News written by Dave Horvath (May, 2006)

The hardware giant AMD announced that they are launching AMD Live! to be an all-inclusive media package for Live! enabled PCs. In cooperation with other manufacturers, AMD is set to release a software suite that they hope will change the way you interact with your digital media.

In cooperation with OEMs such as Acer, Alienware, Fujitsu Seimens Computers, Gateway, HP, and a few others, AMD plans to launch a five application suite, available for free, for uses to manage their digital media.

Like Apple or TiVo, AMD hope its chips will set a new standard for home entertainment or media server devices, bringing your digital photos, music and video into one user-owned DRM-free storage center. One of the differentiators from our competitor is that we're not focused on premium content," said Teresa de Onis, AMD's desktop brand manager. "[A user's] music photos, their recorded TV shows -- all sorts of those types of content we want to distribute throughout the home. While many companies have attempted to do similar things by allowing user-owned media to be played on multiple devices around the house, AMD is the only one attempting to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) schemes.

The European company Sling Media has launched today their Slingbox Internet TV device. Slingbox TV plugs into your cable or satellite TV set-top box and then transmits video over the Internet. This product is being dubbed "placeshifting", as opposed to the "time-shifting" features in devices like Sky+ and Tivo.

Slingbox is officially launching in Britain this week and will be available to a broader European audience later this year.

Slingbox has had some testing in the U.S. which includes many different features such as broadcasting to an enabled cellular phone, although this feature will not be available in the initial European launch. A spokeswoman for Sling Media had no further comments other than, "Conversations are clearly beginning," with European mobile phone companies.

The unit, which sells for £180 is causing a stir with broadcasters in that it may interfere with their plans to offer downloadable content over the Internet on a fee based system.

Source:
Reuters UK

The hardware company LG has been making strides to incoporate it's brand into just about everything in our daily lives. From cellular phones to refrigerators, LG seems to have a grasp on making things people want to use.

Shown off briefly at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES), LG has unveiled that they will launch their GBW-H10N4X Blu-Ray recorder in June. Expect prices to be in the neighborhood of €799 ($1,020/£546).

Although their plans to bring higher speed recording to the masses first, may turn out to be a bit premature. LG has also announced one slight shortcoming of the new drive. It will not be able to record on the 50Gb Dual Layer Blu-Ray disks. 25Gb single layered disks are the only high definition recording option.

The drive will, however be able to record previous popular media such as CD-R/RW, DVD-RAM and DVD±R/RW. Additionally it will run at up to 4x for BD-R media only. It will read single-layer BD-ROM and BD-R discs at 4.8x, dropping to 4x for dual-layer BD-ROMs and 2x for single-layer BD-REs.

Specs:
Read speeds:

BD-ROM (SL) 4.8x max.
BD-ROM (DL) 4x max.
BD-R (SL) 4.8x max.
BD-RE (SL) 2x CLV
DVD-ROM (Single/Dual) 16x/8x max.
DVD-R/RW/Dual 10x/10x/8x max
DVD-RAM 2x, 3x, 5x PCAV
DVD-Video (CSS) 8x max. (Single/Dual Layer)
DVD+R/+RW/Double 10x/10x/8x max.
CD-R/RW/ROM 40x/40x/40x max.
CD-DA (DAE) 40x max.

Four major Hollywood studios including the likes of Universal and Disney are suing the fifth largest cable television provider in the U.S., Cablevision. The suit is over their controversial network digital video recorder (DVR). This network DVR would enable users to store digital copies of their favorite television broadcasts over the internet in a centrally located server farm. This technology is in contrast to existing systems such as Tivo, who's solution allows users to save programs on hard drives that are located inside the device in their homes.

Television subscribers have long since been allowed to store their favorite programs for private viewing, but Cablevision's service has raised objections from the production studios in that now a third party organization will have control over licensed material they have not paid for.

"Cablevision is actually copying, storing and retransmitting it," said Kori Bernard, a spokeswoman for studio industry group the Motion Picture Association of America. "A commercial entity can't establish a for-profit, on-demand service without authorization from copyright owners whose content is used on that service," she said.

The country of Germany was once known as a safe haven for file sharing needs, often taking a very lackadaisical attitude towards pirating. Recent enforcement however has turned the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) against users of the famous eDonkey2000 and eMule file sharing communities. This morning German officials entered the grounds of over 130 different homes of alleged pirates and confiscated personal computers as well as external media in the cities of Cologne and Bergheim.

These raids were administered by the Public Prosecution Service of Cologne and the Police Authority of Bergheim, who apparently had been investigating alleged illegal activities for several months in cooperation with the IFPI.

"I am pleased that the German authorities recognise the serious impact of copyright crime and are taking action against it,” said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of IFPI. “Internet piracy has hurt the whole music community in Germany, with legitimate sales falling by a third in just five years. The victims are investment in music and everyone who makes a livelihood out of the music industry. Read more...

With the ongoing battle of HDTV standards and policies, developers had set to employ a feature called ICT or Image Constraint Token. What ICT is capable of is forcing the downgrade of video quality for players that lack the HDMI connection standard, in an attempt to thwart piracy. Essentially, this HDMI connection standard is used as part of a "protection pathway" that makes it impossible for pirates to tap into a HD video source.

Growing concerns over this token has spawned discussions that many consumers, if not appropriately equipped, may be forced to deal with a player that either displays severly downgraded quality, or doesn't play next generation video at all.

Unofficial agreements between Hollywood and some consumer electronics companies including Sony and Microsoft have been discussed to not include the ICT standard until 2010 or possibly even 2012.

Without providing more details, the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is. But the agreement is there nonetheless, presumably to help the industry transition to HDMI. This could explain why the very same studios that pushed for HDMI and ICT have recently announced that they would not use it for the time being. Read more...

Sony Corp. has announced that will unveil the first laptop capable of playing, editing and recording high-definition videos in the Blu-Ray DVD format.

Tagged as the Vaio AR Premium, Sony's new laptop will launch this June to the tune of ¥400,000 (~$3500 USD or £1930GBP), approximately one month after rival Toshiba is set to launch it's own fully featured HD-DVD laptop. However, unlike Sony, Toshiba's $3000 offering will be unable to record using the HD-DVD format.

Besides using Blu-Ray technology and displaying in true 1080p resolution -- the sharpest in high definition quality; Sony's new Vaio will also feature a 17" display, a built in TV Tuner and packaged with the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system.

Source:
BusinessWeek Online