News written by Dave Horvath (February, 2008)

The largest electronics chain the U.S. has announced that it will begin focusing its recommendations to customers toward Sony's Blu-ray technology, according to an article by Reuters.

"Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products," Brian Dunn, Best Buy's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement Monday.

It's not an exclusive arrangement since Best Buy says it will still continue to offer HD DVD. But having Best Buy's valuable endorsement in the form of Sunday circulars, front-and-center store kiosks, and staff recommendation seems to be the icing on the cake for a Blu-ray victory in the format war, and potentially the death rattle for HD DVD.

The HD DVD Promotional Group responded with a statement "We have long held the belief that HD DVD is the best format for consumers based on quality and value, and with more than 1 million HD DVD players on the market, it's unfortunate to see Netflix make the decision to only stock Blu-ray titles going forward. While the Best Buy announcement says they will recommend Blu-ray, at least they will continue to carry HD DVD and offer consumers a choice at retail."

Canada's federal broadcast regulator will begin hearings today on whether or not it will allow two companies to enter into the ring with their own unique over-the-air HDTV signals. Toronto businessman John Bitove has proposed to start the first over-the-air high-definition TV network with stations in Canada's eight biggest cities. Another entrant, Yes TV, wants a licence to operate a station for the Toronto market.

The proposals have drawn considerably unfavorable opposition from television's big players such as CTV and Global, which state they are gearing up for the advent of HDTV and believe they are already facing hard times with acquiring the correct advertising schedules for a profitable market.

If successful, the Bitove HDTV operation would represent the first time a network was born into existence from nothing, without a series of pre-existing stations or acquisitions bonded together. Bitove's proposed network would offer English-language HDTV free of charge in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax.

Cupertino based Apple has announced today that Aperture 2, a major upgrade to its workflow and lossless image editing software for photographers, will be available to consumers shortly. Current Aperture users can upgrade to the new client for only $99 while new clients will have to pay the full $199 price tag.

The new software adds more than 100 new features including a streamlined new user interface and image processing engine, according to Apple. A list of new tools have been added to give photographers an added edge in recovering highlights, bringing out color vibrancy, managing local contrast definition, doing soft-edged retouching and vignetting, and fine-tune RAW images.

Aperture 2 also integrates itself with the .Mac web galleries as well as syncs with the iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple TV so users can browse and showcase their photos on a number of their Apple devices.

Apple touched on complaints about the predecessor's heavy processing and performance issues by streamlining the new product into a faster and more efficient program. Indexing, searching, browsing large volumes of images has all been given a performance massage.

Two prominent wireless companies have joined forces to try and bring television to the mobile masses in London. T-Mobile and Orange have decided to try a short venture in which they will offer subscribers "high-resolution" television channels (24 video and 10 audio) over it's existing 3G network. The companies have announced that they will attempt this service on a trial basis to determine the marketability of it.

The two companies will use a technology called Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) to deploy the service. MBMS is part of the 3G architecture, however its not widely supported as little equipment is available for it. The broadcast signal is sent out as one stream from the server, and that stream is then split repeatedly until one stream arrives at each base station from which it is broadcast. By using existing 3G infrastructure the deployment costs should be much lower than DVB-H, which until recently was heavily supported by EU standards.

The companies will use unused areas of the 3G infrastructure that was once scheduled to be used for the TDD (Time Division Duplex) services, but never was deployed. Cost of deploying this television service should be much lower because they don't have to develop any new infrastructure to support it.