Seeking to product LCD screens fast and efficiently while also keeping up with demand in Europe for flat screen TVs, LG Electronics, LG Philips LCD, LG Innotek and LG Chem have opened a European LCD cluster in Wroclaw, Poland. Thee other component makers from South Korea are also housed in the cluster, making it a one-stop-shop for manufacturing all the components to make the TV sets.
LG said it has invested about €400 million in creating the cluster and has an additional €407 earmarked for further expansion in 2011. Approximately 4,200 local jobs have been created. "With this highly efficient one-stop manufacturing system, we can provide faster response to regional customers and markets while increasing competence in cost and price," said Yong Nam, Vice Chairman and CEO of LG Electronics.
Nam continued: "As the demand for LCD TVs is increasing more rapidly in Europe than any other region, the Poland cluster will play a core part in LG's overall LCD-related businesses." The company says it invested in Poland due to geographic location, a competitive workforce and support from the Government.
Motorola is preparing to offer a wider range of multimedia handsets to boost profits, according to company CEO Ed Zander. The company will not be relying on a single product like the Razr as it has been in the past. Zander explained the strategy to investors just a day after announcing 4000 employees will be laid off.
"We're not going to have another Razr. Every once in a while, something will pop, but there have been only three in recent years-- the Microtec, the Startec and the Razr," Zander said in a webcast address at the Lehman Brothers Worldwide Wireless and Wireline Conference in New York last week.
During this month and next month, Motorola will bring new models to Europe and Asia. These include the Razr2, Moto Z8 which features mobile TV, Moto Q 9 smartphone and Rokr Z6, a mobile phone/MP3 player. "So there are four of them, which proves we can still design some pretty wild things. But we need more of them, at more price points, with more geographies and more carriers," Zander said.
Of course, Motorola has a lot of catch up to do as competitors such as Nokia, already have a selection of smartphones / multimedia phones on offer. According to Gartner Inc., Nokia claimed a market share of 35.7% for mobile sales in the first quarter, quite far ahead of Motorola's 18.5% share.
A Chicago man has been charged for uploading copies of the hit TV show, 24, to a website before they aired on television. Federal authorities have charged Jorge Romero, 24, with copyright violations for illegally distributing episodes of Fox's show. He had downloaded leaked episodes of 24 and then uploaded them to LiveDigital.com, according to a federal complaint filed in Los Angeles on Friday.
The four episodes were from the sixth season of 24 and were uploaded more than a week before they were to be aired on TV. Romero was charged with one felony count of uploading copyrighted material to a publicly accessible computer network knowing the work was intended for commercial distribution.
If convicted, he could be looking at up to three years in prison.
In a new patent granted to the company entitled "Mobile Information Terminal Apparatus", Sony-Ericsson seems to imply that it can make a balance between serious gaming and phones, a concept that has been tried but has so far failed.
The patent describes the new device that is similar in shape to the Sony gaming handheld PSP but that also includes a swiveling screen that is reminiscent of the Samsung i7. The screen would allow for both movie watching and gaming and can rotate either 90 or 180 degrees.
The description also claims that advanced software would play a role in the new phone. The phone would always monitor for incoming calls and would pause the game to handle the conversation. To resume, ou can either start from the immediate pause point, at the current level, or shut down the game completely.
Although there was no indication that a phone was upcoming, Sony-Ericsson can now do so without worrying about copies.
iGiki.com has announced that they will be releasing a few games designed specifically for the upcoming Apple iPhone.
The games were developed in Adobe Flash CS3 and are specifically modified for use without a mouse. The games are seperated into "GikiSingles", "GikiPacks", and "GikiMinis."
The GikiPacks cost $2 for three months, GikiSingles cost $1 for three months and GikiMinis are free.
A few of the GikiSingles include "iTrek", a space ship piloting game; "HangMan", based on the classic; "Outer Wars", a 3D shooter; "Sink or Swim", a game where you must save overboard crew from sharks and "zBlast", an action shooter.
The GikiPacks are all remakes of classic arcase games and include iTetri, based on the legend.
According to an Engadget source, Apple has submitted three commericals for television airtime, each of which prominently feature the date June 29th as the release date for the upcoming iPhone.
Although many dates have been rumored so far, this latest rumor seems to be the most credible. There are reasons not to be believe however, mainly that the 29th is a Friday and Apple is notorious for launching products on Tuesdays and that the commercials would air before WWDC when Steve Jobs should officially announce the date.
More updates on the official release date as they become available.
UPDATE:
Confirmed by myself, release date is the 29th, just saw the commerical ;)
According to Olivia Harrison, the widow of Beatle's member George Harrison, the Beatles music catalogue may be coming to iTunes and other legal music download service by early 2008.
Harrison told Reuters, "We just have a few things to work out elsewhere" before the catalogue can be released for digital purchase.
Harrison also noted that one factor for the delay is that a complete remastering of all the CDs is in the works and is taking awhile. "I think we're a little bit behind. We (the band's members and widows) all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there."
The Beatles' catalogue will be distributed through EMI meaning they will go online DRM-free.
According to a company spokesman, SanDisk has decided to put its Sansa View on hold. The company would like to "re-scope" the device which would have been SanDisk's first media player that focused more on video support than music support.
The hold is indefinite but the company reaffirmed its commitment to the player and hopes to release the player when the timing is right.
"The market is changing fast and furious and we want to shift our efforts to develop a [portable media player] that will meet the needs of the market versus pushing out the wrong product," the spokesperson said. "So we're taking another look."
The View would have been the first explicitly HD-capable media players on the market, a player capable of displaying 1080i HD video through TV output. It would have also offered added storage through an SDHC card slot with support for 4GB or more.
Last week, Sony unveiled the VRD-MC5, a self-contained DVD burner that will connect to a few Sony AVCHD camcorders.
This will be the first burner in their new DVDirect line that will be able to support AVCHD. Until now, a conversion software was needed to convert videos to DVD for standalone playback.
Accroding to Dailytech, "The VRD-MC5 offers USB, RCA analog, S-video, and Firewire inputs. The burner will also work with standard definition camcorders. The VRD-MC5 records various formats including DVD, HDD, DV, and Digital8, connected by either RCA or Firewire. The unit does not accept HDV input streams. AVCHD camcorders can only be connected to the burner through the USB port."
The unit comes with a 2.5 inch LCD, navigation controls and a large burn button. "The burner allows for clips to be sorted and placed in a preferred order for burning on DVD+R/-R/+RW/-RW/+R DL discs. It also works as a still photo burner with card slots for MemoryStick Duo/PRO Duo, SD/SDHC, xD, and compact flash."
The burner has no video outputs so it cannot serve as a standalone home DVD player.
The unit has no video output, so it cannot be used a home DVD player. The burnt DVDs will still be in AVCHD format and therefore your playback device must be compatible with the format. Notably, the PlayStation 3 is compatible among a select amount of players.
Recently, the AACS LA, the group in charge of the AACS copy protection, acknowledged that hackers had been very effective in cracking the protection and have since been trying to restore the integrity of the technology. That being said, the new movie titles shipped with Media Key Block (MKB) v3 were cracked by Slysoft a week before the titles hit retail shelves.
Although an official statement has not been made about the latest round of keys being crakced, Richard E. Doherty, director of technology strategy at Microsoft, and who is also very involved with the AACS LA, took time to talk about the protection and how he still has complete faith in it.
“Just to clarify, the original attack was on certain software players that proved to be vulnerable, and did not and does not represent a widespread break in the AACS ecosystem ... In the past PC's have typically been a big target for hacking activities, as they are designed to run arbitrary software programs. But the line between PCs and traditional CE devices is clearly blurring – and many of the best PVR systems (in my opinion) are highly customizable and capable of running user-designed software,” explained Doherty, “Keep in mind, however, that AACS is aware of the history and attack vectors of PC playback systems, and there are several technical measures (such as KCD and the entire proactive renewal system) that are designed specifically to address the particular issues of PC-based protection,” Doherty added.
On Friday, Canada introduced a legislation that would criminalize camcording of films in theaters and make the crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
Recently, Japan introduced a similar legislation and Mexico and the US have had legislations in place for a while. The MPAA and other groups estimate that piracy cost the movie industry $6 billion USD per year worldwide and recently Candada has been called a "haven for piracy".
"I don't want this problem of piracy to be seen as an American problem," said Kevin Tierney, producer of the Canadian film "Bon Cop, Bad Cop," who admitted that his movie had been bootlegged worldwide, "This is stealing."
Until Friday, it had only been illegal in Canada to camcord a movie if it was meant for commercial use. Authorities however, have had a terrible time enforcing that rule, as it is almost impossible to prove such recordings were done for commercial distribution.
Now, if you are caught recording the film, you can face up to 2 years in prison, and face 5 years if convicted of doing so for commercial distribution.
We reported back in April that a Dutch TV show, Kassa, had done a show about Microsoft's Xbox 360 console scratching discs under normal use. It blamed the problem on a TSST DVD-ROM drive that is missing parts that stabilize the disc. Maglena Kunevam, the European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs, confirmed that she has contacted Microsoft about the problem and expects an answer fast.
She has asked Microsoft to explain how it has handled the problem specifically in the Netherlands, but also wants to know how big this problem is in other regions. There has been about 1,000 reported complaints in the Netherlands about this problem. Kunevam said that she expects a full response from Microsoft within a week.
National Public Radio (NPR) and a group of webcasters have filed for an emergency stay in the US District Court of the DC Circuit, looking for a delay on new royalty rates that will go into effect on July 15th. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided in March that royalty rates should be significantly raised. The Digital Media Association in conjunction with NPR is requesting that the "radical and arbitrary" royalty rate increase be delayed.
The new fee structure means webcasters much pay a flat fee for each song streamed on a per user basis. The fees, which would more than double over the next few years, are costly enough to knock out some of the smaller webcasters. The CRB recently rejected arguments made by the webcasters and only decided to allow webcasters to pay royalties based on average listening hours through 2008.
SoundExchange, which is in charge of collecting royalties, feared congressional action and said it would allow smaller webcasters to keep paying the same rates through 2010, but larger webcasters would have to get used to the new rates starting in July. Webcasters were not impressed by the offer, saying it throws larger webcasters "under the bus" and ensures that Internet Radio will never compete with satellite or terrestrial radio.
With the iPhone expected to finally become available in the United States this month, Apple Inc. is reported to have requested Quanta Computer to ramp up production. Reports are circulating that Quanta has received an order to produce 5 million iPhones with delivery scheduled to begin in September.
"It is important for the Company to gain new business to sustain growth and development," Quanta said, responding to media reports adding that, "the Company will not comment on specific customer, order or any types of confidential information." The company has produced various products for Apple in the past and is the world's largest producer of laptop computers.
, analyst Matthew Kather released a survey earlier this week of AT&T Cingular stores that were queried. "Most stores expect the phone on 6/15 or 6/22, and most expect to only have a few (highest number was 40 at one store) on hand initially." Kather's report states, "Overall pent-up retail demand at Cingular stores appears very strong, with about 15-20% of the stores we contacted keeping a waiting list for customers interested to purchase it."
Apple CEO Steve Jobs said on Wednesday that he expects the iPhone to begin selling before the end of June. Many expect the launch to coincide with Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWCD). Jobs is scheduled to deliver his keynote on Monday, June 11.
We have all had an experience of hearing a song in a language we cant understand that grabbed our attention, and it can be frustrating not knowing what the lyrics to the song are. Apple Inc.'s iTunes has decided to take on the language barrier in a very interesting way. The service has launched a new feature called Foreign Exchange which will get two artists from different countries to translate and cover each others' songs in their native language.
Wir Sind Helden, a German electronic act will participate first with +44, an American rock act featuring Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker, formerly of Blink 182. Wir Sind Helden is covering +44's "When Your Heart Stops Beating" and +44 is covering Wir Sind Helden's "Guten Tag." The content will be available exclusively through iTunes.
"The idea is exposing people to bands they may not listen to," Hoppus said. "In America, we don't really listen to music in other languages. I think it's a cool idea to get people to open their ears to music from different parts of the world." iTunes has a presence in 22 countries.
Microsoft Corp. will introduce an initiative on Monday to promote emerging music acts across all of its digital services. The service, Ignition, will expose new artists and their music to consumers for a period of one month. Promotion will be done via MSN, Xbox Live and the Zune Marketplace. Maximo Park, a UK band, will be the first participating act.
The first single will be available as a free exclusive download from the Zune Marketplace, while the video will be available free on Xbox Live and can be streamed through the MSN service. Microsoft will provide a custom website dedicated to the band and its activities on the zune.net site and will host online listening parties of the act's current album on MSN Music.
Microsoft is also working with the band to produce custom content including artist-created playlists and "behind-the-album" commentary. "We don't want the same thing that is going out on MTV," Microsoft director of music marketing Christina Calio said. Ignition is a result of past, successful, music promotional efforts from Microsoft.
After the Zune launch the company started sponsoring artists' tours and the Xbox Live "Artist of the Month" program gave away free video downloads, interviews and a "Game with Fame" program that lets Xbox Live users compete with artists. The new Ignition program does not replace those promotional efforts, it acts as the flagship offering.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) published a statement on its website yesterday concerning the European Commission's publication of 2006 Customs seizures of counterfeit and pirate goods. In 2006, over 23 million counterfeit CDs and DVDs were seized at European borders by customs, according to the European Commission.
The level of seizures increased 139% compared to 2005. The EC reports that over 93% of all pirated products seized came from China, a huge increase form 51% in 2005. "These statistics underscore the urgent need for the EU to step up pressure on China before the WTO. China is producing and exporting millions of pirate products around the world. This has to stop,"Frances Moore, IFPI Regional Director for Europe, said.
IFPI estimates that a third of all CDs purchased in 2005 were pirate – 1.2 billion pirate CDs in total. The global traffic of pirate CDs was worth US$4.5 billion in 2005 based on pirate prices.
Retailer HMV is experiencing strong, healthy sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3. Sales of the consoles and games are holding up during the traditionally quiet summer months. The PS3, the most expensive of the consoles, is exceeding its sales targets but the retailer hopes for a price drop to boost it's overall performance.
"Sales remain in line with expectations, occasionally even exceeding them," commented Tim Ellis, head of games for the entertainment specialist. "We're looking forward to further games releases, and when the time's right, a suitable price revision to take the console to its next level of sales."
Microsoft's Xbox 360 isn't having any problems attracting buyers yet either, despite being on the market longer than its competitors. "The console continues to hold its own and I'm sure Microsoft will know when to consider stimulating sales further via pricing," Ellis said.
As for Nintendo, the Wii console is still one of the hottest items in stores about 6 months since it launched and supply problems are being improved. "Supply is stabilizing and Nintendo is doing a very good job of keeping us updated on key developments," said Ellis.
Nintendo is set to add another few games to the Wii Virtual Console service on Monday, including Zelda II, which will bring the total number of games on offer through the service to over 100. In over six months since the console launched, the service has served about 4.7 million downloads or about 16 downloads a minute on average since November 19 last year.
Super Mario Bros, Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Super Mario World, and The Legend of Zelda are the top five games to be downloaded (in order). Microsoft's Xbox 360 has well over 100 Xbox Live Arcade titles on offer, leaving Sony trailing with just a few downloads available from the PlayStation Store. Sony does not yet update its service on a weekly basis like Microsoft or Nintendo.
The Wii still remains the only home console on the market without games that offer online multiplayer however, and it is rumored he Wii's online gaming service won't be finished development until next year. "Beyond the Wii Shop Channel, all types of people are getting connected and checking out the information and entertainment options available on the Wii Menu," said Nintendo marketing VP, George Harrison.
According to a new report by Merrill Lynch, Apple is ready to sell more iPhones then they originally anticipated. The analyst group has estimated that to start, production will be at about 200,000 to 300,000 per month and then gradually increase until production hits 1 million in December. That would result in 4 million units being produced by the end of 2007 and after prduction levels, about 12 million being shipped during 2008.
In January, at the Macworld conference, Steve Jobs said he hoped to sell a total of 10 million phones by the end of 2008, a number far lower than Merril Lynch's predictions.
Yesterday, the Canadian encryption vendor Certicom filed a broad lawsuit against Sony accusing the electronics giant of infringing on two of Certicom's patents. Although Sony is sued alot, this latest suit can be potentially cripling. The suit is targeting AACS and by extension, Blu ray and the PlayStation 3.
Back in 2003, Certicom sold patent licenses to the US National Security Agency for $25 million including the two in the latest Sony suit. Now, Certicom wants monetary damages from Sony, claiming that the encryptions found in AACS violate Certicom patents on "Strengthened public key protocol" and "Digital signatures on a Smartcard."
Certicom says that Sony needs to take out a license for AACS, Blu ray, PS3 games, and the PlayStation 3 and standalone Blu ray players or discontinue selling them.
Additionally, Certicom claims that the the Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) scheme is infringing and wants monetary damages for every Sony i.LINK (IEEE 1394) implementation that uses DTCP and every Sony product that uses DTCP-IP. Included in that is many VAIO computers, Sony HDTVs, and even a few DVD players.
We will be watching this story very closely and keep updates coming.
In another win for hackers over content producers, the latest AACS copy protection used in Blu ray and HD DVD discs has been cracked, one day after the AACS LA released the "fix".
A hacker by the name of "BtCB" posted the latest key, which begins with "45 5F" and ends with "2A B2" on the Freedom to Tinker website and the key has spread since then.
The AACS LA is obviously not pleased with the processing keys being posted over the internet, and has vowed to get them removed by cease and desist orders. That vow however, has only encouraged more hackers to post the keys and the hackers are always one step ahead.
This however has not stopped the AACS LA from pouring more money into the protection. It is even rumored that Blu ray discs with an added layer of protection called BD+ are coming soon. Lets see how long until the hackers crack that.
You can learn more about how the keys work at the source down below or in past Afterdawn articles.
BitComet v0.89 (latest stable) has been released, providing a whole host of GUI improvements and bugfixes. BitComet is a BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP download management software, which is powerful, fast, very easy-to-use, and completely free. It contains many advanced features for BitTorrent download and extends its leading BitTorrent technology to HTTP/FTP to accelerate downloading up to 5 - 10 times faster, or more. AfterDawn users have downloaded this item 1,540,197 times.
According to Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer, both Best Buy and Blockbuster are ready to enter the rapidly growing movie download market.
"We have nearly a dozen active agreements in place for digital delivery of our content with such major players as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Blockbuster, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart, with more to follow," said Feltheimer.
Although there has been no official announcement by the two companies, Felthheimer announced that he would be selling on the iTunes store, saying so so he can be considered a reliable source.
Blockbuster's intentions have been well known for a while now, but Best Buy was more surprising. One theory is that Best Buy was influenced by its giant competitor Wal-Mart's move into the movie download business. So far however, consumer interest in Wal-Mart's service have been very low just like Best Buy's music service.
Blockbuster has been linked to negotiations to purchase Movielink on more than one occasion and its main competitor Netflix launched a streaming movie service back in January. It seems Blockbuster has decided to build the service from scratch in hopes to gain another edge over Netflix which is still soundly beating the company in subscribers.
Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" had decided that any television broadcasts that showed his government in a bad light should be off the air and with that in mind, the government dclined to renew Radio Caracas Televisión's (RCTV) broadcast license and had its transmitter taken over by a state-run channel.
Somewhat surprisingly, RCTV journalists and producers have not been arrested or harrassed and have decided to fight back. The station has been given its own channel on YouTube for the show E1 Observador. CNN reports that a Colombian channel also broadcasts RCTV content into Venezuela.
According to YouTube, the show has been viewed 175,000 times since May and the channel as a whole is the most subscribed to this week.
Many users use the site to avoid censorship and it is possible that YouTube may become as important as TV broadcasts in the future. Hopefully governments, like those in Venezuela, will be powerless to stop it.
Taylor Carol was diagnosed last year with Leukemia. He needed a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy amongst other things. However, one form of treatment was a little odd; playing a video game called Re-Mission, developed by HopeLab, as often as possible. Taylor first saw the game last June at the Children's Hospital of Orange County in California but was skeptical of it at first. "For the first few months I didn't want to hear about it," Taylor told InformationWeek. "I was still in kind of shock."
Eventually, he got over the fear of being forced to confront his condition and decided to try it out. "After about my second round of chemo, I became more interested. I was feeling so gross, I wanted to why this was happening," he says. "I really wanted to learn about my cancer, but I didn't want to do it by reading a text book." Re-Mission aims to team children and teens suffering from Cancer exactly how it affects their bodies and about treatment.
"I learned that cancer cells reproduce so quickly," he says. "I thought maybe it would be two or three rounds of chemo, but it turns out it's a much longer fight. Fighting cancer is a lot harder than you think." The game features a nanobot named Roxxi who educates children and teens as he fights off cancer inside the human body.
Nintendo of America has announced two new milestones for its DS handheld console. Over 5 million unique users have played online using the Wi-Fi Connection service since the platform launched back in November 2005. All in all, over 200 million gameplay sessions have been achieved by the Wi-Fi Connection. Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, Metroid Prime Hunters, Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl have been the five most popular games for online play out of about 65 available.
"Nintendo DS gamers globally use Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection as an easy, fun place to find fellow players, all without paying anything extra for the service," commented Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime. "The milestones represent millions of hours of fun and camaraderie despite miles between players."
Nintendo's data has also shown that DS purchases have increased by 42% among women, 127% among people over the age of 30 and 212% among people over the age of 35. This shows that Nintendo is achieving its goal of attracting a broadcast audience instead of just the stereotypical young male gamer.
The Nintendo DS console sold over 470,000 units in the United States in April alone (16,000 per day).
Nielsen Media Research said on Thursday that digital video recorders (DVRs) are a leading reason for the slide in television viewing this year. Many of the top U.S. shows, including Grey's Anatomy, American Idol and CSI saw their ratings drop off this Spring. Following questions from NBC, Nielsen began an investigation into the possible factors behind the unexpected drop.
The research is almost complete, but Nielsen left slip some of its findings so far. "DVRs appear to be the largest factor in that," said Pat McDonough, Nielsen senior VP planning policy and analysis. Other interesting factors behind the falling ratings that Nielsen has found are the difference between an Olympic year (2006) and a non-Olympic year (2007).
There was also a higher number of repeat programs this spring than usual.
According to a DigiTimes report, Lite-On IT has secured OEM orders for DVD-ROM drives for Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console. Industry sources in Taiwan indicated that monthly shipments of 800,000 - 1,000,000 units will begin in the third quarter of 2007. Lite-On did not comment on the reports due to non-disclosure agreements signed with clients.
BenQ and Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology (TSST) have produced the built-in DVD-ROM drives for the Xbox 360. While LiteON took over BenQ's optical disc drive business unit last year, it didn't take over the OEM manufacturing rights for Xbox 360 because it was required to obtain new certification from Microsoft.
The company stands a chance of displacing TSST to be the primary OEM maker of the built-in DVD-ROM drive based on its monthly shipment volumes and the goal of Microsoft to sell 15 million units in 2007.
Sony has released another firmware update for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) console. The 3.50 update adds support for Remote Play, which allows anybody with a PlayStation 3 and a PSP to access the multimedia content stored on the PS3 from anywhere an Internet connection can be made. While accessing Blu-ray or DVDs using the PSP is not possible, users can stream other videos, music and games to the handheld over the Internet.
The update also added an RSS channel guide for users.
You can now connect a PSP system to a PS3 system via the Internet using [Remote Play].
[Communication Settings] has been added as an option to the [Remote Play] menu.
[RSS Channel Guide] has been added as a feature under [RSS Channel].
We reported recently that ABC.com is to start offering TV shows on its website in high definition. Popular shows such as Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy will be part of the line-up. However, when the plans first emerged, it left many wondering if their Internet connection would actually be fast enough for the service to function adequately. Surprisingly, bandwidth might not be as much of an issue as initially thought.
Skarpi Hedinsson, vice president of technology for the Disney-ABC Television Group, said that tests of HD resolution video have been carried out with bitrates between 850kb/s and 2mbps/s. "We’re not talking 5 megabits per second or something crazy like that," he said. Even with just basic video knowledge, applying this bitrate to a resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels sounds insane.
Cable providers typically encode HD streams at 12-19mbps in the MPEG-2 format, but even with MPEG-4, at least 5 mbps would be expected. So how is ABC.com hoping to achieve this? With the help of On2 Technologies. On2 has gained some interest due to its high quality video codecs. "We have invested in a facility that has very sophisticated encoding," Hedinsson said. "Three or four months ago, I would have said we wouldn't have been able to do this."
The debate over the affects of violent video games on minors is back on now that New York State Senate recently passed a bill criminalizing selling violent video games to minors. The New York Assembly has now passed a companion bill that makes it a Class E felony, punishable by up to four years in prison, to provide violent and indecent games to minors.
Bill A08696 goes further however by mandating that all new consoles sold in New York contain parental controls. While the newer consoles, the PlayStation 3 (PS3), Xbox 360 and Wii all have parent control systems, it's not clear what would happen to PlayStation 2 or GameCube.
Once again, this attempt to block the sale of violent games to minors relies on research that attempts to bridge violence in video games to real-life violent behavior amongst the youth. However, that debate is still on-going and whether violent games do have an impact is still unclear.
The two bills (A08696 and S5888) will now go to a conference committee before the final legislation will go to Governor Eliot Spitzer to be signed into law. Given Spitzer's support for such legislation, he will more-than-likely sign it into law. Presumably, as with several other U.S. state attempts, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) will sue immediately.
While the price of high-definition TV sets keeps falling and the demand for HD content is looking good, TiVo seems to be just missing the trend with overpriced HD DVR's. TiVo Series 3 debuted at $799, and the previous DirecTiVo HR 10-250 debuted at over $1,000. With cable and satellite operators beginning to offer HD DVR's themselves, often for $10 per month, TiVo knows it has to rethink its offerings.
TiVo CEO Tom Rogers complained about the situation the company has got itself into during a first quarter earnings call on Wednesday. He blamed the price tag of the Series 3 for ensuring the company has not "been able to meaningfully participate in the HD wave in retail," and promised that TiVo will have a "mass appeal priced HD unit... later this year."
Unfortunately Rogers did not give any more details but it can be speculated that the company is planning a "lite" version of the Series 3 which a much lower price tag.
Simultaneous to its retail store release, the iPhone has been added to Apple's online storefront with the same pricing, $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model.
Today, Sony gave word that the PlayStation 3 was finally in full production, now that blue-violet laser diode shortages were out of the way.
The latest PlayStation 3 firmware update, version 1.82, released yesterday by Sony, promises to improve AVC playback as well as backward compatibility.
