News written by Petteri Pyyny (January, 2006)

During the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google made an announcement that it will soon launch a service called Google Video Store that will feature prime-time TV shows from CBS, basketball matches from NBA, music videos from Sony BMG and more.

Move puts Google in direct competition with Apple, who launched its expansion of iTunes to include videos back in October, 2005. Apple's main partner has been ABC, whose shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, have proved that an on-demand TV show service (even though its main output device is iPod) can be a commercial success.

Content from CBS will contain titles like CSI, Survivor and Amazing Race. NBA will offer current season's games 24 hours after they finish and will also offer some "outstanding performances from the past" via Google's service.

However, Google might have made one big mistake with its service, as it stated that prices of shows are determined by each content provider individually and that there's no minimum or maximum limit for pricing. Many analysts have agreed that part of Apple's success has been fixed pricing, where each song, album and TV show cost the same (videos cost $1.99 via iTunes) and knowing how the content industry works like, it sounds very likely that at first, the pricing will be low, but once people get used to the idea of buying TV shows, the prices for most popular shows will skyrocket.

New political party has been set up in Sweden that plans to participate to country's upcoming general elections. The party is called Piratpartiet as in Pirate party and it aims to remove copyright laws from Sweden.

Party plans to remove all immaterial rights, including copyrights and patents and also plans to stop Sweden's participation in international copyright organizations, including WIPO and WTO and to make it illegal to put any restrictions on distribution of digital content (in form of DRM, copy protections, etc). Party also states that it plans to uphold and push even further the strict privacy laws currently in place in Sweden and to make it illegal to track or monitor citizens' communications online and offline.

People behind the party have made it very clear that their idea is not a joke. To register an official party in Sweden, party needs to get 1,500 signatures to support its cause. Organization already managed to gather over 4,000 signatures in first 24 hours and now is in process of validating the signatures. Once validated, it aims to register itself as an official party and to participate in next general elections with their rather interesting agenda.

As all other news outlets do the same, we do it as well; its once again time to take a look at the events that happened in the world of digital media during the last year. As a summary, in terms of digital video, it was a year of empty promises and nothing else. In terms of digital entertainment as a whole, it was a year of major hardware releases.

First year of "next generation" console wars

Year 2005 was the year that launched a new era of gaming console wars. The war is being fought on two fronts -- Sony took a shot at Nintendo's dominance in handheld gaming consoles by releasing the PlayStation Portable in the U.S. in March and few months later in Europe. Hackers were also busy trying to find exploits in PSP's firmware in order to run homebrew software and pirated games on the device. Several security holes were found in various PSP's firmware versions that allowed to do that, but Sony also seemed to be very cautious about the loopholes and released several firmware updates to the device, typically bundled with latest games that forced users to upgrade their firmware in order to play the games.