News written by Petteri Pyyny (June, 2007)

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.

Source: AVS Forum

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.

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.

More information (in Finnish):

TTVK
YLE