Cinézime, a French "video on demand" company for independent movies, will now offer some of its movies without DRM.
Next to many DRM-protected movies, the company will sell 100 DRM-free movies, a good portion of which are free.
The company was able to convince some producers to sell their movies without DRM in a move that mirrors developments in the online music market in France.
Orna Ghenassia, the founder and manager of Cinézime, had this to say about the decision: “ I am convinced that ultimately a majority of movies will become DRM-free. DRMs do not stop piracy. However, they hinder the development of VOD. By unlocking the movies we open our catalogues [notably] to Mac users”.
Users who purchase the DRM-free music must first accept a license agreement that states that the movie can only be viewed within a circle of friends and family members and not distributable to other persons. This is “in order to protect the rights of authors who trust you” the license states.
We can hope that moves like these will be successful and the model will move from independent producers to a full DRM-free market.
Its been a long time coming and finally the Apple TV has shipped, allowing consumers and critics to review and see if the Apple TV can be a hit like iTunes and the iPod.
Apple TV is basically a wireless network adapter that allows users to stream movies, music and photos straight from their computer through their home entertainment system. The Apple TV has an advantage over the competition because it is the only device to support music or movies that were bought at the iTunes store.
The Apple TV has however, been knocked by some critics for its small 40 GB HDD, limited file support, and overly priced movies. Other cons include the fact that you cannot buy directly from the iTunes store from the device.
The AppleTV is available at all Apple retail locations for about $300.
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service has struck yet another content deal; this time with Major League Baseball. The deal will bring sports highlights to the iTunes download store, priced at the usual $1.99. The content includes a "MLB.com Daily Rewind" highlight show, as well as two weekly "Game of the Week" full-length games.
To promote the premium content to iTunes users, MLB is offering a free download of "2007 Season Preview Show" to every iTunes user. An iTunes "Season Pass" for the highlight show will cost $7.99, and $19.99 for all full games. Users who decided to buy an Apple TV device will also be able to watch their content on a proper television by streaming it using iTunes.
Sony released the latest version of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) console, v3.30. The latest firmware makes a few tweaks to the system including support for video playback at 720x480 resolution, versus the prior scaled-down 320x240 resolution. It also has added expanded support for PlayStation Network games, and offers PSP users free access to T-Mobile HotSpots for a limited time.
Fir six months, PSP users will be able to use T-Mobile hotspots, most commonly found in Borders and Starbucks, for free. The services usually charge a onetime $9.99 fee for 24 hours of use and T-Mobile offers a variety of monthly subscription packages at flat rates. To sign up for the promotion PSP users must log into a T-Mobile HotSpot by March 28, 2008.
Google Inc. has fired back at Viacom in the ongoing war of words between both. Managing Counsel Michael Kwun has called Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, "an attack on the way people communicate on the Web and on the platforms that allow people to make the Internet their own," adding that Viacom is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The DMCA provides a "safe harbor" for web hosts who comply with takedown notices and remove infringing content on request. Kwun said that if Viacom wins in court, it would "place the burden on hosting platforms" and "would turn the DMCA on its head." He also said that Viacom's lawsuit has no basis in law.
He pointed out that Google previously complied with requests made by Viacom to remove about 100,000 videos from YouTube. Later on however, YouTube rescinded some of those requests over confusion whether they actually infringed and Kwun has argued that Viacom was attempting to force YouTube to make such a decision.
"Fortunately, the law is clear, and on our side," he concluded.
UK retailers were absolutely delighted with the amount of PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles that were sold in the territory since launch, saying it was the biggest ever launch of a "home console". "Given the relatively plentiful supply, it's fair to say this was our biggest-ever console launch in unit and value terms,"HMV's head of games Tim Ellis told GamesIndustry.biz.
He added: "We still have some consoles in stock around the chain, as we were able to order plenty, but we expect these to sell these through over the coming days and weeks, especially as new games titles are released." Retailers will continue to unload stock over the busy Easter period, but some have warned that lowering prices to move stock could harm long term sales.
"It's been a remarkable week for us here at GAME following the successful launch of the PlayStation 3," revealed Anna Macario, marketing director at GAME. "We have seen huge demand and seen fantastic sales throughout our 400 stores around the country."
The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has suffered a defeat after a judge ruled in favor of Kaleidescape, a manufacturer of home media servers. The California judge found that Kaleidescape did not violate its CSS license. Kaleidescape makes home media servers that aim to store all the movies and music of the owner. The servers start at $10,000.
Media is ripped from its original disc and stored on the server. The DVD CCA found that this functionality opened the door to massive copyright infringement saying that any device that played movies from a DVD disc, had to have physical access to the disc to do so.
Judge Leslie C. Nichols ruled in favor of Kaleidescape, saying that the 20-page CSS spec was not technically included as part of the license agreement. "Kaleidescape has been operating in the shadow of the DVD CCA's allegations for over three years,"Michael Malcolm, CEO of Kaleidescape told Ars Technica. "We are gratified that after hearing all of the evidence, the Judge has completely vindicated our position."
IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon has warned that the forth coming release of the Xbox 360 Elite will not boost Microsoft's market share this year. Instead, he believes that it is software titles that will make a difference for the company. "The Xbox 360 Elite may sway some gamers waiting to decide on a new system, but I don't expect the Elite to have much an effect on the 360's market share this year," he told GamesIndustry.biz.
He added: "The higher price and the 120GB hard-drive upgrade should increase revenue for Microsoft and for retailers, but system-selling games such as Halo 3 will increase the 360's position more significantly." He did say however that the release of the console and Microsoft's further expansions to online gaming shows that the company is working hard to dominate the area.
"With the 360, Microsoft is extending the online capabilities of Xbox Live including downloads of long form video as well as games and game add-ons, and the point of increasing the hard-drive to 120GB is to enable 360 Xbox Live gamers to download more items more often," he said. "Extending Live to Vista systems will also increase Microsoft's online audience, which is an important metric now and going forward."
The highly anticipated trailer for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto sequel, namely Grand Theft Auto IV, was released only minutes ago. Developed for both PS3 and Xbox 360, the game is going to define the next-gen GTA titles. The wait is over, almost one year since Rockstar announced the release date of the trailer, it is here to show some impressive in-game footage and a sneak peek at what the game is about.
Reports are circulating that Apple Computer Inc. is currently looking for one European network to get exclusivity over the iPhone, and industry insiders are saying that the most likely candidate at this stage is Vodafone. Apple needs to make a decision on a network some before the end of the year, as the iPhone is set to make its European debut around then.
Cingular Wireless, the mobile unit of AT&T, announced just days ago that at least one million people have shown interest in the iPhone through a website setup for consumers to register their interest in the device. The iPhone version that contains 4GB of flash memory will cost $499, while the 8GB version will cost $599.
Apple has said that it could possibly sell 10 million iPhones. The company has run in to some disputes since the gadget's MacWorld debut, including one with Cisco Systems over the use of the "iPhone" trademark, used by Cisco subsidiary Linksys. Apple and Cisco came to an agreement allowing each to use the trademark.
Canon Inc. is to appeal an "expected" court decision in the United States regarding technology used in surface-conduction electron-emitter displays (SED). The company expects the ruling in the first trial to go against it after the court judged earlier this year that a licensing deal stuck with Nano-Proprietary in 1999 did not extend to Canon's partner, Toshiba.
Tokyo-based Canon expects that ruling to come in late April, President Tsuneji Uchida said at a general shareholders meeting. SED displays tout brighter images and less power consumption than LCD and Plasma sets currently on the market. Canon had hoped to enter the $84 billion market for flat-panel TVs in partnership with Toshiba.
Sony has unveiled two items that will compliment the launch of its first European Blu-ray hardware. The company unveiled the Bravia D3000 series, a range of LCD displays that are available in 32, 40 and 46-inch versions. It offers support for 24fps film video, matching the original framerate of films. Couple that support with Motionflow +100Hz technology to double 50Hz material's refresh rate and cut down on juddering during movement.
The sets include three HDMI connections too, making it easy to hook up all of your HD equipment. The company also unveiled a stand that is designed to work with the the Bravia D3000 series, the RHT-G800 stand. The three shelf stand can hold a screen up to 46-inch in size and it has an included surround sound system inside it, featuring seven speakers (two subwoofers).
Panasonic, the leader in high definition and Plasma TV, recently announced its full line of Plasma HDTVs for 2007, including a 42-inch, a 50-inch and 58-inch 1080p high definition model, which join Panasonic's current 65-inch and the world's largest Plasma, the 103-inch, to provide a wide choice of Plasma televisions in the 1080p resolution arena.
The full line brings ten new Plasmas to consumers for 2007, and further demonstrates Panasonic's industry leadership and cutting edge technology in big screen Plasma entertainment. "With our 2007 HD plasma line, we've maintained and continued to improve upon the same expertise that resulted in numerous best of awards last year," said Dennis Eppel Vice President, Panasonic Display Products Company.
He added: "And we have every intention of maintaining the market share lead that we've held for virtually the last two years. With additional manufacturing capacity, we expect to address a planned 11.5 million-unit production schedule for 2008. Continuing our philosophy of listening to our customers we've expanded our line of 1080p Plasmas, and, enhanced our cosmetics -- our 2007 line of plasmas feature a beautiful gloss black finish."
Record label SonyBMG has revealed that it will no longer accept sample music from unsigned artists on hard copy formats, instead directing them to record label websites to blog their music, photos and videos. "Blogging is clearly one of the major trends in music, media and entertainment," said SonyBMG's UK and Ireland Music Entertainment Chairman and Chief Executive Ged Doherty.
He added: "100,000 new blogs go online each day at the moment, and the blogosphere is doubling every 230 days so it makes complete sense for the major labels to use the process in a creative way to encourage, discover and communicate with new artists." Social networking sites across the world already offer features to musicians to help them promote their work.
CyberLink Corp. has announced the availability of their Vista-ready software on Samsung's PC products. CyberLink DVD Suite for Vista, a combination of award-winning CyberLink products, will be featured in both Samsung's MagicStation desktops and SENS series notebooks. CyberLink DVD Suite for Vista provides an all-in-one software package, offering playback, Authoring, editing, backup and burning. Applications include:
PowerDirector 5 for editing video content
PowerDVD 7 for watching DVDs and videos
PowerProducer 3.7 for authoring DVDs
MediaShow 3 for creating photo slideshows
Power2Go 5.5 for making music discs and burning data
PowerDVD Copy for duplicating DVDs
LabelPrint 2 for designing disc labels
"Our ongoing partnering with Samsung, whereby we offer CyberLink DVD Suite for Vista on their desktops and notebooks, allows users to greatly benefit from our superior DVD playback, burning, and instant video editing technologies," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "Consumers can enjoy the benefits of great software and hardware when they purchase a Samsung computer that includes CyberLink DVD Suite."
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.
The proposed XM-Sirius merger now has another hurdle to jump. The Consumer Coalition for Competition in Satellite Radio (C3SR) is sending a commissioned study to the FCC claiming that if they companies were to merge it would constitute a monopoly.
The group formed after the merger was announced "to counter the potentially dim prospects facing subscribers of satellite radio under a monopoly provider," claims the group's Web site.
The study, which was commisioned by J. Gregory Sidak (a former Deputy General Counsel for the FCC), claims that the merger would have no benefit for consumers.
"No matter how you slice it, dice it or package it, the merger of XM and Sirius would establish a monopoly, which are typically characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide, as well as a lack of viable substitute goods," Sidak says.
The study argues that the merger meets the definition of monopoly by any reasonable market definition.
"Even if one includes AM, FM, and HD radio, the market power of the combined company is enough to cause concern" the study says.
"This study confirms, empirically, what we have been stressing since before this merger was even announced: subscribers do not view their satellite radio service as a substitute for other forms of entertainment, and a merged provider would be able and motivated to raise prices and cut back the programming that so many listeners value and depend on," said Chris Reale, one of the founders of C3SR.
Sony unveiled today that they were launching two new front home-theater projectors at a starting price of about $1,000 USD.
According to Sony, both new projectors, the BRAVIA 3LCD VPL-AW15 and the VPL-AW10, feature 1,280×720 progressive resolution, which is ideal for enjoying HD movies, sporting events, and gaming as well.
The VPL-AW10 model can reach a contrast ratio of up to 6,000:1 when certain modes are selected. The VPL-AW15 model can reach a dynamic contrast ratio of up to 12,000:1 when certain modes are selected.
"Users can also optimize the AW15's model's color palette with Sony's Real Color Processing function. Color hues can be adjusted to match specific tastes."
Each projector has an HDMI input supporting 1080/24p, which is downscaled to native 720p. Both projectors also include component, composite, S-video and HD15 inputs.
The projectors are expected to hit shelves in June and sell for between $1000-1300 USD retail.
According to Taiwanese game developers, the PlayStation 3 platform, even in comparison to the Xbox 360, is technologically too complicated to make it easy to develop games, especially by second-tier developers.
The second-tier developers, including those in Taiwan, do not have the financial or technological capabilities that international developers do and therefore cannot pass the technological barriers that the PS3 platform imposes.
This fact can partly account for the limited amount of PS3-specific games.
The developers also indicated that the Xbox 360 platform much was easier to produce games for.
The developers also made some interesting points. Although the PS3 might have stronger hardware functionality than the Xbox 360 many users do not see better video quality while playing the same game on both systems. A reason for this phenomenom is possibly that game developers are more willing to invest in optimized performance for the Xbox 360 simply because those games are currently more profitable.
Microsoft Corp. has released the delayed 1.3 update for the Zune portable media player. Last month, Microsoft announced that Zune owners will be able to download a software update to fix several bugs with the device in mid-March, but the patch release had been delayed until Wednesday. The update fixes some known bugs with the player.
The 1.3 update brings a promised fix for the skipping issues that some users were claiming to be getting with songs purchased from the Zune Marketplace. The update also brings improved device and software reliability and changes made to the FM tuner that prevents it from draining battery while in sleep mode.
The last Zune update was issued in December, adding support for the Windows Vista operating system.
An Indiana man has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for selling more than $700,000 worth of counterfeit computer software on the eBay Internet auction site. Courtney Smith, 36, of Anderson, Ind., was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Sarah Barker of the Southern District of Indiana for selling counterfeit computer software over the Internet in violation of criminal copyright infringement laws.
At today's guilty plea and sentencing, Smith admitted that he purchased counterfeit Rockwell Automation computer software through the eBay Internet auction site and then duplicated and resold the copyright protected software to other eBay users. Between March 6 and May 26, 2004, Smith sold counterfeit copies of Rockwell Automation software in 32 or more separate eBay auctions, receiving $4,149.97.
"Mr. Smith exploited eBay to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of counterfeit software at drastically reduced prices, thereby illegally profiting on the back of the copyright holder," said Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher. "The Department of Justice is committed to prosecuting individuals who exploit legitimate online auction sites to sell pirated software and commit other acts of fraud."
Sony Corp. has announced a new Blu-Ray player for the European market. The BDP-S1E is described by the company as ",one of the most powerful and intelligent consumer audio and video devices", it has ever manufactured. It supports 24p True Cinema, playing back video at the original 24 frames per second if the television set supports it.
The player provides full support for 1080p (1920 x 1080p) video content and can upscale DVD-Video content to 1080p. The company said that the BDP-S1E will be available throughout Europe from summer this year. However, consumers may want to hold off on investing in Blu-ray player until after October 31st.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has mandated that all hardware released after that date must fully support BD-J, which provides interactivity features for Blu-ray movies including menus and PIP.
The HD DVD promotional group has promised 70 new movies releases on the HD DVD format within the coming four months. The group, led by Toshiba, has denied claims from the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) that HD DVD has lost the format war. The group pointed out the difference in stand-alone sales for each format so far, and Toshiba also has more price drops coming in a few days.
Toshiba's HD-A2 will cost $399 from April 1st on. New HD DVD titles that have been promised include newer movies such as Children of Men, Good Shepherd and Happy Feet. Also in the line-up is HD DVD boxsets of the Matrix trilogy. Other releases will include Dreamgirls, 40-Year Old Virgin Unrated, Flags of Our Fathers: Special Collector’s Edition, The Hitcher, Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible 2, Black Christmas (2006), Harsh Times, The Battle of the Bulge.
Sony has confirmed that over 600,000 PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles have been sold in Europe since the console was launched last week. This means that 60% of the stock shipped to Europe (1,000,000 units estimated) has been sold. The 60GB version of the console (20GB not yet available in PAL territories) sells for €599 on average in Europe (£425 in UK).
Sony had previously sold 165,000 units in the UK in two days, which compares well against 105,000 Nintendo Wii consoles and 70,000 Xbox 360 consoles. Sony achieved the figure by delaying the European launch by four months, giving itself time to manufacture enough units to avoid shortages seen by Nintendo and Microsoft.
"Yes, 600,000 is the figure for Europe," a spokesperson told Eurogamer.
Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. has revealed that it will offer a backseat television service for DaimlerChrysler cars and minivans later this year. The company said that three live child-themed channels would be available in 2008 model year cars in the Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge lines. Sirius and rival XM have proposed a merger which is now waiting on regulatory approval.
The company had planned to offer a service like this since 2004 but had to work it out with content companies and manufacturers first. The system will cost about $470, which includes the first year of service, when packaged with Chrysler's rear seat entertainment system in new cars. Customers must subscribe to the Sirius Satellite Radio service.
The service will cost $7 per month on top of the $13 per month fee for the radio service after the first year. Channels on the service include Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon, Walt Disney Co.'s Disney Channel and Time Warner Inc.'s Cartoon Network.
Dell has announced that it will epxand its support for Linux operating systems from servers and workstations into both notebooks and desktops.
Back in February, Dell asked for customer input through its "IdeaStorm" web site. Out of the more than 100,000 repsonses that were recieved, over 70% asked for some sort of pre-installed home Linux product.
Linux users are now curious to know what versions of Linux will be distributed as well as when Dell will begin shipping these products out.
Dell has working relationships with Novell and Red Hat, which have created very popular Linux OSs. There are others though such as Ubuntu and Debian so it will be good to see which distributions Dell decides on.
Dell plans to ask for more user input regarding Linux and open source technologies in the future.
UPDATE (May 1st): According to SearchEnterpriseLinux, Dell will be offering the new PCs and notebooks pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. The computers will be sold through Dell's web site and "We have worked with Dell to get Ubuntu fully supported and fully certified on Dell hardware," said Jane Silber, director of operations for Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu. "Ubuntu has the full endorsement of Dell." she continued.
Consumer electronics giant Apple Inc. has announced a new feature to be added to its iTunes Store which will allow music fans to buy a complete album at a cheaper price if they've already purchased one or more of the tracks.
The first feature of its kind from any music download service, 'Complete My Album' will allow consumers a full album with discount of 99 cents per each previously downloaded Track from that album.
Albums eligible for the promotion will be listed on a special page within the iTunes Store. Users who decide they would like to purchase the rest of an album will have a deadline of 180 days from the day they purchase the track.
iTunes' vice president, Eddy Cue, noted, "Music fans can now round out their music collections by upgrading their singles into complete albums with just one click, and get full credit for those songs they have previously purchased from iTunes."
In a lawsuit filed in Texas today, Hewlett-Packard has sued Acer for allegedly infringing 5 HP patents.
HP believes that from the years 1997 to 2003, Acer infringed on patents that include power management, DVD editing, clock switching, processing capabilities, and several other technologies.
HP wants an injunction placed on Acer that would force them to stop selling some of their products in the US, as well as unspecified damages.
"HP believes Acer has been selling computer products that use HP's patented technologies without permission. HP respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects the same treatment in return," HP said in a statement.
An analyst believes that this lawsuit shows that HP can no longer ignore Acer, which has seen a high level of growth and acquired market share in the U.S, anymore. "Acer has become a threat that leading PC vendors cannot afford to neglect. We understand why competitors would desire a halt to Acer's expansion in the U.S. market."
Sony has filed a request with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) asking for a class 2 permissive change that included details of some minor tweaking to the PlayStation 3s Bluetooth features. Amongst the models that were listed with the filing included the currently available 20GB and 60GB consoles but surprisingly, a new 80GB model as well.
Sony however, has dismissed any rumors that an 80 GB model is on its way. A Sony spokesperson stated, "The 80GB we're not making any comment on, but we don't have any plans at the moment."
I do believe however, that with the launch of the Xbox 360 Elite it is only a matter of time until a PS3 with a larger HDD, possibly 120 GB to match that of the Elite, is available in stores.
GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo has recently accused Nintendo of withholding Wii consoles from retail outlets around the US.
DeMatteo has stated that he believes that Nintendo hit its wanted target for the 2006 fiscal year and is withholding stock to boost performance in the first quarter of 2007.
"This is just my opinion – I think they intentionally dried up supply because they made their numbers for the year. Their new year starts April 1 and I think we're going to see supply flowing," he said.
He expalined that they were getting shipments for April, and hopes to not have crippling shortages in the future.
"Next week we get our first allocations of Wii and DS and we are quite pleased with those numbers. We are concerned about the dryness here in March, but it looks like April is going to be good," commented DeMatteo.
Toshiba announced today that they would be lowering the price of their entry-level HD-DVD player down to $400 USD and that they would also be introducing a 1080p player with a $500 price tag.
The new "HD-A2" would become the latest entry-level player, and the "HD-A20" will be great for those on a budget but looking for a full 1080p resolution. The best of the best, the "HD-XA2", which includes 1080p, had its price cut to $800 earlier this month.
Along with the price drop the HD-DVD Promotional Group announced that there will be 70 more new HD-DVD movies made available through July. They include such hits as the Matrix Trilogy, Dreamgirls and The Bourne Identity.
Universal's HD-DVD chief had this to say: "The spring is ramping up well for HD DVD, with an incredible list of movies and the best priced hardware on the market".
Universal is the only of the major movie studios to completely back HD-DVD. Others like Paramount produce for both formats.
The Blu-Ray camp declared victory at CeBIT and the HD-DVD camp has conceded that they are losing in hardware sales simply because every PlayStation 3 has a Blu-Ray drive. The HD-DVD camp has also said that disc sales around the country are even with those of Blu-Ray discs.
Microsoft has finally put all the rumors to rest by officially announcing the black Xbox 360 Elite.
The new 360 will go on sale in the US on April 29th with the retail price of $479 USD.
The new additions are as follows:
- An all black finish with matching accesories such as wireless controllers.
- IPTV capability
- HDMI output
- Detachable 120GB HDD (The HDD is also available seperately for $180 USD)
- A data transfer cable which will allow users to copy game saves, and other content from their other 360 HDD.
Those that buy the new 360 will also get a free Xbox Live Silver Membership and 1 month free Gold Membership.
Note: As many of our Afterdawn readers have noted in past news articles, the new 360 will have the same 90 nm chipset that run in the current 360s. Officials say the new chipset will be available in Premiumm Xbox 360s in the fall.
IOGEAR is aiming to simplify home entertainment connections with the world's first true automatic HDMI switch. The new HDMI 2x1 Automatic Switch (HDAS) is the only product on the market that senses which HDMI product is currently in use, with IOGEAR's patented HDAS technology, and instantly locks and transfers the appropriate audio and video content to the connected HD display.
It also eliminates the hassle of having to plug and unplug HDMI cables between home entertainment equipment in order to connect to an HDTV that does not have enough input ports. According to In-Stat, HDMI-enabled device shipments will grow 78 percent per year through 2010. As the technology becomes increasingly incorporated into common consumer electronics products such as set top boxes, DVD players, gaming consoles like PS3, and even computers, end users may run into the issue of having too many HDMI-enabled pieces of hardware and not enough inputs on their televisions.
"The majority of new home entertainment products support HDMI, however, most televisions do not have enough input ports to connect to all of them at once," said Miranda Su, vice president of sales and marketing at IOGEAR, Inc. "Our new HDMI 2x1 Automatic Switch eliminates frustrations associated with having to continuously plug and unplug devices. Additionally, it is the only true automatic switch available that intuitively detects which source is active and delivers the audio and video content completely in sync with almost no latency."
A woman has filed a lawsuit against Vivendi Games, Sierra Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and a defunct rental store called Hiawatha Video, after her infant suffered an epileptic seizure while playing Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly on a PS2 console. The lawsuit alleges the defendants were "negligent, careless, and reckless with regard to the design and manufacture" of Spyro.
According to the lawsuit, the child has suffered permanent disabling injuries that will affect him "in all activities of daily living." As with all other games, Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly came with a warning about the possibility of experiencing epileptic seizures "when exposed to certain light patterns or flashing lights."
The woman is seeking damages on behalf of the child "for such fair and reasonable amount as may be awarded by a jury of his peers." Sony has requested that the woman specify the total amount of damages she's seeking.
Microsoft Corp. has added more popular video content to its Xbox Live Video Marketplace through deals stuck with Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, A&E Network, ADV Films, National Geographic and TotalVid.com in the US. The deal means that films such as Braveheart, Team America: World Police, World Trade Center and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut will be available for download in HD.
Microsoft recently revealed double-digits growth for Xbox Live downloads, with a 400% increase since the company started offering movies and TV show content for download in HD. The Xbox 360 is an ideal device for video downloads, as it is connected to a TV already, removing the need for any further equipment to bridge the gap between Internet video downloads and the TV.
While Microsoft Corp. has not yet announced any release information for the Xbox 360 Elite unit in Europe, retailer HMV has revealed it expects the console will be available by late summer. "All we understand is that it's at some point perhaps around the late summer," a spokesperson told Eurogamer.net.
The spokesperson added: "We're expecting the product to be sold sooner rather than later, and obviously at that point we'll have a fuller idea of all their launch plans, precise timings, pricing and everything else from a retail point of view." The Xbox 360 Elite includes an all-black finish, headset, controller, component/SD cable, 120GB HDD, HDMI output and cable and a one month subscription to Xbox Live Gold.
"I feel sure that there'll be demand for this product, and Microsoft now enjoys the level of brand penetration and player loyalty for it to be successful."Tim Ellis, head of games at HMV said. "There should be quite a few core gamers out there that may want to upgrade or who will at least want the extra capacity now on offer."
AT&T Inc. claims to have sold its U-verse Internet-based video service to 10,000 customers, saying sales dramatically increased in the past several weeks. Ralph de la Vega, group president of AT&T's regional wireline operations, revealed the data at at a Bank of America conference in New York on Wednesday.
There has been concerns about the expansion of U-verse, a video service delivered over high-speed fiber-optic cables, after it failed to launch in a targeted 15 U.S. markets, reaching 11 instead. AT&T is selling the service as an alternative to offers from cable companies.
"In terms of U-verse, I am really pleased with what I've seen in the last few weeks," he said. "Our sales have dramatically increased over the last several weeks." The company is aiming to make the service available for 8 million people by the end of the year, but has not revealed any targets for subscribers.
In a suggestion that would tackle street crime, a British government crime review talks about adding fingerprint activation technology to music playing devices like iPods. MP3 players are fairly expensive CE equipment and since they are designed to be used on the move, they have become a major target for thieves.
The report proposes, "working in partnership with businesses to crime-proof their products, services and processes to the highest standards. One example could be introducing fingerprint activation of MP3 players." Such technology is already used in laptops for example, but its goal is really to protect the data than to protect the actual device.
Many people have been seriously injured, or killed in cases, while being mugged for an MP3 player or a similar device.
The University of Maine System has rejected a request made by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to disclose the personal info of students alleged to have engaged in the illegal p2p sharing of copyrighted works on its campuses.
The RIAA has been dishing out letters recently to Universities notifying them that alleged pirate students face litigation, requesting that they inform students assigned to I.P. addresses said to have engaged in illegal filesharing - allowing them a chance to settle with the trade group out-of-court.
The University of Maine notified students with pending RIAA lawsuits on Friday, however the institution refuses to pass over the details of the students to the RIAA. "It's not the university's role to, in effect, serve papers on our students for another party," said John Diamond, spokesman for the university system. "We want our students to be aware of it (the suit), but we do not feel that it is our obligation to be the arm of the RIAA beyond simply sharing the information."
Diamond believes that fulfilling the RIAA's request and handing over personal info of students would see the UMS breach the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which bars the UMS from sharing private information. "The only way the RIAA can get that information is if the RIAA takes us to court to get those names," Diamond added.
With the confirmed rumors of the Xbox 360 Elite currently being manufactured in China, Sony PR Peter Dille has sent a welcome message to Microsoft:
"We think every PlayStation 3 owner should have an 'elite' experience, which is why we include an internal hard drive and HDMI output in every PS3 we sell, along with the 50 GB of storage capacity on a high definition Blu-ray disc. Sony has been the strongest advocate of high definition as the future of next-generation gaming. This requires high-definition components, including HDMI output, and large storage devices to deliver and store all that rich and vivid HD content. Microsoft's announcement today [er, "tomorrow"] not only legitimizes Sony's PS3 strategy, it moves us closer to adopting universal standards in the area of high definition gaming that will benefit game developers and ultimately the end user."
Sony seems to be implying that 16 months after launch Microsoft is now playing "catch-up". They may be right in the sense that the 360 doesnt match up to the PlayStation 3 for consumers interested in HD video on discs.
This week, APRIL (l'Association pour la Promotion et la Recherche en Informatique Libre) has brought an case before the French Supreme court requesting an annulment of a decree that "introduces a maximum €750 fine for possession and use of DRM circumvention technologies". If the action fails, the decree would be introduced into the French Copyright laws as article R 335-3.
APRIL's argument is that being fined for merely possessing an anti-DRM device/program "imposes an unfair and disproportionate threat on users of open source software and the whole movement of open source software."
In their argument for the anulment of the decree APRIL has cited Article 6-1 of the EUCD, “Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.” They also point out that “in the knowledge or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective” should be punished is not in that decree.
APRIL also feels that the fines would breach the right to interoperability and provide legal uncertainty for open source software.
Major media corporations EMI Group PLC and Bertelsmann AG have finally laid their ongoing dispute concerning Napster to rest by agreeing an out-of-court settlement.
EMI, along with a string of high-profile record labels, filed a lawsuit against Bertelsmann back in 2003, following the German company's decision in 2000 to invest in the original Napster after it was crippled by lawsuits seeking to shut down the network. Rival music companies, including EMI, alleged that Bertelsmann's $85 million investment in Napster was the equivalent to copyright infringement.
Bertelsmann pumped $85 million into Napster, but an outright takeover never materialized.
Details of the agreement were not revealed, however, Bertelsmann admits no liability. "We are pleased to have reached this agreement with Bertelsmann," said Eric Nicoli, chief executive of EMI Group. "We can now put this matter behind us and continue to pursue the development of new legitimate digital music business models."
On Tuesday, a top European Commission official raised questions as to whether competition authorities need to beign regulating Apple's iPod music players.
Many critics have argued that Apple should make the music it sells at its iTunes store compatible with all mp3 players, not just the iPod.
"Before we jump in to regulate competition on the market it is worth asking whether competition is actually harmed," the Commission's director general for competition, Philip Lowe, said at an antitrust conference in Munich, Germany.
"Is there not vigorous competition between different bundles of mp3 players and music libraries?,"said Lowe, who is the second-highest ranking competition official in the EU.
Consumer rights organizations that originate from Germany, France, Finland and Norway have all agreed to jointly campaign against iTunes.
Norway, who is not a member of the EU, made comments in January that said Apple must liberalize its music download system by October 1 of 2007 or face legal action.
In another update to the rumored Xbox 360 Elite, Shawn Hargreaves, and XNA Framework Developer for Microsoft has commented that there will be no code changes necessary to support the HDMI output in the new, revised 360.
Hargreave's comment seems to insinuate that the new HDMI output options will "be completely transparent to developers" which should leave all the video duties up to the advanced scaling hardware inside the revised 360.
His comment could also mean that games that dont natively support the 1080p resolution will be upscaled to do so. Movie fans should be happy as well because the current 360 line can only send a 1080i signal using component cables.
For the current line of 360s, you have to use a VGA cable to hit 1080p but that should not be the case soon when the Elite hits store shelves.
Cingular Wireless, the mobile unit of AT&T, has announced that at least one million people have shown interest in Apple Computer Inc.'s iPhone. AT&T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson made the announcement on Tuesday. AT&T will be the first to sell Apple's phone when it ships in June this year. The company is not taking pre-orders for the phone but left a website for visitors to leave their email address to receive information.
"One million people have asked us to call when this phone is available," Stephenson said in his keynote speech at the CTIA wireless technology conference. The iPhone version that contains 4GB of flash memory will cost $499, while the 8GB version will cost $599. Apple has said that it could sell 10 million iPhones.
Nintendo has altered the hardware components of new Wii units in an attempt to block the use of currently available modchips that enable users to play copied games. The new units are part of a new shipment of Wiis and contain an altered circuit layout that makes modification much more difficult than with the earlier versions of the console.
Sources noted that attempting to modify the newer consoles with the older modchips will most likely lead to damage. However, new generation modchips for the Wii may become available within a month of the newer Wiis hitting the streets. Services that offer Wii modification said it's likely that Nintendo will adopt BGA (ball grid array) IC packaging to prolong the time needed to develop new modchips by about four months.
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have all altered the circuitry of their consoles before to combat against modding.
Texas Instruments is showing off a prototype digital light processing (DLP) movie projector that is designed for use in mobile phones. The projector was shown off at the CTIA Wireless 2007 Show. The Dallas-based company is showing off its "Pico" prototype. It is equipped with a DLP processor, three lasers and a power supply. It is approximately 1.5" in length.
The company claims that the projector can beam images onto a wall in DVD quality. The company has not revealed the technology is expected to be used in any phones. Texas Instruments is dedicated to a possible rejuvenation of DLP projection technology.
This is not the first time that a company has shown plans to put video projectors into mobile phones. A projector definitely seems like a more viable option for viewing content from a mobile phone than a tiny LCD screen.
A Russian piracy case against a head teacher has been ordered to go to retrial by a Russian court. Alexander Ponosov was accused of installing pirated copies of a Windows operating system and copies of Microsoft Word on several school computers. He denied the claims and said the software came pre-installed with the computers and that he didn't know it wasn't legitimate. A lower court had dismissed the case as "trivial".
But now a higher court has ruled that it should proceed. The trial has been seen as a response to international pressure to crack down on piracy in Russia. Russia ranks second to China for use of pirated software and music. Russian President Vladimir Putin said previously that the manufacturers of pirated goods should be targeted and not the consumers.
Microsoft has distanced itself from the case, claiming it had nothing to do with the charges and had opted last year not to bring any civil action. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called upon Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to intervene.
Italian authorities have once again moved against Internet piracy with the "shutdown" of a DirectConnect (DC)P2P hub known as Discotequezone. The Fiscal Police (GdF) executed search warrants issued by the Public Prosecutor of Brescia, and with support from the Federation Against Music Piracy (FPM), raided several locations throughout the country.
The operation targeted five servers and four heavy uploaders involved in the massive distribution of copyright infringing music tracks through file-sharing platforms. Eleven people have been charged with copyright infringement. The police crackdown led to the seizure of 16 computers, 27 external hard disks and more than 1000 DVD-Rs and CD-Rs with a total of more than five terabytes of copyright protected works.
Since 2005, More than 195 individuals have been criminally prosecuted for illegal P2P distribution in Italy.
According to new statistics from Chart-Track, it appears that there are now over 3 million Nintendo DS or DS Lite owners in the UK.
Nintendo had this to say in a statement: "DS was the best-selling platform during 2006 and has already established itself as the UK market leading hardware format again so far in 2007".
The DS is also handily winning its battle against Sony's PSP, securing an overwhelming 68 percent market share in the UK for the first quarter of this year.
Nintendo attributed their success to the great sales of games such as Brain Training, Nintendogs, and Tetris, all of which are designed to bring in audiences of all ages.
"It’s a great testament to the strength of the DS hardware and software range available that just as Nintendo DS has passed its second birthday here in the UK, it reaches such a landmark sales figure," said Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton.
"With many more Touch! Generations games launching in 2007, Nintendo DS and Wii will continue to be the main driving forces behind the expansion of the videogame market this year."
The original DS went on sale in the UK in March 2005 and the DS Lite launched in June of 2006. Currently the DS Lite can be purchased for 145 EUR retail.
Cyberlink Corp. today support for the Advanced Video Codec High Definition Standard (AVCHD) for video playback and authoring. CyberLink has already incorporated AVCHD support in high-definition disc player software PowerDVD Ultra, and will launch support for disc authoring software PowerProducer mid-year. "The AVCHD format offers exceptional quality for the recording, storage and playback of high-definition video content," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink.
She continued: "With our expertise in developing leading playback and authoring products, CyberLink's support of the AVCHD format delivers greater flexibility for our hardware partners and even more choice for consumers." CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra has passed certification for the AVCHD format
from official tests conducted by the AVCHD Testing Center in Japan.
AVCHD is based on the MPEG-4AVC (H.264) video format, enabling recording of high-definition 1080i and 720p video onto discs, providing faster seek times for accessing content compared with miniDVD, and offering higher compression requiring less storage space than MPEG-2. Currently Sony and Panasonic have camcorders supporting the AVCHD for recording, while Blu-ray Disc players support AVCHD playback.
We have a new XviD encoding guide. This one shows how to Encode DVDs to XviD using MeGUI. MeGUI is a front end for a variety of command line tools that can be used together to create AVI,MP4, or MKV files containing MPEG-4 video and MP3, AC3, or AAC audio.
Besides being one of the successors to GK and Auto GK, MeGUI is also an excellent tool for people thinking about transitioning from XviD to x264 since you can encode video with either.
UK Xbox boss Neil Thompson has taken a verbal jab at Sony's PlayStation 3 by attacking the system’s hefty price tag and Blu-ray functionality.
Thompson also completely dismissed the idea that the 360 was inferior because of the PlayStation 3's in-built Blu-ray drive.
"Do I want to make people pay £200 extra for a machine with discs that have storage space I don’t need? My answer’s no, I don’t need to do that today," Thompson said. "And I don’t think I’m going to need to do that for quite a while."
Thompson argued that the 360 is more flexible and allows users to upgrade at their choosing, not have to pay extra for a format they may not care about. He also believed that flexibility was the key to the console's success in the future. "I’m not sure the market has moved to high definition [movies] yet," he said.
"And if and when it does, then the way that we’ve constructed the offering we’ve made means we’ll be able to go whichever way we want."
The inclusion of a Blu-ray drive in every stock PlayStation 3 is one of the reasons for its hefty price tag but it does allow you to play high definition movies right out of the box. You must buy an HD-DVD add-on to be able to play HD dvds on an Xbox 360.
In a small update to a recent article, many news outlets are reporting that Microsoft does indeed plan to release the black Xbox 360 Elite console which will include an HDMI connector, IPTV capabilities, and a 120GB hard drive for a decent $479 USD price tag.
The new 360 would have an updated motherboard as well which would incorporate the new 65 nanometer technologies. By updating the motherboard, Microsoft can cut down on manufacturing costs. This leads to speculation of a price cut for the holidays which would put extreme pressure on the 360's console rivals Wii and PlayStation 3.
Analysts believe that even if there is no price cut, the addition of IPTV will give the 360 an edge over its competition which lacks the technology.
Hitachi has announced it plans to spend ¥3 billion on a plasma production plant in Malaysia. The plant will produce units to meet demand in Australia and Southeast Asia. Hitachi spokesman Masayuki Takeuchi said that the company will produce 42-inch displays in the country and will eventually expand to 50-inch displays.
Global sales of plasma and liquid-crystal display televisions will gain 8 percent this year to $92 billion, industry researcher DisplaySearch said. Hitachi follows rivals such as Panasonic, Toshiba and Sony in expanding its TV production overseas to meet demand for flat-panel screens.
Hitachi hopes to use the facilities of its optical devices subsidiary in the country to produce 10,000 units per month starting April. In October, the company also said it will spend ¥8 billion building a flat-panel TV factory in the Czech Republic. The plant is set to begin production this summer and is expected to achieve a monthly output of 80,000 units.
Napster Inc. and AT&T Inc. have struck a deal that will provide digitals music to some of AT&T's wireless and high speed Internet customers. The deal will provide free digital music to the subscribers. It will come in to effect on April 1st allowing qualifying users access to more than 3 million songs for one year through the Napster To Go service.
Customers who download the music will be able to transfer the tracks to compatible wireless phones and music players. The offer is available to qualifying new or existing AT&T wireless customers outside of the AT&T's traditional 22-state territory when they agree to a 2 year wireless agreement with purchase of the SYNC phone by Samsung, or the BlackJack phone.
The PlayStation 3 (PS3) console has had an extremely successful launch in the UK, with gamers buying up 165,000 units in two days following the launch according to Chart-Track estimates. This would make the PS3 console - which retails in the territory for £425 - the fastest selling "home" console there yet, ahead of Nintendo's Wii console and Microsoft's Xbox 360 console.
When the Xbox 360 console launched in the UK in November 2005, it sold 70,000 units during its first weekend. As for Nintendo's Wii console, it managed to move 105,000. Both launches were noted to have suffered from shortages with both company struggling to keep up with demand.
Sony delayed the launch of the PS3 in PAL territories for four months, giving the company time to produce enough units for a shortage-free launch. Overall, the excellent figures puts the PS3 in second place for the "fastest selling games hardware" to the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which sold 185,000 units during its launch weekend.
The excellent freeware DVD burning tool, ImgBurn, has been updated to v2.3.0.0. The update brings several fixes and adds quite a few new features (as usual with an ImgBurn release). Here is the complete changelog of the release.
Added: Parsing of the Joliet filesystem (in addition to the existing UDF/ISO9660 parsing) for pin pointing the file where a read error is occurring.
Added: Ability to have the program use erase/format commands where DVD-RAM and BD-RE disc then give their full capacity to the user data area and do not keep any 'spare areas' for error recovery. (Potentially useful for PS3)
Added: A little 'Erase' button to the main screen for easy access to disc formatting/erasing functions.
Added: Support for images with a 2332 byte sector size (Easy CD Creator v5 ?)
Added: Support for converting a few additional image formats over to the correct format for burning to DVD (Mode1/2048).
Added: Import / Export of 'Automatic Write Speed' configuration.
Added/Changed: If Build mode detects the file 'I386NTLDR', it will automatically enable the ISO9660/Joliet options to allow file names without extensions.
Changed: When files/folders are dragged + dropped into the source list in Build mode, they're now added to the MRU list - but only if 8 or less items are added at a time.
Changed: When files added to the source list in Build mode via the 'Browse for file' button, they're now added to the MRU list - but only if 8 or less items are added at a time.
Fixed: Browsing for (and opening) a file (especially in 'Verify' mode) could fail due to some garbage being appended to the filename.
Fixed: A potential error when unlocking a volume from exclusive access when locking it had failed in the first place.
Fixed: File/folder names parsed from the ISO9660 file system could have garbage appended to them if there was no trailing null.
Fixed: Thread synchronization issue where MD5 values might then be missing from the Log.
Fixed: The first cell in an angle block was being ignored and hence never shown in the 'Create Layer Break Position' window. (The first should have been visible, but not the others)
Fixed: The program displayed the incorrect 'previous' cell in layer break preview if the chosen cell followed one or more interleaved cells.
Fixed: UDF Filesystem didn't allow for the ';' character in file names.
Fixed: The 'Don't Prompt VIDEO_TS Content' option wasn't actually using the answer specified in the settings.
Fixed: The Filter Driver Load Order page was listing 'Upper Class Filters - [None Found]' for an item that should have said 'Lower Class Filters - [None Found]'.
Fixed: The wrong item in the Build mode MRU list could get deleted when the 16 item limit was reached. (Number 8 was deleted rather than number 16)
Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) console has sold 20,000 units in Australia since it was launched on Friday, Sony Australia has announced. According to the company, sales of hardware, software and accessories generated AUD$25 million (USD$20.2 million €15.2 million). The PS3 sells for AUD$999 in Australia and games go for an average of AUD$99.
The Xbox 360 console was launched in Australia on the same date last year, March 23rd 2006, and in the following four days it managed to move 30,421 units and went on to to 700,000 by October that year. These figures made the Xbox 360 the fastest selling console in the territory until the Wii was launched in December.
Nintendo's Wii was launched in Australia on December 6th and in the following four days it just past Microsoft by moving 32,901 units.
Google Inc.'s YouTube service has announced the winners of its inaugural awards. The popular video-sharing site wanted to pay tribute to the users who created content and uploaded it to the service, helping to make YouTube what it is. The winners included an animated video about a kiwi bird trying to fly and a Sydney man hugging complete strangers on the street.
"They saw an opportunity for worldwide visibility and through their success have changed the landscape of how a 'star' is defined,"Jamie Byrne, head of YouTube product marketing, said in a statement. "As the masses learned about online video, many of the creators of these videos established themselves as personalities, going from the seemingly unknown to international celebrity, overnight."
NBC Universal, News Corp. and several other companies unveiled plans for a YouTube rival several days ago. YouTube was purchased by Google last year for $1.65 billion and is currently being sued by Viacom for $1 billion.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claims that its tactic of threatening students suspected of piracy with lawsuits is a success. However, as part of the trade group's recent clampdown on p2p filesharing on university campuses, only just over quarter of 400 students threatened with litigation for illegally sharing music online have agreed to settle with the group.
The RIAA has been warning students that if they refuse to settle out of court, (which usually amounts to a settlement package of approximately $3,000), then they could end up liable to pay $750 per every song illegally distributed.
The RIAA's first batch of letters aimed at university students across North America began in February, requesting 13 different institutions to notify students that they were being sued for sharing music illegally. A second wave of letters were sent out last week to 23 universities.
The PlayStation Store is billed as "an integrated and streamlined online storefront which allows all PS3 users to browse and download available entertainment content". However, Sony has confirmed that some PlayStation 3 owners will have to wait before they can get access to the store while other owners will not get access at all.
The Store allows users to purchase full games as well as download demos and HD game videos.
Since the European launch last week, many PS3 owners have complained that they cannot access the Store at all. These users come from Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Slovenia.
Sony's director of corporate communications had this to say: "There are more than 102 territories in the region, and each Store has to be made unique for each territory due to different currencies and languages," he explained. "Stores will reach some territories in due course."
The director did explain that some countries would not be able to access the store at all due to a myriad of factors including a lack of broadband penetration. "The PS Store may not be accessible in Azerbaijan, for example," he explained.
For those countries that have to wait, Sony has not announced how long you will be waiting.
In a follow up to our Folding@home story here, the latest stats for the project show that over 30,000 PlayStation 3 users have signed up.
The statistics also show that almost 40,000 PlayStation 3 CPUs are linked to the project and over 30,000 of them have been actively performing calculations in the last two months.
The European launch has helped boost the stats which have jumped from 15,000 to the current stats in a little over 4 days.
If you would like to sign up for Folding@home you may choose to do so through the folding@home icon in the Xross Media Bar.
CeBIT 2007 ended so it is time to sum up the expo. The first thing is PC hardware which didn't bring any new products. AMD/ATI and Intel focused more on their own gaming events and neither one released any new products.
NVIDIA didn't even show up officially even though there were some rumours before the expo that NVIDIA would launch the new GeForce 8000 series (8600 and lower) display adapters for consumers in CeBIT. Luckily a few manufacturers saved their face by introducing display adapters that don't follow the regular patterns. Specially multi monitor and small form factor display adapters were positive surprises.
As we reported several weeks ago, YouTube set up a channel for U.S. 2008 Presidential hopefuls to communicate with users and campaign. Recently, there has been a lot of media attention around videos that address Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama. The videos were parodies of a 1984 Apple commercial that attacked its larger rival IBM as totalitarian.
The anti-Clinton video was particular popular. Dubbed Vote Different, the clip received 1.4 million views on YouTube since March 5th. In the anti-Clinton video, we see virtual clones with shaved heads, walking with military precision while Hilary praises the start of her presidential bid, which she has dubbed as a "Conversation with America".
"On January 14th, the Democratic Primary will begin. And you'll see why 2008 won't be like 1984." the video states, ending with the URL of Obama's website. The anti-Obama clip is a parody of the same commercial, and uses a speech in which Obama unveils his support for the Chicago Bears professional football team in the Super Bowl. "The Bears Lost So Will Obama. Clinton for President," the video reads.
"This is the opening round," said MsCarol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "The Internet is going to be the main event. Anything that gets the attention of millions of eyeballs - and particularly millions of eyeballs of people who at this early stage are watching - matters."
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given the green light to HD radio. HD Radio, which is seen as the savior of terrestrial broadcasting, offers radio stations the chance to broadcast more streams of higher quality digital programming. The technology is said to be superior to Satellite Radio. Some stations have been broadcasting in HD already with permission from the FCC.
HD radio enables radio stations to divide their spectrum into 5 or more streams, an improvement which supporters of the technology claims will boost diversity of content on radio. This move may also bring the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio even closer as both companies can add HD Radio to their list of the existing competition that a combined company would face.
Several days ago, Qualcomm withdrew all of its patent infringement claims against Broadcom. Broadcom responded by doing the same for all of its counter claims except a few. This came after US District Judge Rudi Brewster ruled in Broadcom's favor, finding that Qualcomm's failure to provide information to the US International Trade Commission on the two patents in question back in 2003 was perceived as the company waiving its rights to enforce the patents.
The two have been locked in litigation over two patents related to H.264 video compression technology. Judge Brewster also dismissed claims that Qualcomm withheld key data from the US Patent and Trademark Office, saying the court "finds no clear and convincing evidence of inequitable conduct."
Broadcom general counsel David Dull issued a statement saying the decision reflected the industry's suspicions of Qualcomm. "Qualcomm does not shoot straight with standards bodies. We are continuing to examine their conduct before various cellular and other standards bodies." he said. Qualcomm took the court's decision as a victory. "Qualcomm is gratified by the court's confirmation that our conduct before the Patent Office was lawful and consistent with our duty of candor." Qualcomm's general counsel, Lou Lupin, stated.
We have added another guide to our guide section today for streaming video to Xbox 360 without having to encode to WMV yourself and without needing a Windows Media Center PC. This is achieved using TVersity, which can stream to multiple devices over a wired or wireless network. In the guide a wireless network is used as an example.
TVersity transcodes to WMV on-the-fly and streams it to the Xbox 360, so needless to say a fast PC is ideal.
If you find any errors whether they are with spelling or anything else, or if you have any criticisms or suggestions or anything, don't hesitate to send me a Private Message (you need to be logged in). User feedback has helped us so many times in the past to get stuff "just right".
An American company, EM-SEC Technologies, has recently stated that they have successfully tested wireless-blocking paint. They applied their "Coating Solution" to a test facility last week and the paint sccessfully protected against "wireless devices and other electronic equipment".
According to the company, "a one-time application of the coating creates an 'electromagnetic fortress' by preventing airborne hackers from intercepting signals."
EM-SEC hopes that the paint will be useful in corporate offices, boardrooms, server and computer rooms, and R&D labs where wireless intruders would not be welcome.
In the past, EM-SEC has worked more with government and military customers earning some impressive validations in the process. The EM-SEC website claims that the coatings have been checked out by various groups including Sandia Labs and the Naval Surface Warfare Centre Crane Division (which tests technology for the Navy SEALS)
The paint is also approved as a TEMPEST countermeasure by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
At the moment, the paint may be too advanced for the regular consumer, especially those who would like to use a cell phone inside their painted rooms. However, this product could be bound for commercial use. A movie theater could use the paint to block incoming and outgoing cell phone calls, thus avoiding the legal issues with "jamming".
We have added another guide to our guide section; this time showing how to use PiMPStreamer to stream video files to a PlayStation Portable (PSP) over a wireless network. PiMPStreamer processes the files on-the-fly while streaming so it takes away the need to encode first and transfer to Memory Stick, so it is useful for things you might want to view on your PSP in your home and supports a large amount of file formats.
Hopefully this guide will help any of you who are interested. Note that you do need a PSP with either 1.50firmware or homebrew-friendly customer firmware for this to work. Since we don't usually cover PSP homebrew, any tips, criticisms, suggestions or complaints of any kind can be sent directly to me via Private Message (you need to be logged in).
We have recently published quite a few new guides to our guide section and are currently in the process of "reforming" many of our articles and have a to-do list longer than Santa's annual list. We now strive to cover everything our users may need and last year made a discovery that a lot of our new users didn't need to know how to encode/convert anything, but just how to play their acquired video.
Since then we added comprehensive guides to AVI playback, MPG (MPEG) playback and MKV playback and to our surprise, some of them jumped to the top of the most popular guides. So in a effort to be more complete with the playback section, we added guides to playing the OGMcontainer files, FLV files like those gotten from YouTube, QuickTimeMOV files and MP4 container files.
To many of the regulars here, there guides aren't very useful, but we really hope that the newer users, most often directed here from Google, will benefit from reading them. For the rest of you, it gives you something to link to on the forums.
According to a White Paper written by PC Pro, businesses can save almost $100 USD per PC by using the new power management facilities of Windows Vista.
Most of these savings will be because of the default power-management settings of Vista, which puts the PC into "Sleep mode" after an hour of inactivity.
Windows XP, which on default leaves the computer running idle, wastes large amounts of energy if OEMs, third-party software or employees didn't apply standby settings.
The sleep mode in Vista is more reliable than XP's equivalent "Standby setting" and your Vista PC will come back from sleep mode in a couple of seconds, very fast considering the mode it is awaking from.
The White Paper reports that these settings can save almost $100 per desktop especially if the administrator uses the new power management "Group Policy." The settings also help your business become more green friendly, sharply cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
In Symantec's newly-published Internet Securtiy Threat Report, which covers the period of July 2006 to January 2007, it appears that the Mac OS X is less secure than Windows XP.
According to the report, Microsoft took an average of 3 weeks to develop a patch after a vulnerability was reported. This turnaround was faster than Sun, HP, Red Hat and Apple although it was slower than their 13 day turnaround for the patches in the first 6 months of 2006.
Apple, during the same period, took an average of 66 days to patch vulnerabilities. This was also a slowdown from the first 6 months of 2006 in which their turnaround was 37 days.
Moving into web browsers, Internet Explorer was reported as having 54 vulnerabilities while Mac's Safari had 40. However, Microsoft patched its browser vulnerabilites in an average of 10 days, while it took Apple 62 days to patch their default browser vulnerabilities. Symantec did however explain that those stats were "skewed by a smaller sample set of patched vulnerabilities and exploits."
Sony has announced that they have developed a new "block cipher algorithm" that is specifically designed to enable advanced copyright protection and authentication for distribution of digital media such as music, movies and images.
Sony says it plan to reveal more details about the technology, code named CLEFIA, at the Fast Software Encryption 2007 conference which begins on March 26 in Luxembourg. To date, Sony has revealed that the technology is "a 128-bit block encryption that supports key lengths of 128, 192 or 256 bits." They also say that CLEFIA is powerful enough to defend the digital media against "known cryptoanalytic attacks."
Sony hopes that the technology will make its way into software and AV devices in the future and they claim that CLEFIA can offer stronger security while requiring fewer operations during encoding and decoding processes. The whole process would reduce strain on hardware and can lead to smaller and better AV devices in the future. The company also revealed that the technology "achieves a maximum data bandwidth of 1.42 Gb/s in 90 nm CMOS cell libraries, which would be efficient enough to bring CLEFIA to smartcard environments."
More news will be posted on the technology as it becomes available.
According to iSuppli, the Plasma TV industry will see steady growth in the next few years, but makers of Plasma displays will not see any major rise in revenue. iSuppli expects the industry to see growth of about 14% annually for the foreseeable future, and that unit shipments will see growth from the 13.4 million figure this year, up to 22.7 million in 2011.
However, due to increased manufacturing efficiencies and constantly growing pressure from liquid-crystal display (LCD) TVs, revenues for Plasma TVs will only see slight growth over the next five years as the average selling prices of the units will decline by about 13% per year.
Matsushita is currently performing the best in the market, staying ahead of LG Electronics and Samsung. Matsushita, which sells its TVs under the Panasonic brand, increased its market share to 37.3% in the fourth quarter.
Last month, Microsoft announced that Zune owners will be able to download a software update to fix several bugs with the device in mid-March, but the patch release has been delayed. For some Zune users, this update is vital, as it fixes a bug that makes music tracks skip during playback. These are songs downloaded from Microsoft's Zune marketplace.
Marketing director Jason Reindorp didn't give any new time-frame but assured that the patch is "very close to being ready.""The original date was an estimate based on how long we thought it would take to finish development work and put the update through normal testing processes," Reindorp said. "As with any project like this, things can sometimes take a little less time or a little more time."
The last Zune update was issued in December, adding support for the Windows Vista operating system.
A deal between Apple Computer Inc. and Sony Pictures Television has brought old classic TV shows from the 70s to the iTunes download store. Episodes of TV shows including Starsky and Hutch and Charlie's Angels will be available on the service, and like all other TV show content, will cost the standard $1.99. Other Sony content available via iTunes includes Til' Death and Rules of Engagement.
Slowly, authorized services such as iTunes are building catalogs of TV shows and movies. The market for online video is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years, but analysts warn it is vital that solutions to free content acquired online for use with regular TV sets and other consumers electronics equipment are developed.
While Sony has stated that it will take years for game developers to really utilize the PlayStation 3 (PS3)'s potential with software, Folding@Home, which is a feature added with the 1.6 update, is giving some indication of the PS3s sheer power. According to the Stanford project's latest statistics, the PS3 is leading all other platforms.
The statistics are sorted by operating system and show that the PS3, at the time of writing, has 516 current TFLOPS, very far ahead of the windows users that come in at 152, despite having thousands and thousands more active CPUs. Another statistic worth mentioning is for ATI GPUs, which currently sits at 41 TFLOPS with just 708 active CPUs. The PS3 currently shows 21062 active CPUs.
This is an incredible boost for the project and we can only hope that it will continue to grow. Here are the statistics at time of writing.
TDK, a world leader in digital recording solutions, today announced that it has begun shipping recordable Blu-ray Discs with printable surfaces. The two new products are the BD-R25PWX25CB for inkjet systems, and BD-R25THX25CB for thermal systems. The discs cost $24.99. Both incorporate exclusive surface coatings to deliver professional quality printing results. The discs utilize TDK's exclusive Durabis protective coating technology to offer enhanced durability.
You might remember that the first talk of Durabis and Blu-ray claimed you could apparently attack a protected BD disc with a screwdriver and it would be fine. "With the launch of these two new Blu-ray Discs, TDK is reaffirming its role as a leader in the format's advancement," commented Sethu Palat, TDK Director of Marketing.
He continued: "TDK's new 25GB BD-R printable surface media products deliver the exemplary performance and durability required for professional applications. Not only do the discs incorporate TDK's award-winning recording and hard coating technologies; they also offer optimal printing results with specially formulated print to the hub surfaces designed for inkjet and thermal systems."
Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan has ruled in favor of several Hollywood studios and television networks in the case over Cablevision Systems Corp.'s plan to create a network-based digital video recorder for its customers. Several Hollywood studios and television networks owned by Time Warner, Walt Disney Co., CBS and News Corp. claimed that Cablevision's plan would breach U.S. copyright laws.
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.
While other cable operators had supported the idea for the system, the judge sided with Hollywood, finding that Cablevision storing recorded programs on their servers for their customers would break copyright agreements with content providers. "The RS-DVR is clearly a service, and I hold that in providing this service, it is Cablevision that does the copying," Chin said in his ruling.
Over the past few years, the EU has sanctioned Microsoft for antitrust violations, forced them to make unspecified changes to Windows Vista, and more recently, demandedthat they alter their server protocol pricing.
Yesterday, during a speech to the European Parliament, a top EU antitrust official, Neelie Kroes, accused Microsoft of abusing its position as market leader and gaining market share because of these abuses.
"Microsoft is constantly gaining market share and that is what is worrying me in the workgroup server operating market," Kroes told Reuters"As a consequence of your abusive behavior you are getting positive results for the company—that's not acceptable in my opinion."
Statistics released by the European Commission show that Microsoft's share of the workgroup server market has grown 100% since 1999 when the EU began its investigation from about 35% then to 70% today. Kroes' comments also seem to imply that Microsoft has continued to grow through their abusive behavior in spite of massive fines, penalties and the demands of the EU.
The EC has always maintained that Microsoft has an unfair advantage over competition because they refuse to share information and code with competitors. However, the EC seems to be on the verge of accusing that Microsoft has only gained market share as a result of illegal, abusive behavior. That statement in itself would be very bold considering the size and complexity of a company such as Microsoft. "There's a fine line between preventing abuse of monopolistic power and implying that Microsoft has only been "dealt with" appropriately when the company ceases to grow its market share, or even loses share to a competitor's products."
Today's European launch of Sony's eagerly-awaited Playstation 3 console has not only seen flocks of ardent gamers queue into the small hours awaiting its release, but also several publicity stunts by rivals Microsoft in an attempt to upstage the event.
At the Virgin Megastore in London's Oxford Street, the software maker handed out chairs to those queuing which had a web address to an Xbox 360 branded-site printed on them. The site "welcomes" Sony to the next generation, and ribs the Japanese entertainment company for being "late" in comparison to the 360's 2005 launch.
The launch was met with mixed feelings throughout Europe. Despite the fact several stores were kept open late especially, few French gamers took the opportunity to get their hands on one. Sony had moored a boat by the Eiffel Tower to act as a temporary base to make sales but gamers were crowded out by the media. Meanwhile, Microsoft drove its own boat covered in Xbox 360 logos in and around the area in an attempt to distract people's attentions away from the launch.
At an electronics store in Berlin, Germany, gamers who smashed their 360's off of a wall were rewarded with a free PS3.
Last night, at the official UK launch of the Sony PlayStation 3, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Phil Harrison explained that he believed that the European maket was the key to the console's success.
In his own words, "This is the third continent out of three, but it is the most important...It's got most countries, it's the most people, it's the most cultures...the fact that we've got the launch here with more consoles shipped on day one that we've ever had in our history is a compliment to the importance of the European market."
The PS3 launched in the US last November and in Japan last December, but until this week, European gamers had to wait to get their hands on the new console. The official midnight launch in which Harrison was in attendence took place at a Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street.
Harrison seemed emotional about the launch and had this to say "it's an important day for the games industry and gamers alike: "I've seen PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 launched on Oxford Street but this is the most meaningful for me personally, because I think it's so important not just for our industry but for UK consumers - the fact that they're going to get the best machine with the best software support, the most Network service and the firmware update."
The National Football League (NFL) has gotten itself caught up in an online battle over a YouTube clip with Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer, and has managed to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) through its actions. As a lesson to students about how content owners are beginning to exaggerate their rights, Seltzer posted a clip of the NFL's copyright message that aired during the Super Bowl.
"This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited," the notice read. Just five days after posting the clip on her blog, she received a takedown notice through YouTube, and the clip was removed.
However, Seltzer is also staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the founder of Chilling Effects, a website that educates the public about their rights online. She sent a counter-notification to YouTube which cited Section 512 of the DMCA. It meant that YouTube was compelled to replace the material on receiving a counter notification asserting "good faith belief" that the material removal was a mistake.
Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin testified to a Senate committee this week to attempt to convince the committee the proposed merger with XM Satellite Radio should not be considered an antitrust issues. Both satellite radio companies have proposed a $13 billion merger but the FCC is reluctant to play along. Karmazin made some promises and let his opinions known to the committee.
"I should point out that XM has the largest digital radio facility of its kind in the country and is headquartered right here in Washington where the combined company will continue to have a significant presence," he said at the beginning of his testimony, reminding the senators of the jobs that the companies have created. He also said he didn't believe this was an anti-trust issue because the combined company would still face a lot of competition.
He listed AM/FM analog radio, Internet Radio, HD Radio, streaming music to mobile phone and even equipment to use MP3 players in cars as competition. It was his belief that the market here is for digital audio and that how it is delivered doesn't really matter; its not just "Satellite Radio" to think about anymore.
AT&T is hoping to lure new customers by bringing U-verse services to PCs. Until now, U-verse was considered just a competitor to to traditional cable and satellite companies, but now with a new package called U-verse OnTheGo, subscribers can watch TV channels on a PC if there is a broadband connection available. The initial TV stations that will be offered include The Weather Channel and Bloomberg Television.
The company is offering a 14 day free trial of OnTheGo to customers but requires a prior subscription to the U-verse IPTV service. The service currently offers just under 30 channels in total. After the trial period ends, it will cost $10 per month on top of the existing U-verse package.
The service, like AT&T's U-verse IPTV offering, is only available in a limited number of U.S. urban markets. The company pledged to add more channels to OnTheGo as time progresses and to expand throughout the country. The OnTheGo service is currently limited to the Windows XP operating system using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.
The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has filed a lawsuit against XM Satellite Radio, accusing the service of copyright infringement over its "XM + MP3" music service. XM + MP3 allows users to record on-air tracks through devices like the Pioneer Inno player. Music publishers are crying foul, saying that XM users are making permanent copies with compensating songwriters and without any permission.
Lead attorney Debra Wong Yang wrote in a statement that the service, "constitutes pervasive and willful copyright infringement to the overwhelming detriment of copyright holders, legitimate online music services and, ultimately, consumers." XM and Sirius also have the RIAA on their backs over ability of listeners to record music from the services.
XM has argued that its listeners are fully entitled to make recordings under the 1992 Home Recording Act. However, the record labels insist that the devices used to make the recordings are "iPod-like" and that the services have become more like music download services like iTunes and so should fall under a different copyright licensing regime.
Microsoft Corp. has closed its Soapbox video sharing service to new users while the company attempts to improve anti-piracy measures on the site. Just like any other video sharing site, Soapbox immediately began to fill up with pirated video clips when the test version of the service was launched last month. No new subscribers will be allowed to sign up for access the site, but anybody who already holds an account can access the site.
Microsoft could have been faced with a dilemma of distributing legitimate videos for major content companies on one of its units, while on another there were thousands of unauthorized videos available for free. YouTube found itself the recipient of a billion dollar lawsuit courtesy of Viacom due to the thousands of video clips users have uploaded without permission.
Microsoft has licensed digital-fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic to help filter out unauthorized material. Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online-services group, said that the temporary closure of Soapbox was not forced on Microsoft by its partners, but said that they were interested in how the company planned to clean up Soapbox.
Sony has given a great surprise to those waiting to buy a PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in London; a 46" LCD HDTV television set and a free ride home. The giveaway involved more than 100 gamers and cost about £250,000. "I feel fantastic. I'm delighted that everyone here also gets a television." 17-year-old Ritatsu Thomas, the customer at the head of the queue, said.
The PS3 costs £425 in the UK and its game line-up is starting to improve. It includes a Blu-ray drive for games and for movies and a powerful Cell processor. The launch in the UK and the rest of Europe was delayed by four months due to production problems. Australian gamers are also able to get their hands on a PS3 now.
Ray Maguire, head of Sony Computer Entertainment in the UK, said that the TV giveaway at the London event was a reward for the patience of the gamers. Say what you want about the £425 price tag for the PS3, but if you are one of the lucky people who also got a free LCD TV, then you got a bargain!
Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 (PS3) console has launched in Europe and Australia today, March 23rd 2007. The latest installment of the PlayStation franchise launched in both the North America and Japan in November 2006, but production problems led to an additional four month delay for PAL territories. The PS3 console is a powerful gaming console/home entertainment device/computer, striving to be the most powerful gaming console of the generation when pitted against Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360.
While being last to the starting line, at least in Europe, the PS3 still has received phenomenal demand according to retailers, despite also being the most expensive console. It costs AUD$999 in Australia and the price in Europe is set at €599 but varies in many countries (€629 in Ireland, £425 in UK etc.). Another notable difference between the launch in PAL territories and the launch in NTSC territories is the absence of a 20GB model in Europe and Australia. Only the more expensive 60GB model is available for the launch.
Officials in Malaysia reported today that Malaysian movie pirates have placed a bounty on the heads of the two sniffer dogs who helped bust an illegal fake DVD ring with a seizure of $3 million USD worth of discs.
"Lucky and Flo, two female black Labradors deployed by Malaysian authorities in their crackdown on pirated movie DVDs and music CDs, carried out their first major successful operation in Johor state on Tuesday."
Syndicate bosses have now offered a reward for the killing of the two dogs.
An official for the MPAA had this to say: "As a result of the extent of loss to the pirate syndicate, we have information from the domestic trade ministry that the Johor syndicate is intent on killing Lucky and Flo...The Malaysian authorities are taking this threat seriously and the security around the dogs' current location has been beefed up."
During Tuesday's succesful raid in the southern city of Johor Baru, 6 people were arrested and the dogs helped to seize about a million pirated games and movies.
Replicating machines, the DVD's and many other tools used to create and distribute the discs were found hidden in concealed spaces and hidden compartments spread out over four floors of an office building.
Buena Vista Television, a unit of media and entertainment company Walt Disney has been dealt a lawsuit by Starz Entertainment cable network for allegedly selling films via its movie download service which were exclusively licensed to Starz.
According to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday, a licensing agreement was made between the two firms back in 2005 which prohibited Disney from selling some of its films for transmission online before or during a certain period of exclusivity for Starz.
Since 1993, the Liberty Media owned firm has forked out in excess of $1 billion for the exclusive rights to Disney films, says the lawsuit, and Starz also has the right to offer the movies on its Vongo subscription download service.
"Our issue is that the contract has a clear prohibition from them doing this and we gave them notice, had a number of exchanges and had meetings and they denied our request for relief," said Starz Entertainment Chairman and Chief Exec Robert Clasen, speaking with Reuters. "We are absolutely adamant in protecting our contractual rights and licenses."
Disney has enjoyed huge sucess on the Internet video paid downloads front. Last year it became the first major Hollywood studio to offer its TV shows and movies via Apple's iTunes Store and now Disney's Chief Financial Officer is predicting the company's profits to reach $25 million in the first year from the service. And only last month, Disney -- along with the other major studios -- made deals to sell movies online via WalMart's newly-launched online download service.
A new site, Kongregate.com, aims to bring independent game developers to a YouTube-like system that offers revenue sharing. Video game maker Jim Greer came up with the idea, and after pitching it to some Silicon Valley investors, he received $1 million for the start-up. The site was opened shortly after Christmas and is open to all developers.
Currently it only hosts about 300 games. "Not all of them are gems, but the top 100 are," said Greer. The 36 year old founded the company with his younger sister Emily, 32. Reid Hoffman, founder of business networking site LinkedIn, said that the timing was the reason for his decision to invest in the company.
"If you get thousands of people creating content, really interesting things emerge," said Hoffman, who describes himself as an occasional gamer. Greer is not new to the video game business at all, having made his first computer games on an Apple II at the age of 12 and proceeding to work with Origin Systems. He also served as technical director Electronic Arts Inc.'s Pogo.com Web site, which attracts about 14 million gamers (mostly middle aged female).
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is now in a tough position after a judge made it clear that the trade group cannot walk away quietly from its case against New York resident Patricia Santangelo. The court said that Santangelo has the right to have her legal status resolved "one way or the other". This leaves the RIAA with a choice to either go to trial or dismiss the case with prejudice.
If the RIAA goes to trial, it is very likely that Santangelo's defense will prove she was not guilty of copyright infringement. That loss would be devastating to the RIAA's campaign against file sharing. If the trade group decides to dismiss the case with prejudice, it is still a resolution in Santangelo's favor and makes the RIAA responsible for court costs and is basically an admission of no case against Santangelo.
Either choice will also, no doubt, impact the RIAA's case against Patricia's children, Michelle and Robert, both of whom were targeted by the RIAA in November. "This case is two years old," Judge Colleen McMahon wrote. "There has been extensive fact discovery. After taking this discovery, either plaintiffs want to make their case that Mrs. Santangelo is guilty of contributory copyright or they do not."
Toshiba Corp. has responded to Sony's previous announced of the BDP-S300Blu-ray player, which will cost $599, by making further price cuts to its standalone line up. Begining April 1st (not a joke), the HD-A2 will sell for $399 and HD-A20 will sell for $499, meaning that Toshiba is now selling the lowest price next-gen, stand-alone high definition disc player on the market (below $400).
The company has also made a price cut to the HD-XA2, which will cost $799, down from $999. Price cuts for HD DVD were expected with the launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console and the BDP-S300 Blu-ray player. Deputy General manager of HD DVD at Toshiba, Olivier Van Wynendaele, said recently that it is far too early for either side to declare victory when so few players are being sold, but promised to undercut any forthcoming Blu-ray price drops.
Sales of physical CDs in the US have plummeted about 20 percent in the first quarter of 2007 as more and more consumers turn to digital media.
89 million CDs have been sold from the start of the year until March 18 compared to 112 million CDs sold during the same period in 2006. All figures are according the industry tracker Nielsen SoundScan.
Individual song downloads rose from 242 million tracks during the period last year to 288 million this year in the same period.
Digital music industry analyst Michael McGuire had this to say: "Consumers are sending a message to artists that while you may have put a lot of thought into the sequence of the album, I only like these three songs"
"It comes back to consumers being in complete control of their media experience, and that is not going backwards,"
"This is a tough business being a record label because they have to find new sources of revenue."
Although statistics show that CD sales have been in decline for at least the last 5 years, they still account for almost 90 percent of album purchases.
McGuire also had this to say: "The last couple of years the music industry didn't move fast enough and they are trying to catch up now...But, the whole digital thing is a train that is picking up speed."
NBC Universal has decided to build its own social networking service aimed at challenging the dominance of News Corp's MySpace and Google Inc.'s YouTube. Like its rivals-to-be, NBC's service, which will be hosted at NBC.com, will allow users to share NBC video content and post them on blogs and other social networking sites. NBC hopes to capture some viewers from sites like YouTube.
Again, like MySpace and YouTube, users can upload their own produced video content and images, and share them with other users. Public profiles will also be offered and users will be able to create fan groups around their favorite television shows. Huge content providers such as NBC hope to use their influence to gather a lot of web traffic to earn advertising dollars.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has requested that a federal court protect the free speech rights of activism site MoveOn.org and Brave New Films after a ViacomDMCA takedown notice resulted in the removal of a legitimate video. The video, titled "Stop the Falsiness," was a parody of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report". It pokes fun at both host Stephen Colbert and MoveOn's own political activism.
The video was uploaded to YouTube in August 2006, and does in fact include clips from The Colbert Report. However, as far as the EFF is concerned, use of these clips is protected by the same fair use that protects comedians such as Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart. "Our clients' video is an act of free speech and a fair use of 'Colbert Report' clips," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Viacom knows this -- it's the same kind of fair use that 'The Colbert Report' and 'The Daily Show' rely upon every night as they parody other channels' news coverage."
The EFF has challenged many abusers of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's takedown notice system, saying that even just an allegation of copyright infringement is enough to result in content removal; a "shoot first, ask questions later" later policy that the group says can silence online artists and critics, creating unfair hurdles to free speech.
At CeBIT, Samsung Electronics, the industry giant, has unveiled 2 new DVD writers and 2 new Blu-Ray burners.
The SH-S203 with SATA writes DVD±R at 20x, DVD±R DL/-RAM at 12x, DVD+RW at 8x, and the DVD-RW at 6x. The SH-S203 is the first certified burner to have 12x writing speeds for dual layer DVDs.
The SE-S204 is an external burner using USB 2.0. Shipment for the SH-S204 begin in May.
The SE-B046 is an external Blu-ray burner with USB 2.0/IEEE 1394 (Firewire).
The SH-B043 can write Blu-Ray recordable discs at 4x, and BD-RE at 2x. "The drive uses 2 lens and 2 laser diodes for supporting all BD/DVD/CD formats. The external player will only be available in 2008, while the built-in one will be in store by year end."
Early Wednesday, Apple said it had begun shipping its Apple TV. With Apple TVs release, Apple hopes to solidify its hold on the digital entertainment industry and expand to markets they are currently not a part of.
"The device acts as a link between iTunes on the computer and a user's big-screen television by using a preexisting Wi-Fi network. For faster transfer, the device would use 802.11n technology. It includes a 40GB hard drive to store the information locally to the device, negating the need to download it before each viewing."
You can read more about the Apple TV in this article: Apple TV
Plextor has revealed its compact "dual-bay"PX-DB600, which enables two optical slim line drives to be positioned into the space of just one 5.25" drive bay. This is ideal for small form-factor media center PCs. The Plextor PX-DB600 combines with the Plextor PX-608AL as PX-DB608AL. The PX-608AL is a multi-format DVD burner that supports DVD+/-R and DVD-RAM.
"By their very nature lifestyle PC systems are compact and designed to take up less space. Unlike traditional desktop systems, extra drive bays are often unavailable, therefore limiting opportunities for adding optical drives. So for those users who do not want to add the extra clutter of an external USB box, the Plextor PX-DB608AL is ideal."Rudy de Meirsman, Sales & Marketing Manager of Plextor Europe, said.
Plextor will sell the PX-DB608AL product, which will include the PX-DB600 dual bay unit with 2 slim line slots, including interface boards, and slot covers, PX-608AL slim line slot loaded optical drive and a suite of software including Nero and Plextools.
With the Sony PS3 console set to launch tomorrow in Europe, retailers are reporting phenomenal demand for the console. The European launch was originally set for November 2006, but was delayed due to many factors including Blu-Ray component production problems. Now the PlayStation 3 (PS3) is about to be launched (and some Italian retailers have broken the street date) but some European gamers are still disappointed and upset that the delay took place.
However, David Reeves, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) president and CEO, has said that he doesn't see the launch delay as "disappointing", but instead it will be beneficial for Sony. "It's not. It has been really beneficial to us. We're going to get it right." he said in an interview. "It has been rather like taking a bottle of soda water and we've shaken it so hard over the last six months that when we take the cork off, it's just going to explode."
He also took the opportunity to respond to critics claims that the console's demand is being over-estimated and that because pre-orders are still available even now, the phenomenal demand claim is hard to believe. Reeves said that just because the stores aren't out of stocks yet doesn't mean that the console is selling strongly.
Microsoft Corp. is currently investigating claims of fraud on the Xbox Live network, but has re-assured the six million users of Xbox Live that there has been no security breach. "Recently, there have been reports of fraudulent activity and account theft taking place on the Xbox Live network," Microsoft said in a statement. On March 11th, a user posted a complaint to the Xbox forums about a stolen account and credit card details.
"We want to reassure all of our 6 million Xbox Live members that we have looked into the situation and found no evidence of any compromise of the security of Bungie.net or our Live network," the company said. The Redmond-based software giant said that there was a few isolated incidents where malicious users attempted to get personal information from unsuspecting users, and in turn use the information to access the victim's Xbox Live account.
Security on the Xbox Live network is a huge concern for Microsoft, who's products are targeted the most by hackers.
It appears that efforts to hack Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) console may have gotten a big boost today with the discovery of a bug that could lead to working exploits to inject code. This in turn, could lead to PS3 homebrew and ISO loaders. Hacker "hacked2123" is given credit for distributing a proof-of-concept example for the LibMPEG exploit, which is confirmed working with v1.10 and v1.11.
There has been a lot of rumor and speculation lately about possible methods to hack the PS3 console and possibly boot games. Blu-Ray games can be fairly easily dumped to the PS3 HDD and several have been available to download for months now. It will be interesting to see what this develops in to.
The mega-popular Xbox 360 video game Gears of War will follow Halo in a transition to film. The film rights to Gears of War have been acquired by New Line Cinema. The title sold more than 3 million copies in 10 weeks after its launch and replaced Halo 2 as the most popular title on the Xbox Live service. It received several awards including "Game of the year" from Gamespot and the Interactive Achievement Awards' "Overall Game of the Year".
Gears of War tells the story about a war between humans and the Locust Horde on the planet of Sera. Players are part of Delta squad as they execute a plan to end the war for good. Lead game designer, Cliff Bleszinski, has been working for screenwriter Stuart Beattie, aiming to create a movie that will appeal to both the fans of the game and regular moviegoers.
The team hopes to create a motion picture that will improve greatly upon several past attempts to bring popular video games to cinema screens. "We're not going to do a to a lowest-common-denominator movie," said producer Matty Bowen, who is working on the project with Wyck Godfrey. "We're going to attempt to elevate it. And we're starting off by having an A-list writer doing it."
Dutch anti-piracy foundation BREIN has taken down another P2P site: dsb-tracker.org. This Dutch language BitTorrent site offered torrent links to popular films, music, games and software to 8,300 registered users. BREIN executes structural civil law enforcement against illegal P2P sites and over the past 15 months 131 sites that facilitated around 1.6 million users were taken down.
BRIEN had previously contacted and threatened the site owner, but was ignored. BREIN then demanded the site's hosting provider, Leaseweb, take down dsb-tracker.org, a move which led to the operator taking it down himself. This operator was also owner of the site dsb-scene.org, which was also put on notice by BREIN. "Although this action concerns smaller sites we did consider requesting a name disclosure because the operator continued his activities after our notice."Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said.
BREIN demands that site operators to give themselves up and sign an undertaking to cease and desist from their "illegal" activities under forfeiture of a penalty. If the operators cannot be reached or fail to respond, BREIN requires the service provider to take the site down and disclose the name and address of the owner or operator. BREIN holds the owners and operators of P2P sites liable for the infringements that take place through their services.
Mozilla, the creators of the open source browser Firefox have recently announced that they will stop support for their 1.5.0.x browser and ask all users to upgrade to the 2.0 series. The exact date given for the end of support is April 24th 2007.
Mozilla has slowly been cutting off updates to Firefox 1.5 and that is very obvious in the last update (1.5.0.11, in which all that was included was a patch for the browser's FTP protocol.)
This decision could be a bit rash, because many users and especially businesses still use 1.5 and like to test the stability of an updated browser before upgrading.
I will still be using 1.5 as I feel 2.0 is bloatware.
This morning, Italian gamers looking for Playstation 3s were able to pick some up at retailers that decided to break the street date and begin selling the console two days earlier than the March 23rd street date.
Davide Sher, of TIM, the "leading specialist publication for Italian retailers" had this to say about the situation: "It's a strange situation. This is the first time retailers have broken street dates by two days."
Sher went on to explain that the problems began earlier this week when the retail chain Darty took out ads in the national newspapers advertising that they would be selling the consoles on Wednesday instead of of Friday's street date.
Rival retailer Media World learned of the news and cancelled its launch date event and moved the release date up to Wednesday as well.
Upon learning of the news of its rival stores, the huge retail chain Gamestop stated it was policy to not break street dates but they might start so they do not lose their edge over the competition.
Sher had this to say: "The mainstream consumer electronics retailers get their PS3 stock early, so they can start selling early," he said, confirming that Sony's new console did indeed go on sale at Media World this morning but many specialist retailers don't have any units yet and won't receive any until Friday morning. This puts them at a real disadvantage."
Earlier this year, a picture of a prototype Xbox 360 console leaked on the internet and with it began rumors of a revamped 360 that would include an HDMI output and an upgraded scaling chip.
The newest issue of Game Informer adds fuel to the fire by showing an image of a black Xbox 360 and along side it, specifications that include a 120GB HDD, matching black accessories, HDMI output and an HDMI cable all for the reasonable price of $479 USD.
Matt Helgeson, a senior editor at Game Informer has reportedly confirmed that the story is not an April Fool's joke like many readers believe it to be.
Along with the pictures and the specifications, there is mention that existing owners can choose to purchase the larger HDD for "under $200 USD".
However, the current external HD-DVD drive will continue to be an external accesory and Microsoft official statements repeat that the console will never include an internal HD-DVD drive.
Chris Satchell, the general manager of the game development group for Microsoft had the following to say about the rumors: “We're always working on prototypes and new technologies and just playing with stuff in Redmond to see what's interesting. I think at the moment we have the widest available connections on the system. If you want to get great HD, I think we've got a good solution for that.”
Skype and PayPal have teamed up to offer users the ability to send money to other Skype users easily using the PayPal system. Niklas Zennstrom, Skype co-founder, revealed the new service on Tuesday at a technology conference in Silicon Valley. He did not say when this service will be available for Skype's millions of users. Both Skype and PayPal are units of auction giant eBay.
PayPal is already the most popular payment method for Skype users paying for long-distance Skype phone calls to other phones. "You can send money over Skype," Zennstrom said of the upcoming service plan. "This is basically connecting the Skype community over PayPal. All the user needs is a PayPal account."
A Skype spokesperson said that the service should be formally unveiled within a month. "A lot of people using Skype are people who have friends and family on the other side of the world," Zennstrom said. At the end of 2006, Skype had 171 million registered users worldwide.
Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio have both been sued by Austin, Texas-based company Keystone Autonics, for alleged patent infringement. Keystone Autonics claims that both radio companies are using technology taken directly from patents it owns. Sirius and XM are already experiencing several problems, which include the RIAA and critics of their proposed merger.
The patent in question was awarded to George Hindman of Keystone Autonics in January. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is also clashing with the pair over a bill the trade group supports that would prevent users from being able to locally store and record songs aired over satellite radio.
Sirius and XM have previously agreed to merge in a $13 billion agreement, but have met opposition from several sources including the FCC, which indicated the companies would have a hard time getting that deal through and that an approval would be unlikely.
LG Electronics has revealed that it expects retailers to charge about $60 for devices used to convert digital TV signals to analog. LG is one company that is producing these boxes, which will prevent analog TVs from "going dark" when the United States changes to digital-only broadcasts. "We plan to have the boxes available in early 2008,"John Taylor, LG's vice president of U.S. government relations, said.
The transition will be made in the United States on February 17, 2009. Without a converter box, analog TV users will have to either subscribe to satellite or digital cable, or replace their TV with a digital television. The production cost of the devices was not revealed by LG.
The National Telecommunications & Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency, is responsible for a "coupon" system that $40 discount coupons to consumers to help buy the converter boxes. It expects to have a system in place to accept requests for coupons by January 1, 2008.
Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. has announced the launch of its Removable Hard Disk Drive iV, the world's first iVDR standard hard disk drive capable of recording copyright protected High Definition (HD) content without quality loss. The small iVDR fits in the palm of the hand but features a maximum capacity of 160GB and a data transfer rate of 540 Mbit/s. Employing SAFIA copyright protection technology, Removable Hard Disk Drive iV is a new iVDR-Secure type media ideal for recording and transferring HD and SD content.
In recent years, as terrestrial digital broadcasting has become more commonplace, HD video content has become more widespread. Recording long HD broadcasts requires a lot of storage space. Moreover, recording copyright protected digital content or moving it from a recorder or other internal hard disks requires media capable of copyright protection.
The iVDR Consortium was established in March 2002 and now consists of more than 50 companies promoting the iVDR standard. With this, the diffusion of iVDR-compatible devices is expected to increase dramatically. These iVDR devices will be used as bridge media to record HD and SD content that can then be viewed on a player or in a car, for example.
The popular burning/multimedia suite Nero Burning Rom has been updated today to version 7.8.5.0. Nero 7 Premium is compatible with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system and supports, among other things, Blu-ray and HD DVD writing, free VoIP telephony, unlimited MP3 support and offers a media center for mobile devices. Monthly updates are available for free.
Sony Corp. has moved to soften worries about backwards compatibility issues in the European PlayStation 3 (PS3) console, set to launch in PAL territories on Friday. The hardware (emotion engine) that provided support for PS2 titles was removed and replaced with a software emulation solution instead. Sony had previously said the console will support 1000 older titles at launch.
"If your game is not listed here, emulation is not yet supported on PlayStation 3," The backwards compatibility website, which can be found here, reads. "We will be adding additional titles to this list in future firmware upgrades," added David Reeves, President of Sony Computer Entertainment.
CD-WOW!, the second largest online music retailer in Britain, may have to pay millions of pounds for importing CDs from Asia. Besides the damages, which could be around £4 per CD or DVD, CD-WOW! was also ordered to pay legal costs for the British Phonographic Institute (the British equivalent of the RIAA) and the other claimants in the case.
Justice Evans-Lombe said there was "strong evidence that CDWOW! was committing widespread breach of the undertakings", referring to an agreement CD-WOW! reached with the BPI in January of 2004. The agreement settled a similar complaint at that time. The company's founder, Henrik Wesslen said afterwards that the breaches of the agreement were "not intentional."
Wesslen told reporters "We knew the verdict was always going to be a negative one because we held our hands up to a number of incidents," but called it "a harsher verdict than we would have hoped for." He went on to say "At a time when the record industry is losing vast revenue to piracy, it seems ludicrous that they can set out to destroy a section of the market that is actually making them money."
As Apple launches its new Apple TV, Microsoft has sent out a press release to make sure they are not forgotten in the online movie and TV download sector.
The press release claims that monthly downloads on Xbox Live Video are now on a double-digit month to month growth, and overall have increased about 400 percent since XLV went live in November.
In the press release Microsoft also claims that XLV is the top downloading service "in the living room" and number two in downloading services behind iTunes.
iTunes has about 1,000 hours of content available for download while Microsoft claims 1,500 hours on XLV.
Microsoft also reminds that XLV is the only download service to offer HD programming at the moment. There are rumors however, that iTunes will begin to offer HD programming alongside the launch of Apple TV.
However, the HD content available on XLV does have its drawbacks. HD content take up much more room than non-HD content, and Xbox 360s have small 20 GB HDDs.
Late last week, Michigan congressman Fred Upton (R) filed the Video Game Decency Act of 2007 under the bill H.R. 1531.
The bill asks for federal legislation that would make it illegal for game developers to hide content in their games in the hopes of receiving a less restrictive ESRB rating.
If you recall, Upton was a harsh critic of the now-infamous Hot Coffee scandal and this is obviously seen in the language of the bill which in part says: "It shall be unlawful… to… distribute… any video game that contains a rating label… for that video game where the person, with the intent of obtaining a less restrictive age-based content rating, failed to disclose content of the video game that was required to be disclosed to the independent ratings organization"
According to Upton, any violations would constitute a deceptive practice under guidelines of the Federal Trade Commission.
This is not the first time Upton has introduced a bill asking for video game decency. He introduced a similar bill in 2006 asking for more FTC enforcement over video game content. The bill went unsigned.
Posted here is U.S. attorney and Christian conservative activist Jack Thompson's response to the fact that Take Two has sued him in which he posts a few biblical explanations as to why he does not want Grand Theft Auto IV or Manhunt 2 released. The text has not been changed in any way:
Dear Gamers and Gamer Publications on the Internet and Elsewhere:
I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. With the filing of this SLAPP lawsuit last week, my prayers are finally answered.
This lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is, without a doubt, the single dumbest thing I have ever seen any lawyers do in my thirty years of practicing law -- while in continuous good standing to do so with The Florida Bar, I might add, the shock radio and video game industry's efforts notwithstanding.
I encourage folks to read Psalm 35, a Psalm of David, which is brilliant in its entirety (since God Himself wrote it), but for those who don't own a Bible or who think their hands will catch on fire if they touch one, here is the salient portion that applies to this lawsuit:
According to a Wall Street analyst from ThinkEquity, Apple TV can "prove to be as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior as the iPod has been to traditional music business model...Apple TV is an ideal conduit for multiple services including DVR, paid-for content, gaming, or advertising."
The analyst also explained that the huge combined value of all the opportunities brought forth by Apple TV could be worth as much as $11.4 billion USD.
The analyst sees Apple TV as having the potential in the future to target gamers and also feature a rival to TV Guide which could bring in advertising revenue.
Apple TV is a "network computer in disguise" according to the analyst and he states that with some hardware and software tweaks, a lot is possible with the new TV.
"Apple TV can, in our opinion, be easily turned into a DVR with little or no hardware modification and a software upgrade...We think Apple's brand, established distribution, marketing power, over 100 million total iPod unit shipments, and 22 million active Mac users would create more than enough energy to propel an AppleTV TiVo-like service to a higher subscription base than TiVo's current 4.4 million users."
As the next generation console battle rages on, one question continually comes to the consumer's mind. For how much longer can Microsoft continue to charge $70-a-year for a subscription to Xbox Live?
With Microsoft's announcement last week that they will be introducing cross-platform play in June (allowing Xbox Live subscribers to play against gamers on Widows Vista pc's) many Xbox Live subscribers were excited for the new feature that wont cost them one cent more then their annual fee they are already paying. Microsoft however, must notice that most PC owners will not pay for features that they have been gettting free for years. In my opinion, a Gamertag is not worth $70-a-year.
After this, the real question lies in how long Xbox Live can stay a pay service when the free PlayStation 3 online service gets going.
Sony has announced firmware upgrade for the launch of PlayStation 3 in Europe. The v1.60 firmware features patches for backwards compatibility, Folding@home connectivity, background downloading and internet browsing. The company also launched the PS3 Compatibility Site that lists PS2 games playable with the new European hardware PS3 model.
The firmware upgrade will be available at midnight on March 22 via PlayStation Network, http://www.PlayStation.com, or for those without access to the internet, on a disc from local customer service.
The version 1.60 features support for Bluetooth keyboards and mice, and an additional QWERTY on-screen keyboard, as well as background downloading for up to six items simultaneously. Folding@home feature allows PS3 owners to sign up to Stanford University's program by clicking the logo on the XMB (XrossMediaBar), and contribute while the console is in idle mode.
"Stanford University’s Folding@home program, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers. Using the power of the Cell Broadband Engine™, PS3 system can perform computer simulations for the Folding@home program ten times faster than your average home PC."
According to two company filings with the Taiwan Stock Exchange,Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) has announced it will be adding investments of $14 million USD via Ampower Holding for LCD components.
In the filings, CMO reported that it will acquire 45% of the holding company.
"The panel maker has been aggressive in better completing its upstream supply chain. The maker announced last December it is investing US$1.21 million in Guan-Jie Electronics (transliterated from Chinese). Thanks to the investments, CMO gained 57% of the company, which was reported by the Chinese-language Commercial Times as an LCD inverter maker."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has gained entrance into the "secret' meetings of the Digital Video Broadcasting Porject (DVB), a group of technology and television companies that create the TV and video specifications that are used in Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa and has uncovered some startling facts.
In thier newest report, EFF reports that US movie and television companies have convinced the DVB to create new specifications that would force DRM technology into televisions. This would be to take away consumer's rights and most likely force them to pay over and over again to view legally acquired degital television content.
Ren Bucholz, EFF's policy coordinator in the Americas had this to say "DVB is abetting a massive power grab by the content industry, and many of the world's largest technology companies are simply watching. This regime was concocted without input from consumer rights organizations or public interest groups, and it shows."
Despite recent record profits, American movie and television studios insist that new technologies could ruin their industry. Notably in the past they have tried to block VCRs and recordable VCR and DVD devices in the US. Now, using the DVB, their plan has gone international.
One of the largest online music stores in Europe, Musicload, owned by Deutsche Telekom has recently come out against DRM on account that it has negative effects on the marketplace and the service's customers.
In an open letter distributed last week by Musicload, the company said it was having constant problems with DRM, so many that 75% of its customer service calls were the result of some sort of DRM-related problem.
As told by Musicload, "DRM makes the use of music quite difficult and hinders the development of a mass-market for legal downloads." Musicload is saying that DRM is unfair to the customers and also prevents competition between rival music services.
Musicload is in a heated competition in Germany against Apple's iTunes music service which also does not offer DRM-free music.
In December, Musicload began to allow independent music labels to sell their music on the service without DRM and Musicload has reported that artists that chose to drop DRM saw a 40 percent increase in sales since that time., and that more artists and labels are showing interest. Musicload hopes to see DRM-free MP3's make a comeback in the near future but major labels have dropped little hint that that is a reality.
According to Screen Digest, Sony is set to sell 4 million PlayStation 3 (PS3) units in Europe in 2007. Analyst Nick Parker, told the Times Online that plentiful stocks of the console could not be seen to indicate poor sales performance. "The lack of shortage is supply driven; what Sony has shipped will sell," he said. "We estimate that Sony will sell around 4 million units in Europe this year, with 1 to 1.5 million in the UK."
He said that PS3 could overtake Wii in the sales stakes next year, if not by the end of 2007. He also claimed that Microsoft's Xbox 360 is showing signs that its demand has peaked, with sales being only 1% higher than the same time last year. The PS3 will go on sale in Europe on March 23rd for €599 (£425).
According to DigiTimes, DVD burners capable of writing speeds up to 20X stand a good chance of becoming the mainstream writing speed of DVD burners by the fourth quarter of this year. Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell are evaluating the adoption of half-height 20x DVD burners, and other PC brands already having decided to adopt such burners.
Lite-On IT started volume production of 20x DVD burners in late 2006. Both Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) and Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology (TSST) began 18X DVD Burner production at the same time, uninterested in producing 20X models then. However, sources claimed that in the emergence of OEM and ODM orders for 20x DVD burners, HLDS, TSST and Pioneer are preparing to begin volume productions of 20X burners in the second quarter.
In a yet to be aired interview with the American PBS program CEO Exchange, Sony boss, Sir Howard Stringer is noted to have called Nintendo's Wii console "a wonderful device." Nintendo's Wii has topped the console sales for both January and February in the United States. Honesty exists in the games industry, but it is rare, and is always followed with some form of a "but..".
Naturally, Stringer sang praises for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console, referring to it as the "Mercedes of the video game field". "If we fail, it is because we positioned PS3 as the Mercedes of the video game field." he said in the interview. "PS3 is after a different audience and it can be whatever it wants — a home server, game device, even a computer."
He also expects Blu-ray to win the format war with HD DVD, mainly due to increased movie studio support.
Movie Gallery, which operates both Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video, has announced that the company will offer its customer online DVD rentals in an effort to take some customers back from Netflix and Blockbuster. The company's own research showed that its customers were loyal when looking for newer DVD releases, but turned to online alternatives for older movies.
The chain also said it plans to avoid the high-cost advertising battle now underway between Netflix and Blockbuster, and instead aims to simply offer its existing customers access to low-cost online rentals through the service. Ever since its acquisition of Hollywood Video back in 2005, the chain has been struggling, plunging deep into debt.
At the end of 2006, it was $1.1 billion in debt. It is currently re-negotiating the terms of its debt agreements and hopes to return to profitability this quarter.
Nintendo has denied rumors circulating that the company is currently developing an external hard disk drive for the Wii console. The rumors sourced from a Japanese gaming magazine Gamelabo report that Nintendo executives had a meeting to discuss the new HDD component. GamesIndustry.biz contacted a Nintendo of Europe spokesperson, who denied the claim saying it was just "pure rumour and speculation".
However, the company did confirm that a new headset peripheral for the DS handheld device will be available in the United States soon. It will allow players to take part in online voice chats and is due to go on sale alongside Pokémon Diamond and Pearl next month. No European release for the peripheral has been confirmed just yet, but it is likely to be available at the some time as Pokémon Diamond and Pearl this year.
Toshiba has rejected claims from the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) that Blu-ray is winning the format war. Olivier Van Wynendaele, Deputy General manager of HD DVD at Toshiba Ltd, accused the group of using propaganda in their press releases and at CeBIT in Germany this year. The BDA and news sources have been reporting that Blu-ray is outselling HD DVD by a ratio of 3:1 in the U.S., which Van Wynendaele strongly denies.
He told Tech.co.uk that the reason for the sudden surge in Blu-ray figures was due to new owners of the PlayStation 3 console redeeming Blu-ray movie vouchers given to them by Sony. The vouchers can be exchanged at retail stores and Van Wynendaele said this has distorted the genuine sales figures.
He then went on to say that over 200,000 HD DVD stand-alone players were sold in the United States, compared to 30,000 stand-alone Blu-ray players, and criticized the BDA for attempting to count all PS3s as Blu-ray player sales when they have no proof that customers are using them for anything other than games or are interested in buying any Blu-ray movies at all.
Speaking at the CeBit show, a Toshiba spokesperson revealed some interesting news about their flagship HD-DVD technology and its integration into their popular laptop product lines.
Announced for a release in Q3 2007, Toshiba stated that its Satellite brand of laptops will come equipped with HD-DVD drives. Toshiba already offers HD-DVD drives in its existing Q30 line of laptops which was launched in May of last year. Not content with letting that line go to waste either, the japanese electronics giant also revealed that the Q30 can expect an HD-DVDR drive in Q2 of 2007.
Some may remember that Toshiba had shown off an HD-DVDR equipped laptop at January's CES show, but now it appears that the product will finally come to consumer's hands.
The company announced that of the blue-laser optical drives designed for PCs, 60% of them were capable of supporting HD-DVD format, and with the integration into slimline notebooks, officials say that brings the share up to 70%. With the release of the HD-DVDR equipped Q30 and the lower end Satellite system later this year, it appears that Toshiba may make it's projected forecast of 500,000 HD-DVD players on the market in Europe by the end of 2007.
Their numerous copyright infringement lawsuits aren't enough to disuade the people at YouTube from having a bit of fun. They've announced that they will host a user submitted video award for the most popular videos voted on by you, the user. With several categories ranging from most creative to most adorable, YouTube promises good times for people who enjoy several unlicensed works on their website.
Voting will go on until this Friday and winners will be announced on March 25th. Winners will receive a trophy as well as a spotlight section on the video sharing giant's website. Since the website's success can be attributed to user interaction for both content and popularity of media, YouTube officials are confident that this type of an event will garner a lot of positive attention to the website. Should this award be successful, you can expect more of them in the future.
There are seven total categories in which you can vote and they are; most creative, most inspirational, best series, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary and "most adorable video ever". Among the nominees are noted "vloggers" Paul Robinett (Renetto), British pensioner Peter Oakley, up-and-coming folk singer Terra Naomi, Star Trek parody Chad Vader, actress-turned-teenager Lonely Girl 15, and comic commentator LisaNova (Lisa Donovan).
AfterDawn was invited to CybeLinks product presentation where CyberLink representative talked about the current state of the company and also about the future.
Most people associate CyberLink with PowerDVD but CyberLink also makes other video and media related softwares like PowerDirector and PowerProducer. Most of their software goes to OEM manufacturers which get over 80 percent of CyberLink sales. This also is their strategy on global markets because it is easier to reach consumers through OEM manufacturers.
One of the main targets of CyberLink in media sector is Windows Media Center which CyberLink enchants with additional plugins. Media Deluxe Pro package comes with MagicDirector, PowerDV, Media Server, SoftDMA, MakeDisc and MagicSports plugins for Windows Media Center.
With MagicDirector you can easily edit your own videos directly from Windows Media Center.
With PowerDV you can capture DV and HDV material to harddrive or to DVD.
With Media Server you can share media files in your computer to local network and watch them from another computer with SoftDMA software.
Google has stepped into the in-game advertising business with the acquisition of Adscape, the Internet giant revealed on its website on Friday. Financial details were not disclosed, but technology site Red Herring, previously reported the value of the deal to be around $23 million. Video game analysts said Google's step into the field could boost the business significantly.
"As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience," Google said on its site. "We think this rich environment is a perfect medium to deliver relevant, targeted advertising that ultimately benefits the user, the video game publisher and the advertiser."
Microsoft Corp. previously purchased Massive Inc. for $200 million, sealing itself into the market. Massive struck several deals with publishers including UbiSoft Entertainment SA, THQ Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. to place advertisements in their titles. Many experts say that Google dropped the ball when that deal was struck.
Sony Computer Entertainment Australia (SCEA) has announced it will hold its official midnight launch event for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in Sydney's Pitt St Mall. Retailer Myer has teamed up with SCEA for the event. The retailer will set up a big viewing space outside its store and will hold a free public screening of Casino Royale for the gamers waiting to get their hands on a PS3.
The film will be played directly from a PlayStation 3 and will begin at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 22. Sydney radio personality Lizzy Lovett from 2Day FM will be the host for the event and gamers will get a chance to play the PS3 on the big screen and there will also be "PlayStation-themed" giveaways.
Additionally, Myer will provide a free Blu-ray copy of Talladega Nights to the first 100 people who buy a PS3 console (The first 20,000 Australian users to register their PS3s on the PlayStation Network will get a copy of Casino Royale). The 60GB version of the console will be available for purchase for A$999.95 from March 23rd.
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have all had their personal response to the NPD figures for February hardware and software sales, which showed Nintendo's Wii as the dominating console in the United States. Nintendo wasted no time in issuing a press release about the 335,000 Wii units and 485,000 DS units sold, accounting for 54% of (gaming) hardware sales for the month.
Nintendo also pointed out that of the four best selling games, three were for Nintendo systems. Microsoft responded to the figures by pointing out that the title Crackdown for the Xbox 360, was the best selling for the month. The company also said that an average of 5.4 games were sold to each Xbox 360 owner, compared to PlayStation 3's ratio of 2.3, and the Wii's rate of 2.8. Microsoft claimed that at the same point in the Xbox 360's lifespan, the attach rate was 3.8.
As for Sony, the company compared the month against February 2006, and told GameSpot that it brought in 67% more retail dollars in February 2007. "The PlayStation brand remained the number-one revenue driver for the month in the industry owning 38.5 percent of total sales," a representative said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recently taken on several individuals that have abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) takedown notice process. The group recently filed two cases against two abusers, and it is rumored that Viacom may also be tackled by the group. The first of these cases was against Michael Crook.
Crook responded to Craigslist personal ads and made a list of those he considered "perverts" and posted them publicly online. After a Fox News appearance, several pictures of him (from that appearance) appeared on some blogs. Crook used DMCA takedown notices to order that the pictures be removed. He also claimed that he owned the copyright to the images.
Of course, the two problems with the notices are that he didn't own the copyright to the images and that "fair use" would have allowed the pictures in any event anyway. The EFF stepped in then and in a settlement, Crook agreed to stop using the takedown notices and recorded an apology video.
In another interesting ongoing case, the EFF has gone after Richard Silver, the "creator" of the Electric Slide dance. He claimed that a video uploaded to YouTube violated his copyright. According to the EFF's complaint, the video actually only had about 10 seconds of steps that "resembled" the Electric Slide, which was enough for Silver to issue a DMCA takedown notice against YouTube.
ASUS is showing off new notebooks that include a HD DVD drive at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. "In both computing and entertainment, content increasingly available in high definition up to native HD resolution has created a whole new level of multimedia experience. This new high resolution entertainment and gaming experience allows users to reach the heights of excitement, awe, and joy on various type of displays," a company news release states.
Incorporated with Toshiba's HD DVD-R optical drive, the W1 and W2 notebooks can read discs with up to 30GB of data, including video, photo and music all from a single HD DVD disc. The HD DVD-R optical drive also plays HD DVD movies at a resolution that is six times sharper than the DVD format, presenting a vibrant, incredibly sharp and state-of-art multimedia experience.
The W1 and W2 series offer an all-round high-definition experience with built-in digital TV tuner and HDMI interface, supporting standard, enhanced, or high-definition video, plus multi-channel digital audio on a single cable.
New internal and external Blu-ray drives are being shipped by Other World Computing (OWC), designed for both Macs and Windows PCs. The prices start at $559.99 for internal drives and US$649.99 for external drives. For Mac users, OWC also offers the full version of Roxio's Toast 8 Titanium software with the drives.
The internal drive configuration is a standard IDE/ATAPI drive. The external drive features both USB and FireWire 400 ports to connect to the computer. Two 25GB (single-layer) Blu-ray media discs are included with the drives.
Blu-ray is currently outselling the HD DVD format in the United States, helped by the November launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console.
Sharp, the TV distributor, currently has a prototype of a 64-inch TV with a resolution of about 4000x2000 pixels, which is equivalent to 8.8 megapixels.
To compare, a 1080p TV has a resolution of 2 megapixels so this new prototype blows a current generation HDTV out of the water.
Reviews at Cnet say that the quality of the picture is unbelievable and hope to see Sharp commercialize the TV in time for the next HD disc war that follows Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Those who are interested in purchasing a TiVo Series 3 HD digital video recorder (DVR) but are put off by the $800 price tag will be happy to know that the company is working on reducing the price to boost falling sales. TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said in a conference call that it is important for the company to drop the price of the device if its to move further into the HDTV sector.
"We will be highly focused this year on moving forward with a lower-priced, mass appeal High-Def unit, which will allow us to much better participate in the HD television trend," said Rogers to analysts in a recent earnings report. "The other clear learning at retail is that High-Definition television sets are the most important new consumer electronics item."
He continued: "Given the price of our HD unit, we were not able to meaningfully participate in that trend. This also clearly contributed to lower sales volume compared to a year ago, when this trend was nowhere near as significant."
LG Electronics has revealed the price of its new internal disc drive that is capable of reading and rewriting Blu-ray blank media and reading HD DVD-ROM discs. LG already offers a hybrid stand-alone player for both formats, but it lacks support for several aspects of HD-DVD, meaning it carries no HD DVD logo. The GGW-H10N"Super Multi Blue" drive will cost a whopping $1,200 to buy.
It can burn both single layer and dual layer Blu-ray discs, supporting up to 4x write speed for single layer (24 minutes per disc), but drops back to 2x for dual layer. The 4x write speed is welcome, but the market currently only offers consumers single layer Blu-ray media, mostly with 2x write speed support for about $11 to $20 per disc.
After it emerged earlier this week that Viacom Inc. had filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google over its YouTube video sharing site, Google was quick to claim it had protection under the "safe harbor" provisions set present in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google also said that the lawsuit would not alter its service or distract it from its work.
However, Viacom lawyer, Don Verrilli, has struck at Google's claim of protection under DMCA and at the law itself. Firstly, he said that Google does not fit the criteria needed to take advantage of the safe harbor provisions. He said that under Section 512 of the DMCA, a "service provider" must be unaware of infringing activity and must not make direct financial gain from it.
He believes that Google is aware of the mass-infringement on the site and has no problem filter content for any distribution partners. "YouTube has done a lot of social good that comes with a very significant problem," Verilli said. "And the significant problem that comes along with the good is that there is an enormous, enormous amount of copyrighted video works uploaded onto YouTube and viewed on a staggeringly high level by YouTube users."
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been given until March 26th to produce billing records and timesheets in a case against Debbie Foster and her daughter Amanda. The records are necessary to help Foster calculate how much the RIAA has spent in attorneys fees after failing to sue the Oklahoma woman. This case spans back to 2004, when Debbie was originally sued for allegedly illegally sharing pirated songs on P2P networks.
Foster denied any part in illegal file sharing, but the RIAA kept up its case and added Debbie's daughter, Amanda, to the lawsuit. Instead of settling like most do, Debbie challenged the RIAA to produce further evidence including dates and times and records of the files she supposedly pirated. After not producing any records, the RIAA offered to withdraw its case.
In response, Debbie has asked to be awarded reasonable attorneys fees after the whole ordeal. She submitted her expenses to the court, to which the RIAA claimed she was asking for too much. It is this claim that led to the Judge ordering the RIAA to disclose its own legal fees.
A new start-up from San Diego is set to pit itself against giants in the music industry including Apple Computer Inc. and XM Satellite Radio. A beta version of Slacker was launched on Wednesday, and it aims to take digital radio beyond the web. It's founders include former CEOs in the business, including Dennis Mudd from MusicMatch and Jonathan Sasse from iRiver.
Its service is similar to those offered by Yahoo! Music and Pandora, allowing users to select radio stations based on their preferences or creating custom stations by selecting songs as their favorites. A user cannot play any track on-demand, instead the service will use a recommendation engine to play music the user will probably like, introducing them possibly to new artists.
Later this year, the company will release Slacker Jukebox, desktop software that will have an optional $7.50 per month Premium subscription service to remove advertisements and store all "favorited" songs on a computer. The company also plans to launch a portable player later on with a 4-inch color screen and WiFi connectivity.
At CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany, Devolo is showing off technology to route data throughout mains power circuits in a home. While this concept is already in use and is improving as time goes on, Devolo has developed technology to route TV signals throughout the home using mains power circuits. These systems typically work using a specially adapted plug that acts as a mini-hub to route data to devices around the house.
"It connects to the set-top box and converts that TV signal to an IP signal," said Andre Jansen, a spokesman for Devolo. "The adapter has a range of 200m and that's enough for a normal private household." Devolo has yet to announce prices or availability of the home TV network system.
As February came to a close, one thing was very clear. Nintendo was blowing away the competition in console sales. The company sold 485,000 DS units and 335,000 Wii consoles for the month. During the same period Microsoft's Xbox360 sold 228,000 units and Sony's PlayStation 3 lagged behind with 127,000 units sold.
By using some simple math, we can see that Nintendo's latest console, the Wii, almost outsold it main competitors' combined sales for the month.
However, Sony's PlayStation2 continued to see well, selling almost 300,000 consoles for the month.
Nintendo noted that the game systems "represented 54 percent of all hardware sales in February, more than those of all other manufacturers combined."
In general, all console sales on a "year-to-date" basis increased by 106% from 2006.
The report was not a complete loss for Microsoft and Sony however. The PlayStation 2 sales were a shining spot and so was the best seller Guitar Hero 2. Crackdown and Gears of War sold very strongly for Microsoft.
Why are the Nintendo consoles selling so well? Envisioneering Group Research Director Richard Doherty gives a simple answer: "Keeping it simple, stupid, is winning...Both Wii and the DS don't require big instruction books and that's expanded the audience...Sony and Microsoft took a different path, producing consoles of stunning power and complexity ... and price."
Media giant CBS has announced that it has sealed a deal with Google Inc.-owned YouTube. The pairing will create a brand new web channel which will feature clips and highlights from the annual "March Madness" NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) basketball tournament.
The deal comes as somewhat of a surprise, in light of CBS' former sister company Viacom's recent copyright infringement litigation against Google and Youtube, and considering original talks between YouTube and CBS appeared to break down last month.
The line-up will include clips of the tournament as well as other aspects such as press conferences, interviews and highlights. The service will be free, however it will be ad-supported and include links to other CBS and NCAA Web pages.
According to YouTube, the new service will allow game clips to be uploaded to the site in near-real-time so users can view, comment, rate, recommend & post their own video responses.
CBS' main goal, said Quincy Smith, the company's President, is to try and reach out to -- rather than try to discourage -- YouTube's audience. "Above all the other good news, what's most exciting here is the extent to which CBS is learning about its audience as never before," he said. "Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialog between established media players and a new set of viewers."
When Halo 3 hits shelves later this year for the Xbox360, the highly anticipated game will be available in three editions, confirmed Microsoft yesterday.
The first edition is the "Standard Edition" which simply included the standalone game. A limited quantity "Legendary Edition" will be released at the same time and will include a collectable Spartan helmet case, a Halo 3 storyboard art and two exta discs full of bonus material.
The "Limited Edition" version comes in a metal case and includes the first extras disc from the "Legendary Edition". Buyers will also enjoy a Halo fiction and art book which features a guide to the game's universe and previously unseen material.
The first disc of the "Legendary Edition" will include behind-the-scenes footage that features a "Making of Halo 3" documentary and early game concept storyboard. Also included on the disc is a special audio-video calibration tool that will let fans enjoy optimised audio and extra high definition footage.
The second disc, exclusive to the Legendary Edition includes remastered cinematic material from Halo 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved, complete with developer commentaries.
Earlier this week, Take Two, the game distributor, took a step to get Jack Thompson off their backs by filing a federal court case against him in the state of Florida. Mr. Thompson has, for the past year, been attacking the distributor, trying to get restraining orders against their games, the most recent being "Bully".
Take Two has plans to release Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV in the near future and are trying to avoid another of Mr. Thompson's lawsuits. Thomspson made it clear he would try to block both games from being released and so Take Two asked a judge to "enjoin him from bringing suit on behalf of the State of Florida to enjoin the sale of GTA IV or Manhunt 2."
According to the lawsuit, Take Two is tired and frustrated by Thompson's threats, lawsuits, retractions, and dismissals. The complaint states such actions by Mr. Thompson as "he brought suit on behalf of the State of Florida, dismissed it, filed again, sought a temporary restraining order, and then failed to pursue that motion" These lawsuits come at "unpredictable times and under unpredictable circumstances" which also interrupts a smooth transition between Take Two and retailers. In the past, Mr. Thompson has sued such giants as Walmart, Best Buy and Target over the sales of Take Two distributed games.
Nero announced today that Nero Linux 3 will be unveiled at CeBIT in Germany. The new version of the definitive burning application for Linux operating systems will add Blu-Ray and HD DVD data recording support as well as an improved graphical user interface (GUI) that is similar to the look and feel of the current Nero Burning ROM 7 edition.
"Nero has long recognized the importance of including the Linux community in our broad user base," said Udo Eberlein, Chief Operating Officer, Nero AG. "By ensuring that the functionalities of our most popular application are available to users of the Linux operating systems, we are also ensuring that Nero's cutting-edge burning technology is enjoyed by users all over the world."
In addition to Blu-ray and HD DVD burning capabilities, Nero Linux 3 will also natively support 64-bit systems, as well as Unicode in all languages currently supported by Nero's flagship product, Nero 7. A beta version of Nero Linux 3 is expected to be available at the end of March 2007. Nero's OEM partners will be able to bundle Nero Linux 3 starting in mid-May 2007 offering a unique solution to the growing community of Linux OS users and fans. Many Linux distributions will be supported in the new upgrade including Red Hat Enterprises, Fedora Core, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Linspire, and Mandriva.
Fengtao Software Inc. has become the latest to offer a solution to the average computer user to bypass Advanced Access Content System (AACS) on HD DVD discs to copy the content. DVDFab HD Decrypter 3.0.9.0 Beta has been released, adding support for HD DVD and there is support promised for Blu-ray titles soon. Here is a changelog...
New: Copy HD-DVD to hard disk in "Full Disc" mode, in less than one hour.
Change: Significantly reduced the time to open DVD.
Fix: Several minor problems.
So now that there is another freeware ripper in the wild, it will be interesting to see how AACS LA handles this problem. Of course, the software is not available to download from our servers.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) head of corporate communications, Nick Sharples, said that the company is still on track to reach its target of 6 million PS3 units shipped by the end of March. He re-confirmed Sony's target in an interview with Bloomberg at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. He also said that Sony will reveal shipment estimates for financial year ending March 2008 on May 13th.
Some have cast doubt on Sony's target, which was initially set about a year ago when the PS3 was still on target for a global launch in November. However, some Blu-ray component production problems and other issues, saw the console being delayed in PAL territories. The European launch of the PS3 is on March 23rd.
To make up for the delay in Europe, Sony has promised that one million units will be available on launch date, more than the number of Xbox 360's and Wii's available on day one, put together. Sharples also revealed that a beta test of the PlayStation Home feature will begin next month.
Toshiba has shown off a new stand-alone HD DVD player at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. This is the third player that will be available in the European market. The HD-EP10 offers 1080p full HD output, improving upon the HD-E1's performance. The player also features upscaling abilities for DVD-Video, up to 720p, 1080i and 1080p. It is set to retail for about €699.
Included also is support for the lossless audio compressions Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio (but unlike the top-end HD-XE1, there are no analogue 5.1 audio-out connections). "Toshiba’s HD-E1 and HD-XE1 set benchmarks in high definition home entertainment, both in terms of performance and value for money," said Olivier Van Wynendaele, Deputy General Manager, HD DVD, Toshiba Information Systems(UK) Ltd.
European Commission (EC) telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding, has called on those involved in the emerging Mobile TV technology to agree on adopting a single technology standard, and warned about possible intervention if such an decision is not made soon. She said that Europe is risking blowing its chance to become a player in the global Mobile TV market. She made her comments at CeBIT in Hannover Germany.
Across the world, trials of Mobile TV technology are currently underway, as content providers and phone companies are assessing the global consumer demand for TV-on-the-go services. Despite the success of the trials, Reding said she was disappointed with the progress being made by the industry in standardizing the technology.
"The industry should agree on one standard. I think there's no more time to lose here," she said. "In the end I could mandate the standard but I do not want to do that." The European Mobile Broadcasting Council (EMBC) was setup last year with help from the EC, and it brought together everybody interested in the technology, hoping to get stakeholders talking and working towards a unified technology.
HMV and SEGA have teamed up for the UK launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console. In HMV's Oxford Street store, the launch will take place at 7:30pm next Friday, March 23rd. As part of the promotional agreement, the first 150 customers to buy a PS3 will receive a free copy of Virtua Tennis. Throughout the entire day the store will host demos of the game and other promotional activities.
The original plan to sell PS3s from the store at midnight was changed, although some regional stores will go ahead with that plan. "We will be opening 50 key stores around the country at midnight. However, we have decided to open the doors of our Oxford Street store at 7.30am on the Friday," a spokesman said. "We believe this is the most practical response to various sets of circumstances."
The change of plan was for many reasons, including concerns from police about safety of shoppers at a midnight launch.
SafeMedia Corp., a company dedicated to helping safeguard consumers' networks from "every risks associated with illegal file sharing of copyrighted files," has invented 'Clouseau', which it claims is the first system of its kind designed solely to eradicate P2P piracy.
Clouseau is a network appliance deployed on subnets that will look to stamp out all unauthorized P2P activity.
"Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are lost to P2P piracy. Current technology is clearly ineffective at stopping it," claimed Safwat Fahmy, chief exec and founder of SafeMedia.
"Clouseau is the best-of-breed internet piracy prevention solution designed from the ground up specifically to stop all P2P internet piracy no matter where it originates worldwide," Fahmy continued. "It is safe and invisible, causes little or no latency in the network, self-healing and user-friendly, and completely shields user anonymity."
The device, claim SafeMedia, uses fingerprinting and DNA markers which monitor incoming and outgoing packets so that illegal P2P is snuffed out while allowing legal P2P to pass through to its destination without any noticeable delay.
"We have made Clouseau dynamically proactive, safe and hardened. Pirates are smart and innovative, and so is Clouseau," added Fahmy. "Our technology is dynamic, sees through all multi-layered encryptions, adaptively analyses network patterns and constantly updates itself. Packet examinations are non-invasive and infallible. There are no false positives."
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represents and protects the copyrights of many of the major software companies, has halted five alleged software pirates who it claims were distributing counterfeit versions of its members' software on internet auction sites. The move was said to be the start of an international crackdown on unlicensed software sales online.
"To all offenders out there, large or small, our message remains the same: software piracy is illegal and we will be bringing legal actions against internet pirates to tackle this serious problem" said John Wolfe, director of internet enforcement for the BSA. "The international litigation announced today is just the beginning of our expanded efforts to fight global software piracy."
One of the sellers is based in the US, one is from Austria, with two coming from Germany. The fifth person, who is UK-based, is suspected to have played a role in the running of a website selling illegal copies of expensive design and architecture software product Autodesk. Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee and Symantec are other companies said to have had their software pirated by the alleged offenders.
PlayStation 3 (PS3) owners will soon be able to join a Stanford-run distributed-computing effort that researches Cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's causes (amongst other things). The Folding@Home project is similar to SETI@Home, except it studies protein folding in hopes to determine causes of various lethal conditions.
It works by using CPU cycles on a computer to complete workloads sent to it from the project's servers. When completed it sends its results back and downloads information for its next task. When you multiply participating CPUs by thousands you reach the power of super computers.
Folding@Home teams are found particularly amongst computer hardware enthusiasts like overclockers. It is for a great cause and its functionality in the PS3 could boost the project significantly. Ken Kutaragi actually announced that Folding@Home would be part of the PS3 at last year's Tokyo Game Show.
"Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment. Now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases,"Masayuki Chatani, Sony Computer Entertainment's chief technical officer, said in a statement. "In order to study protein folding, researchers need more than just one supercomputer, but the massive processing power of thousands of networked computers. Previously, PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool--[the] PS3."
The HD DVD group has launched the European version of the HD DVD Promotional Group, to be led by Toshiba, Microsoft, Universal, and French movie producer Studio Canal. In Europe, HD DVD is estimated to have an 85% market share, which it captured in just four months. The HD DVD group is now trying to cement its presence in Europe ahead of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) launch.
The European group has gotten its own site, but it doesn't exactly look very European. For example, it only offers English and German versions and the intro video is helicopter shots of the skyline over Manhattan. it is effectively a copy of the American promotional site.
When the PlayStation 3 (PS3) launches in Europe in a week, it will no doubt alter the market share in little time.
Nintendo's Wii console was the best selling console in the United States in February according to figures from market research firm NPD. In total, Nintendo managed to move 335,000 Wii consoles and the company claims it is still struggling to keep up with demand. Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, which has been out since November 2005, had a good month selling 228,000 units.
Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3), which retails for $499 (20GB) and $599 (60GB), sold 127,000 units in the month, which emphasizes the big difference to Wii's $250 price tag. Unsurprisingly, the low-cost last-cycle king, PlayStation 2 (PS2), is still walking tall with 295,000 units sold during the month.
Sharp Corporation has announced it will begin of the High-Power Blue-Violet Laser Diode GH04P21A2G that achieves a power output of 210 mW, the industry's highest power output, in May. This device will enable high-speed 6X recording on next-generation dual-layer Blu-ray Discs (BD) and HD-DVDs.
This year, the market for recorders and PCs capable of recording on next-generation DVDs is expected to take off in earnest, and demand for blue laser diodes, the key device in this type of equipment, is projected to increase in tandem. Users are also expected to demand faster recording times in the future which will require speeding up the write process for individual layers on these discs.
Since beginning mass production of the industry’s first infrared laser diode for use in CD players in 1982, Sharp has consistently been an industry leader in both technology and production. The GH04P21A2G makes full use of crystal growth technology developed for infrared, red, and blue-violet low-power laser diodes. In addition to a newly developed laser chip with a proprietary facet structure and a high power output of 210 mW that will contribute to high-speed recording for the next generation of DVDs, this current device also features a long service life of 10,000 hours, a level that leads the industry.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has made a bold claim at CeBIT this year. The consortium behind the Blu-ray Disc format, expect the 25GB-per-layer optical medium to actually replace the current DVD technology within three years. "Within three years it will just be Blu-ray,"Frank Simonis, the Blu-ray Disc Association European chairman said at CeBIT, the world's biggest technology trade show.
Having already declared its own victory over its rival, HD DVD, Blu-ray has gone on to outsell HD DVD in the United States where the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console is available. This has led to speculation of further price cuts from the HD DVD camp, in an effort to curb the initial buzz that Blu-ray receives from PS3 owners who are completely new to HD.
However, replacing HD DVD fast could be possible if Blu-ray sorts out its prices and keeps the PS3 console selling strong, but even three whole years is a very short time to hope to replace DVD. DVD is a huge success story in the industry as a medium to sell movies (DVD-Video) and to sell games (PS2, Xbox, PC) and software (DVD-ROM). It has also become a major success for consumers who use the format for data storage, for home movies, in DVD recorders etc.
If you live in or around the Whitehaven area of Cumbria, you will be the first of many to lose the analogue signal broadcast to your television sets. Beginning on October 17th, approximately 25,000 households will receive only digital signals from the stations as part of a nationwide digital television cutover.
BBC Two will be the first channel to switch from the aging analogue signal to its newer, crisper format, while the remaining channels are set to go dark on November 14th. All residents in the Whitehaven area will need some form of digital television, or invest in a set-top converter box by that time, and its expected that everyone in the UK will need to follow suit before 2012. Every television will need to be connected to Freeview, satellite, cable or broadband television by then to continue receiving transmissions.
New equipment, installation and support will be given for those individuals over the age of 75, have a disability and the blind, but will cost £40. There are fee waivers for those qualifying individuals who require income assistance.
Starting in early May, residents of Whitehaven will begin receiving captions across their screen explaining the cutover process. Beginning early October 17th, BBC Two will go offline and Freeview will begin broadcasting the digital versions of BBC One, Two and Three as well as News 24 and CBBC.
Todd Hollenshead, head of Doom 3 creator Id software believes that rife copyright infringement of PC games poses a huge threat to the future of the industry. He suggested that the PC games industry isn't taking the threat of piracy seriously and that if something isn't done to curb it, companies could soon demote the PC to a second tier platform.
"I find myself when I have a discussion about piracy trying to convince people it's a serious problem," he said.
It is estimated that global piracy cost the US gaming industry in excess of $4bn in 2004 -- excluding losses from Internet piracy.
"In Eastern Europe, Asia and South America the losses are estimated to be 90% plus," said Mr Hollenshead, speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.
One of his primary concerns at the moment is the circulation of cracked copies of PC games. "The statistics of the amount of net traffic devoted to piracy of PC titles is startling," he said.
Many of the newest & most popular titles are freely available throughout the filesharing community. Games such as Battlefield 2142, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas, Fahrenheit and Need for Speed Carbon can all be downloaded with relative ease.
Sony has held a "PSP in Education National Launch" event in London, showing how the PlayStation Portable (PSP) device can be used to assist in education. Sony Computer Entertainment UK's managing director, Ray Maguire, introduced the project which was organized by ConnectED, which shows how the PSP can be used in schools as a learning tool, even though such devices are not welcome by the administration of most UK schools.
Maguire said that Sony has tried to link products to education in the past, mentioning the 2003 trial of using the PlayStation 2 and EyeToy as a communication method between students in different schools. However, he pointed out that now the possibilities are much wider with the developments since in "connected devices" and wireless broadband.
He said that Sony is not seeking to become a leader in the education space, but wanted to demonstrate to content providers how the PSP could be used to provide data and programs for the space. Richard Owen, from Maplesden Noakes school, said the test had been very positive. He said that teachers found that students benefited from being about to work more at their own pace, like being able to rewind a supplied audio file and listen to it again, or repeat a video clip.
While Microsoft Corp. has an agressive anti-piracy campaign currently in effect worldwide, a senior executive has admitted that software piracy ends up benefiting the company in the long run. Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes believes that piracy of the Windows operating system can lead to legitimate software sales later on, with some pirates who would otherwise not use Microsoft software becoming paying customers in future.
"If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else," Raikes told delegates at last week's Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco. Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) currently checks Windows installations and alerts users of illegitimate license information. The campaign, while receiving criticism for major problems associated with it, even for legitimate users, is directed mostly toward weeding out sellers of pirated Microsoft software.
While Raikes estimates that about 20% - 25% of software in the U.S. is pirated, he makes an argument that in the long run, it can have benefits. "We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products," Raikes said. "What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software."
Portable consumer electronics meant for entertainment such as Apple's iPod or Sony's PSP are often used for more beneficial reasons. While Sony is currently promoting the PSP as a platform that can also be used in Educational settings, the English cricket team is using iPods to research techniques both used by English players and the opposition.
Hoping to help plays improve their game, coaching staff have loaded iPods with clips with techniques from the opposition and English team for players to study. The dull Caribbean wickets mean England's usual swing and seam attack must come up with new ways of getting batsmen out, such as bowling slower balls and off-cutters.
Liam Plunkett, an English bowler, said he has been glued to the small iPod screen, hoping to come up with tactical ideas ahead of the opening Group C clash with New Zealand this Friday. "I have to practice the next few days but it will be right for Friday," he told reporters. "My swing has been taken away from me."
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Sony executive Phil Harrison has revealed he expects that Sony will keep its position as leader in the video games market, and that the Blu-ray format will give the console the boost it needs to get there. "I think we have everything that we need to compete, not just relative to the other players in the market but also to grow the market. This is something that is part of our corporate culture," he said.
He pointed out the forthcoming games and network services for the console as factors that will ensure strong sales as well as the Blu-ray player. However, Harrison banks more on the growth of Blu-ray to move PS3s off the shelf. "That is a positive factor which will play more into the consumer psyche as the year goes on, as more consumer electronics firms launch standalone disc players, as more Blu-ray disc movies become available, and as more shelf space is dedicated to the category at retail," he said.
He believes that the Blu-ray disc format will become the mnost popular format in a very short space of time. "In America, where PS3 is already out, Blu-ray disc is surging ahead as the next-generation movie format of choice. It's absolutely trouncing any other formats, and I think we'll see the same in Europe and the UK," Harrison said.
The NPD Group has published a study on digital music consumption on the Internet, though legal and illegal means, and has come to some interesting conclusions. The study showed that legal, paid music downloads are gaining on P2P downloads at a high rate. "Legal a la carte downloads were the fastest growing digital music category in 2006, and it is likely that the annual number of legal users will surpass P2P users in 2007," said Russ Crupnick, vice president and entertainment industry analyst for The NPD Group.
He continued: "Unfortunately for the music labels, the volume of music files purchased legally is swamped by the sheer volume of files being traded illegally, whether on P2P or burned CDs sourced from borrowed files." While Apple's iTunes store, by far the dominant store in the online music download market, has sold over 2 billion music downloads since it launched, that figure is accomplished by illegal downloading in a matter of months.
The NPD Group found that the number of P2P users did increase in 2006 from 2005, but at a slower rate than previous years. However, the number of file transfers between those users increased a whopping 47%. There were 47 million U.S. households that have at least one member that downloaded, ripped, burned, played, or uploaded digital music by the end of 2006.
According to Pacific Media Associates (PMA), the average price of a 30 inch+ HDTV-capable set in North America fell by another 3% in January this year. The 32" WXGA high-definition (HD) LCD TV segment was the best portion according to Rosemary Abowd, PMA vice president. These units accounted for 23% of all the units sold in January with an average street price of US$900.
37" WXGA LCD TVs dropped 33% in January, caused by increased sales through online retailers at agressive discounts. LCD models sold beat Plasma displays by about 2 to 1, LCD's largest lead yet by PMA's figures. The top 20 best selling models in January 2007 were LCD sets, compared to just 6 of the 20 last January.
The best-selling model for January was the 50" Panasonic TH-50PX600U.
Samsung has confirmed to Pocket-Lint.co.uk that its second generation Blu-ray player, that is set for release in the United States in October, will not be available in the UK at the same time, and perhaps not at all. "We don't know whether the 2nd generation player will be launching in the UK or not or whether we will wait until the 3rd generation player before Christmas,"Stephen Mitchell, marketing manager, Samsung Electronics Ltd revealed.
The company's 3rd generation Blu-ray player is currently in development will be released in both the U.S. and UK by the end of the year. Samsung also could produce a hybrid player similar to that offered currently by LG, but is watching and waiting for now. "We can do it, but we are still waiting to see what the rest of the market does," Mitchell stated.
He added: "We could launch a hybrid player or a Blu-ray recorder tomorrow, but until we see what other manufacturers are doing we are not going to be announcing anything." He also believes that, for now, both competing formats can co-exist. "We think Blu-ray is the stronger of the two," said Mitchell. "However we aren't ruling HD DVD out yet."
Motorola Inc. has announced that it has made an equity investment in Amimon Inc., an emerging leader in semiconductor technology for wireless transmission of high-definition (HD) video. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. "We believe that Amimon's WHDI Technology is setting a new standard in wireless HDTV connectivity which nicely aligns with Motorola’s connected home strategy," said Reese Schroeder, managing director, Motorola Ventures, the company's strategic venture capital arm.
"Our investment reflects our belief that Amimon's solution is well positioned to offer a high quality wireless uncompressed HDTV link between video sources such as a digital set-top and a high-definition TV," he added. Amimon's wireless high-definition interface (WHDI) technology enables wireless transmission of uncompressed high-definition video streams in the 5GHz unlicensed band. WHDI enables applications such as wireless flat-panel TVs, wireless projectors, wireless HDMI and wireless VGA repeaters (dongles).
"Motorola and Amimon share a common vision of facilitating connectivity between consumer electronics devices," said Dr. Yoav Nissan-Cohen, chairman and CEO, Amimon. "The investment from Motorola will fund our plan to set WHDI as a new industry standard for connecting high-definition video sources to displays wirelessly.
Malaysia has used two sniffer dogs, Lucky and Flo, to assist in the battle against piracy. This makes it the first country to deploy animals to hunt for discs of illegal recordings in cargo (although it is not the first test). The two Black Labradors sniff through cargo and then sit in front of suspicious packages to signal their handler.
"It's cost-effective, and in terms of time, it's very effective too," said Domestic Trade Minister Shafie Apdal. The dogs went through a pile of boxes in 10 minutes that would have otherwise taken security officials a day to check. Malaysia is currently negotiating a free trade pact with the United States, and is featured on the U.S. watchlist on piracy.
The country has dramatically stepped up efforts against piracy in recent years as a result. The dogs will be used in Malaysia for the next month at cargo hangars and storage centers to determine which environment they function best in. "The arrival and deployment of Lucky and Flo will make Malaysia the first country in the world to test the capability of dogs in detecting optical disks in hidden compartments or shipments," Shafie said at Malaysia's biggest air-cargo center in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur.
According to figures published on Tuesday by Nielsen/NetRatings, more than one in every three adults who go online, or about 37%, own a video game console, and 17% own a portable gaming device. Interestingly, 71% of adult console users are married, and 66% have at least one child in their household.
"As game consoles have become increasingly sophisticated, families have incorporated them into their centralized home media centers, which include the television, digital recording device, digital music player and the PC," said Carolyn Creekmore, senior director of media analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings.
Microsoft and Sony have gone out of their way to make their consoles more suited for a home entertainment setup by adding excellent multimedia features. Sony is particularly banking on the PS3 being viewed as an entertainment hub, packing in a Blu-ray player into every console it sells. These extra features have given adults more reasons to invest in the consoles.
On the other hand, Nintendo has decided to focus almost solely on gaming with the Wii console, which boasts some very innovative features such as its controllers. While it lacks ability to play full HD content for example, it has attracted torrents of attention from hardcore gamers, casual gamers and has even attracted a whole new audience, helping it to top the U.S. console sales chart in January this year.
Google Inc. is fully confident that current copyright law in the United States provides YouTube and other Google services adequate protection against lawsuits like the $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom Inc. today. After months of an escalating argument between Viacom and Google, Viacom filed a lawsuit against the company on Tuesday, claiming "massive intentional copyright infringement."
However, Google's lawyers were quick to defend the company and add that it has strong protections under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and warned that Google will aggressively protect itself. The DMCA limits liability for firms that act quickly to block or remove pirate material from servers when they are properly notified by the copyright holder.
"Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or... bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online ... the 'safe harbor' we need in order to be able to do hosting online,"Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, told Reuters. "We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis for operating."
CeBIT is the world's largest computer expo and it is held each spring on the fairground in Hanover, Germany. This year's CeBIT will be held between March 15th and March 21st, and AfterDawn will be there to bring you news from the expo. With 310,000 square metres of expo area and over 6,000 exhibitors, the CeBIT will hopefully gather over 450,000 visitors from all over the world.
CeBIT was first held as the computing part of the Hannover Fair, but in the 1980s the information technology and telecommunications part was straining the resources of the industry fair so much that it was given a separate trade show in 1986. Each year CeBIT has shown us new and innovative products and hopefully this year doesn't break old traditions.
I (Agent_007) will be at CeBIT throughout the expo reporting happenings from the event. The reports will include news, photos and videos of new products and from the press conferences. You, the readers of AfterDawn, can participate by giving feedback and by discussing the CeBIT expo in AfterDawn.com's CeBIT pages. You can also ask me questions and make wishes regarding stories, photos or videos CeBIT. In addition to the official material, I will also be keeping a blog about my time in Germany in general.
Movie giant Viacom has been added to the most recent list of people suing Google and its recently acquired internet video website YouTube. What has been listed as "massive intentional copyright infringement", Viacom has entered a lawsuit in the amount of $1billion.
The suit claims that YouTube has infringed on their intellectual properties intentionally and seeks retribution of its assets and an injunction against further violations. Viacom claims that over 160,000 of its copyrighted material has been uploaded to YouTube and has been viewed over 1.5 billion times without their expressed consent.
Not content that the US is suited for the inevitable digital television cut-over in 2009, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has stated that they are set to give US housholds 2 coupons amounting to $40 each, good for purchase towards set-top boxes that will convert digital signal to analog. Their hopes are to keep consumers happy who have yet to make the switch to a television capable of receiving digital signals.
February 19, 2009 is the scheduled date in which the US will stop broadcasting anything analog and switch to a completely digital signal. It is estimated that there are some 73 million televisions in America, however they further estimate that a wide 15% of those still receive their transmissions via analog antenna. The NTIA is prepared to ship approximately 33,750 coupons in hopes of appeasing the followers of the great rabbit ears.
"The transition from analog to digital television is a historic change and brings with it considerable benefits for the American consumer," Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez said. "The coupon program is designed to help ease the transition to digital TV. Not only will the transition help expand consumer choices, but more importantly, the digital transition will enable more efficient use of the nation's airwaves, providing new advanced wireless services and increased public safety services for all Americans."
Sony Computer Entertainment UK chief Ray McGuire confirmed recently that the current version of the Sony PSP will undergo a redesign and bring forth a smaller and lighter PSP for the masses.
While saying the screen size of the PSP will remain untouched, he believes that with advances in miniaturizing electrical components, it is possible for stuff more goodies in a smaller package inside the vulnerable PSP. A thinner, sleeker handheld can be expected sometime in the future, although a date as to when the next version might be seen wasn't announced.
This sort of thing is not new to Sony, as they did the very same thing with the original Playstation, dubbed the PSOne and again with the slim-line PS2.
There were hints that the new fangled PSP could feature something fans of the handheld have screamed about since it's inception. Onboard storage of up to 8Gb of space and perhaps the inclusion of the Eye-Toy addon. There were no official comments however on exactly what changes will be made, only that a change will come.
Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has launched an independent studio called Vuguru, that is specifically geared towards online video content. He announced the new studio on Monday. The first project of the studio will be titled "Prom Queen", and will be launched on April 2nd. The exact plot of the project was not disclosed.
The program will be split into around 80 clips of 90 seconds each to make it more suitable for online viewing. Videos will be distributed both from a website dedicated to Vuguru content, and also from other familiar online platforms. YouTube, Veoh, and its sponsors will also gain rights to distribute the video.
EMI, one of the world's four major record companies, has played down rumors that music from The Beatles will be available for digital download soon. The infamous Beatles are considered the last "major act" to jump on the the music download bandwagon. UK download site Wippit had posted a press release claiming that Beatles tracks will be available from its service, but EMI has dismissed the claim and has requested it be removed.
EMI is believed to be on the verge to offer Beatles downloads on authorized services. There is no doubt that whoever gets the exclusive will receive major success with it. Whilst unveiling the new iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs dropped a hint/teaser by calling up a selection from the band's Sergeant Pepper album. Since last month's settlement between Apple Computer Inc. and Apple Corps. after trademark disagreements, a potential deal has been rumored.
Wippit posted a press release on its site last Friday, titled, "The Beatles available for download on Wippit." However, the full text of the press release, dated Wednesday 14 March, is unavailable.
The Court of Appeal in Naples has imposed jail sentences on several members of an organized gang involved in a major music piracy case since the late 90s. The case stems back to the arrest of the gang members in 1999 after an investigation carried out by Luciano D'Angelo, the district anti-mafia attorney, and the police, with the assistance of the Italian music industry's anti-piracy unit, FPM.
The head of the organization, "A.C.", was known as "The Emperor" because of his influence in the counterfeit music business in Naples in the 90s. The appeal sentence is the final decision in a seven year legal battle that has seen FIMI (Italian recording industry body), and record companies including EMI Music Italy, Universal Music Italy, Sony BMG Italy and Warner Music Italy acting as plaintiffs.
"A.C." was found guilty and sentenced to three years and six months in jail for conspiracy to violate the copyright law. Seven other members of the gang faced prison sentences of between one year and six months and three years. They now face a separate civil claim and will have to pay damages to the plaintiffs.
U.S. households that have televisions using analog technology, will be eligible for $40 discount coupons to buy digital converter boxes as U.S. television stations are required to switch to only digital broadcasts by February 17, 2009. With 20 million estimated to rely on free over-the-air television, the date has often been criticized with many calling for it to be pushed back.
The coupon offer was announced on Monday by the Commerce Department. A converter box would be needed to use an analogue television after the cut off date. Since quite a large amount of U.S. families cannot afford to replace their televisions with a new digital television, it becomes the most viable option to keep TVs from going dark.
Some industry sources have estimated the price of a converter box could range between $50 to $60. "There are a number of options for consumers to effect transition on their own ... This program is one option for consumers," said John Kneuer, head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA expects to have a system in place to process coupons starting on January 1, 2008.
Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities conducted several major anti-piracy operations on both sides of the Tri-border area earlier this month. The Specialized Anti-Piracy Unit (UTE) in Paraguay executed search warrants on 2nd March against two major labs and three warehouses in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. A total of 126 burners, 24,575 film DVD-Rs and 12,248 music CD-Rs were seized as one person was arrested.
On March 67th, Brazilian authorities in the state of Parana seized a total of 566 DVD-R burners, 16,000 film DVD-Rs, 6,000 music CD-Rs, 475,000 blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs and half a million inlays as part of an ongoing highway interdiction programme. Three people were arrested as a result of the seizures.
Acting on intelligence from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Paraguay's UTE also executed a search warrant against a warehouse located in the International Free Zone of Ciudad del Este, resulting in the seizure of approximately 100,000 recorded music CD-Rs and 303,000 film DVD-Rs. "We congratulate the Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities for these excellent enforcement operations,"Raul Vazquez, head of IFPI's Latin America office, said.
Sony has revealed that it plans to launch its ambitious PlayStation Home service around October this year. The initial download is expected to weigh in at about 500MB and future subsequent updates and patches will be structured to a streaming solution. A closed beta phase that will involve about 15,000 users will take place between April and August and an open beta will include about 50,000 users between August and October.
Details of the Home plans are revealed in a "third party relations" Q&A from Sony's developer website. According to the file, certain aspects of Home will be accessible using the PlayStation Portable (PSP) console and mobile phones. The environment's persistence will be a particularly tough element to master. "Currently Home is not a persistent world, so when you leave Home, all of your possessions go with you. For instance, it is not currently possible for other users to visit your apartment while you're not there," Sony said.
It continued: "We are working on the persistent aspect of Home, and expect to implement it in the long term." Advertising will be kept to "palatable" levels but will be prevalent. "If you consider Home to be a simulacra of the real world then most goods and services found within the real world could theoretically be replicated within Home," the PDF notes.
Never shy of making the headlines, Bittorrent indexing site ThePirateBay.org announced in a blog that it has awarded a diploma to the King of Sweden. The site state that it is a "congratulatory diploma" regarding its "joint efforts in making Sweden famous globally when it comes to technology and culture".
The blog continues, "In these progressive days we've spread more files than ever. We've made history. We now have the honour to report that The Pirate Bay now archives 200 000, by the citizens donated, documents of culture and we're tracking more then 500 000 cultural treasures globally. This is a new world record." Has TPB decided to go cultural?
The Pirate Bay is notorious throughout the tech world for poking fun at major corporations and catching the attention of the masses. The fact that the site was raided by U.S.-backed Swedish Police raid in May of last year only appeared to boost the site's popularity. In fact, within a few days, it had bounced back with a larger following and a cheeky new logo (pictured).
Even more recently, The Pirate Bay came up with the idea of possibly creating its own country -- free from any governing body -- a place where digital content could be freely shared in peace. Whether or not the idea will materialize remains to be seen, however keen followers have already coughed up over USD 20,000 towards the idea.
There's a new beast in the war pit against internet piracy, and it's name is cGrid. Developed by a group called Red Lambda, cGrid is set to be a very real threat to P2P file sharers everywhere. Although still in its infant stage and with its sights focused on Universities, its a technology that should have many P2P people a bit wary.
cGrid is a proprietary technology that has a unique way of monitoring packet level transmissions and decided whether or not packets being sent back and forth from specific MAC addresses on a network are participating in things like bit torrent, FTP, Usenet and other venues commonly known for illegal activities. That's not all though, it can also instantly boot said offender from the network with little to no workaround for getting back on. This new technology obviously has groups such as the RIAA and MPAA rejoicing as the newest wonder tool to hit the market.
cGrid's developers describe the technology as, "the industry's most advanced P2P and file-sharing mitigation technology. It uses undisclosed techniques to monitor and record traffic at the packet-level and also uses proprietary behavioral analysis to determine whether individual users are participating in illegal file sharing. It monitors local networks and keeps historical logs on users according to their MAC addresses. In this way, cGrid can also monitor private file sharing such as that done with invitation-only FTP servers and other normally closed networks."
Earlier today, members of the European Commission began talks with Apple over their huge market share dominance of the mp3 market through their iTunes service. While EU states they have no immediate plans to force Apple into opening up its iTunes services, they did have some rather interesting things to say about the company.
Earlier today, E.U. Commissioner for Consumer Protection Meglena Kuneva unleashed on Apple's DRM policies in saying, "Do you think it's okay that you can play a CD in any CD player, but an iTunes song only on an iPod? I don't. This sort of thing has to change."
The Commission has stated that it has sat down with officials from Apple and they will consult on the issues of iTunes over the next couple of months. Any resolution isn't expected to come in the form of a proposal until such time has expired.
Online music services such as iTunes and smaller rival Sony's Connect are already under scrutiny from a new online copyright bill currently being reviewed in France and being considered by Norway and Denmark. The bill states that it would require an online music retailer to make songs acquired from its service to be made interoperable on many different devices, not just the device sold by the same company of the service.
Electronics manufacturer, Philips has decided to drop the plans to include the fluorescent stroboscopic lights that illuminate many of their flat screen televisions and provide much of the clean up duties for getting rid of motion blur and smear that tend to plague those types of TVs. Instead, Philips has decided to focus on LED backlights that give a more precise burst of light, take up less space and are more efficient to run.
Current LCD TVs emitt a constant stream of light, while Philips' plans with their LED backed televisions actually send out small bursts of light which trick the human eye into thinking the picture is brighter and sharper than it really is. While their previous fluorescent technology, dubbed Aptura was touted as a major advance in technology and a potential cash cow for the lighting division, Philips has since rescinded their support for such technology.
"If we want to continue developing this backlighting technology, we'll have to make new investments. At the same time, LEDs (light emitting diodes) are getting ripe for the market and they enable thinner TV sets, so we've chosen to invest in those," says a Philips spokeswoman.
Philips actually unveiled its flickering backlight technology some time ago and it is featured in several high end flat panel televisions, however it may take some time for televisions equipped with this technology to reach a cheap enough asking price for mainstream consumption.
According to a 2006 study by the China National Children's Center, there are around 2.3 million internet addicts in China. Chinese health authorities consider internet addiction to be as serious as alcoholism and drug addiction. The government blames the condition for juvenile crime, several suicides, and deaths caused by exhaustion because players were unable to tear themselves away from games. The Internet Addiction Treatment Center (IATC) near Beijing, which has had 1,500 patients since 2004, uses a combination of therapy and military style discipline and boasts a 70% success rate.
There is little agreement in Western countries about what constitutes internet addiction, or if such a thing actually exists. However, a Stanford University of Medicine telephone-based study found that one in eight Americans, exhibit one or more symptoms of "problematic internet use", which shares features with impulse control disorders.
In 2006, China experienced a 23.4 percent increase in internet users. Xu Leiting, a psychologist at the IATC said "The main cause of Internet addiction is that parents' expectations for their children are too high." He said "they escape to the virtual world to seek achievements, importance and satisfaction, or a sense of belonging."
According to recently released court documents, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and CEO Paul Otellini, as well as other Intel employees are thought to have deleted emails related to rival chip manufacturer AMD's anti-trust suit. Intel's document retention policy regarding documents relevant to the lawsuit involved individual employees archiving them on a hard drive. Intel has already admitted that some employees didn't follow this procedure. According to Intel, CEO Otellini was under the impression that IT was automatically backing up his email.
Intel is currently working on an automatic backup system to help avoid problems like this. They're also looking through email files hoping to find duplicates of the messages and planning to review a backup made last year. Intel also failed to send notices about document retention to employees identified in 2006.
Intel set up a special email server after the suit was filed in 2005, but not all of the employees whose email was supposed to be kept were moved to the new server, and some of the weekly backup tapes from that server have apparently been re-used since then.
Bolt.com and Vivendi SA unit Universal Music Group have said they've reached an out of court, multimillion dollar settlement, resolving a lawsuit brought against Bolt in October 2006. UMG claimed that Bolt.com allowed its users to share music videos and other copyrighted material without permission and without compensating copyright holders. The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Bolt has also agreed to implement filter technology to block UMG videos and other content from being posted on the site, within 60 days. New York-based Bolt will be acquired by GoFish Corp., which has been a licensed partner of UMG for the last two years. UMG also filed a lawsuit against Sony Corp's Grouper.com back in October.
At the time, Bolt claimed that it had always complied with copyright holders requests to take down videos. User-generated video sites like Grouper and YouTube are currently in the spotlight for copyright infringement, as users have posted literally millions of unauthorized clips.
According to figures from trade magazine Video Business, Blu-ray titles outsold HD DVD titles by a margin or about 2:1 in February. Around 250,000 Blu-ray movies were sold in the month ahead of 125,000 HD DVD titles sold. While the boost in Blu-ray sales is no doubt helped by the PlayStation 3 (PS3) sales in North America, sales of the title "The Departed" appear to rule out some other offered reasons for the format outselling HD DVD.
Blu-ray buyers grabbed 20,000 copies of The Departed on Blu-ray, while 13,000 bought the movie on HD DVD. While this is not a 2:1 margin, it does appear at first glance to attack the argument that Blu-ray only outsold HD DVD because there were more releases in the time frame. According to High-Def Digest, there were 55 releases of Blu-ray titles in the first 8 weeks of 2007, compared to 23 HD DVD releases.
Although, to be fair, it must be noted that HD DVD version of The Departed is a HD DVD/SD DVD combo disc and so costs $5 more than the Blu-ray version. Sony VP Rich Marty said that he expects the gap between Blu-ray and HD DVD to further widen with the Sony title, Casino Royal, headed for Blu-ray and (of course) not HD DVD. However, Universal VP Ken Graffeo warned against drawing conclusions from these figures.
As we reported, at the recent Game Developers Conference, Chris Hecker, the founder of "Definition 6", unleashed an attack on the Wii and Nintendo, claiming they fail to recognize games as an "art form". His comments, which referred to the Wii as a "POS underpowered computer", and said the Wii development required "two GameCubes and some duct tape", caused a firestorm of controversy throughout the industry and on the Internet.
However, only a day after his comments were blasted across the net, Hecker offered a lengthy apology. "I was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun, and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top on the entertaining and fun side, so that it was no longer thought provoking, just inflammatory. And in the process, I hurt a bunch of people I care about. And so, I want to apologize now," he said.
He insisted that his comments was just him "speaking for himself" and in no way reflected the the views of EA or Maxis and he also apologized to his coworkers, whom he upset with his remarks. "I do not think that the Wii is a piece of s***," Hecker said. He went on to applaud Nintendo for the Wii's unique controller, its user interface, and the system's affordable price.
Arcam released this week, a high-end dock for iPods (and the company's first), the rDock. The stand-alone device designed for use with the Arcam Solo and Solo Movie system, but works with others as well, and can easily be connected to to your own speakers and other equipment. A notable difference in this gadget compared to similar items, is that it does not charge the iPod battery by default, a move the company claims to prolong battery life and actually improve sound quality.
Most docks leave the iPod charging all the time, which can damage the battery. The rDock uniquely features a programmable "charge-off" setting. During research, it was discovered that the sound quality took a major leap when running off the iPod battery alone, with no charging going on. This is akin to some audiophile pre-amps that run on a rechargeable battery to achieve independence from mains Noise. The improvement in sound was so marked, that the rDock now has charge off as the default setting.
The French government is currently mulling over changes to the country's copyright laws, in regard to Internet piracy. Under current laws in France, downloading copyrighted material illegally could get you up to three years in prison and a fine up to €300,000. The Justice minister is now recommending that the punishment be adjusted to better suit the actual offense.
For P2P developers, this means that distributing and promoting P2P tools for copyright infringement purposes be punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine of €300,000. However, the difference between actually writing legitimate tools to share digital data and producing tools made and promoted solely for copyright infringement must be noted, though this is a "difference" that may need to be defined by a court of law.
However, those who share files on P2P networks would also be affected by the changes. The punishment for an offense would depend on many factors, including "time frame" of infringement, "willingness" to engage in the dissemination of content. Users who only download files would be the least punished, with jail time ruled out except in cases of re-offending and uploading the content to other users etc.
At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg and internet tech TV outfit Revision3, spoke about how Internet TV will seriously damage cable programming once advertisers turn to the medium and delivering the content to a TV screen becomes simpler. Producers of Internet TV are depending on a new range of set-top boxes, such as Apple TV, to boost it significantly.
Devices such as Apple TV will unlock Internet TV content and make it viewable on a normal TV screen and not just with PC equipment. Advertisers are also slowly learning the value of small, passionate audiences. However, a thorn in the side of this forthcoming revolution is, once again, copyright woes from content providers.
Viacom recently demonstrated such hostility toward the trend by scrapping a deal with YouTube, insisting on hosting all its own content and offering a proprietary embeddable player. AOL director of creative development Nicole Carrico was not impressed by the move, saying, "If your content becomes successful, it's going to exceed your grasp. They're going to have to relax their death grip."
Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Joseph Harper, has received a letter from US senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, drawing attention to the issues of copyright protection efforts in Canada. The letter brings up the issue of people recording copies of motion pictures in theaters in Canada, which reportedly accounts for a large number of pirate movies available worldwide
"We are writing to call your attention to the explosive growth of pirating of movies from theatres through the use of hand-recorders known as 'camcorders.' The theft and sale of newly-released movies has always been a serious threat to the motion picture industry. Now, the advancements of digital technology and improved camcorder capabilities have compounded the problem." the letter states.
The letter goes on with details about laws that are currently enforced in the United States that criminalize the unauthorized recording of movies in theaters using camcorder equipment. "Unfortunately, since the United States has enacted tougher laws and penalties against piracy, including camcording piracy, it seems that much of this illicit business has simply moved north," the letter continued.
SanDisk has failed to take on a number of companies holding MP3 technology-related patents in an English court. The High Court said that SanDisk's claims were outside the jurisdiction of the court, which extends to England and Wales. Philips, France Telecom, TDF, and Institut Für Rundfunktechnik were accused of bullying and harassing SanDisk through legal systems.
Each owns patents relating to MP3 technology, and SanDisk claims that they were abusing their dominant position in the licensing terms they offered for their patents. However, Justice Pumfrey said that the High Court did not have the jurisdiction on any of the issues, and that SanDisk needed to take action in a number of European countries instead.
The dispute between SanDisk and the patent holders involved an incident at a German trade show where the Berlin Public Prosecutor raided SanDisk's exhibition stand and seized 37 MP3 players. This was after SanDisk refused to buy a license form a company called Sisvel, a fifth defendant, an Italian licensing company representing the other four firms.
Sisvel has also obtained seizures in Italy and Border Detention Orders across Europe, which stop the transfer of the devices for sale at the border into the EU. SanDisk accused the companies of foul play in many actions, including tying the licensing of essential MP3 patents to deals for non-essential patents, abusing the patents system to acquire a collective dominant market position, demanding excessive royalties and refusing to deal individually with SanDisk.
Have you ever been at an ATM machine, ticket machine, vending machine or something similar outside, and have struggled to see its display due to high ambient light? NEC LCD Technologies' proprietary super-transmissive natural light TFT (ST-NLT) technology is aimed at making display problems like this a thing of the past. The technology is also expected to improve laptop computer displays in the near-future.
On March 8th, NEC announced that it will begin successive shipment of four new amorphous silicon thin-film-transistor (TFT) LCD samples by the end of April 2007. The new products comprise of a 15.0-inch (38cm-diagonal) extended graphics array (XGA) TFT LCD module, a 12.1-inch (31cm-diagonal) extended graphics array (XGA) TFT LCD module, and two 10.4-inch (26cm-diagonal) video graphics array (VGA) TFT LCD modules.
The displays features ST-NLT to achieve display of vivid colors in environments with high ambient light. They also support wide operating temperature ranges of either -10 degrees Celsius to +70 degrees Celsius or -20 degrees Celsius to +70 degrees Celsius. These new and enhanced features make the new models ideal for installation in automated teller machines, automated ticket machines, automatic vending machines, and point-of-sales systems for gas stations.
Digital Lights Processing (DLP) technology accounts for more than half of the global projector market in 2006, according to comments from Eric Braddom, director of DLP Products Asia, Texas Instruments (TI). In the North American market, DLP also managed to dominate the 1080p and 50 inch+ TV markets in 2006. Overall, the global projector market grew 25% last year.
The consumer segment has seen especially strong growth and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70% from 2006 to 2010. This rate is much higher than that of the Plasma TV technology and LCD TV technology, according to Pacific Media Associates (PMA).
The NPD Group released figures also showing that the 40 inch+ TV market in North America grew 25% in 2006, with the 1080p segment seeing significant growth.
The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) is claiming a victory over P2P piracy in the UK after a file sharer was fined after allegedly uploading an unnamed software title. The software, which apparently was worth about £35 ($65.00), was valuable enough to FAST to spend 10 months identifying the alleged infringer. However, this case is not exactly a victory over file sharing.
What really happened is the accused man simply did not respond to initial copyright notifications from FAST. He then showed up on court in February 27th, and claimed to not have received the initial copyright violation notices from FAST, but the claim did not impress the court and he received an order to pay £3,500 to cover FAST's damages and legal fees.
As a result, this case doesn't exactly clarify anything about the legality of the man's actions or even the reliability of the evidence against him. He uploaded the software using the Kazaa P2P client.
At a round robin test seminar in Taipei, held by the Re-writable Products Promotion Initiative (RW PPI) under the Japan-based DVD Forum on March 8th, market survey organization BOC revealed that is expected the global demand for 8.5GB DVD+R DL / DVD-R DL to more than double in 2007. BOC cited growing demand for high definition content in predicting an increase of 122% in 2007.
In 2006, the demand for double layer DVD discs reached an estimated 90 million discs, and if BOC is right, that figure will approach over 200 million in 2007. RW PPI representative director Koki Aizawa, said that while the global market for optical discs and disc drives is slowly moving to the next generation blue-laser technology, the format war and overpriced products make it unclear when Blu-ray or HD DVD will become wildly popular.
He noted that of the global sales value for all optical discs, Blu-ray and HD DVD are expected to account for just 2% overall in 2007, and 11% in 2011. Therefore, Aizawa believes that production of high definition DVD discs using DVD manufacturing equipment and the advanced H.264 codec for example, will be successful as it will be significantly cheaper than producing a blue-laser disc. This, he believes, will raise demand for DVD significantly, particularly double layer discs.
After the recent dispute settlement between Sony and Immersion, it has been speculated that Sony will use Immersion technology in future products, after the company cut vibration features form the PS3's SIXAXIS controller. Although Sony did say that rumble was technology of the past in the games industry, and that motion sensing technology is the future, the company is open to changing the SIXAXIS controller.
The lack of rumble features in the controllers has been a noted disappointment to gamers and developers alike. However, SCEA CEO Jack Tretton said in an interview with GamePro that he’s open to changing the SIXAXIS controller. "We used to have a narrow approach to controllers. If you really wanted to move outside the standard controller, we left it up to third party manufacturers," Tretton told the magazine.
He added: "But now we're moving to a regional approach. You will see peripherals coming from SCEA that will address the interests of the U.S. consumer. I don't have anything to tell you specifically, but we're certainly open to changing the Sixaxis controller if it addressed North American gamers."
Qualcomm's MediaFLO mobile TV technology is to undergo technical trials in Taiwan as part of an agreement between Qualcomm and China Network Systems (CNS), the largest MSO (multi-system operator) of cable TV in Taiwan, and Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV), a leading terrestrial TV broadcaster. The trials are set to go ahead later in March according to CNS and TTV.
Four CNS live content items and up to three TTV live content items will be assigned for the trial. Both companies want to test the technology for possibly delivering mobile TV services in the territory. Qualcomm's Internet Services & MediaFLO Technologies president Peggy Johnson, said the trial will be a field demonstration of MediaFLO to other markets in Asia and even around the world.
Sony Worldwide Studios boss Phil Harrison has said that after the challenges of recent months, Sony can now focus on PS3 software instead of hardware. "I can't deny that we've had some challenges, but I think those are all behind us," he said. "It's all about software now, it's not about hardware. It's all about services, it's about the way the industry is changing and the way we hope to be taking a leadership position in that change."
He made the comments to GamesIndustry.biz after his keynote speech at GDC 2007. During the keynote, he showed off PlayStation Home, a virtual world under development for the PS3 users to use and enjoy. "We're taking some pretty giant steps forward... The keynote here at GDC was a very, very significant moment for the evolution of PlayStation 3," he observed.
Harrison cited God of War, LocoRoco, Shadow of the Colossus, Eye Toy and Singstar as examples of how Sony is trying to produce innovative software, saying they are, "things which wouldn't come out of perhaps a more conservative product development strategy, and certainly wouldn't come from a multi-platform third-party publisher".
A Shanghai court ruled that the Shanghai Le Ying AV Products Company (Shanghai Le Ying)DVD retail outlet, located in Shanghai's central business district, was guilty of copyright infringement for selling pirated versions of Motion Picture Association (MPA) member company movies. The ruling, from the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court, was delivered on March 6th.
The court ordered the defendant to pay of damages and costs of RMB25,000 (US$3,230) to three MPA members. The ruling was a result of 20 civil complaints against three pirate movie retail outlets known collectively as Ka De Club shops, in September 2006 filed by the MPA. The rulings delivered yesterday were part of that series of complaints, and disposed of three of seven complaints against Shanghai Le Ying, a Ka De Club company.
The remaining four complaints against Shanghai Le Ying are scheduled to be heard on March 29, 2007. In seven complaints against Shanghai Le Ying, the plaintiffs asked for total compensation of over RMB1.6 million (US$206,763) in relation to the infringement of 24 movie title copyrights.
The latest version of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software phones home regardless of whether or not a user installs it. Microsoft has admitted, that even if you choose to click Cancel when prompted to install the anti-piracy tool from Windows Update, the software will still phone home to the Redmond-based company.
WGA has been criticized for many reasons; mainly over privacy concerns and the software's mistakes of branding fully legitimate Windows XP installations as pirated. However, even though this latest development has provoked an angry response from web sites and bloggers, Microsoft ensures that it does not send information that could identify an individual user, but is instead used to collate statistics on WGA use.
"The data collection and transfer in question are part of some of our update download services, such as the Windows Update service. As with other programs downloaded via these services, the success or failure of WGA Notifications' installation is sent to Microsoft," Microsoft UK anti-piracy manager Michala Alexander said in a statement.
He added: "If the user interrupts installation of WGA Notifications, we send the number of the screen on which installation stopped (first, second, etc.). In order to establish an accurate count, we also generate several globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) that do not contain any personal information. We use the GUIDs to tally the number of individual machines without identifying the user. Other data sent includes user and machine language settings and whether or not the machine was joined to a domain."
According to a newspaper report by Nikkei, and Reuters, while Europe is the first territory to get PlayStation 3 (PS3) units with less support for backwards compatibility with PS2 games, Sony will begin shipping the version of the machine without the PS2 hardware to Japan and North America later on this year. The move to switch to a software emulation solution, like that seen on an Xbox 360, is to cut production costs.
The PS2 emotion engine provided the PlayStation 3 with graphics and data processing functions for old PlayStation 2 games. Removing the hardware and instead using a solution to emulate it, means that more support for specific titles will added gradually. At least 1,000 games will be working on the console by the European launch date, according to Sony.
Sony loses money for every single PlayStation 3 unit that is sold, due to its inclusion of expensive hardware such as the Cell processor, referred to as a supercomputer on a chip, and the included Blu-ray Disc drive. This business year, Sony estimates its game unit will have lost over 200 billion yen but aims to break even on games for the year starting April 1st.
In a bid to replace JPEG as the standard for digital photos, Microsoft plans to submit their HD Photo image Compression format to the International Organization for Standardization. According to Microsoft, HD Photo, formerly known as Windows Media Photo, causes less damage to photos than JPEG, while creating a files that are half the size. Like JPEG, HD Photo also supports Lossless Compression.
In order for HD Photo to become the de facto standard for digital photography Microsoft will have to get support from printer, camera, and application vendors. It's already supported in Windows Vistaand can be similarly supported in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 through a free download. Adobe Photoshop plugins are expected in the next two months. Microsoft also has an HD Photo Device Porting Kit to help hardware manufacturers.
On Wednesday night, Skype launched a new beta of a service that would allow any user with the latest updated version of the software to charge for voice and video calls placed to their account.
The beta, dubbed "Skype Prime," allows users to have the option to either charge by the minute or a single charge for the entire call. All fees would be taken out of the caller's Skype Credit account, and the called party would receive 70 percent of the proceeds collected, payable through PayPal.
Since SkypeOut was launched in 2004, Skype says that the features of Skype Prime have been a very common request from its loyal users.
Writes a company spokeswoman: "I'm happy to finally see us rolling this out, and I'm sure it will enable a whole new range of businesses...so nothing will change in our free global Skype-to-Skype calling, but on top of it, you can now have paid calls if you want."
Skype says that this offer benefits global businesses that are wanting to charge for phone calls. At the moment, premium landline numbers can only be accessed within the country they're based. With the new Skype Prime, companies can now make their services available worldwide.
ESA,The Entertainment Software Association, has begun sending preliminary invitations for the upcoming E3, which is to take place from July 11-13.
The invite says that this year's E3 will offer "the opportunity to engage in one-on-one meetings with leading game company executives in an intimate setting, as well as network, socialize, and test pilot major company offerings".
E3 will take place in "an environment designed to ensure that you can get your business done efficiently and effectively".
Complete invites will be sent out in April and will include further details of the event such as schedules, transportation, and travel planning.
This is the first year that E3 will be hosted at a smaller venue, and the ESA has promised that this E3 will be smaller scale then in years past.
Although its not completely clear how many companies will be in attendance, you can expect to see Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft and many other third-party companies.
TrueDisc, announced yesterday that they were releasing their TrueDisc mastering software which creates archival quality CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. TrueDisc claims that files burnt with their software and discs can sustain disc damage as high as 90% and still retain the original file.
"TrueDisc burns standard files to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVD+R Double Layer in a special damage-resistant format. These files, called "master copies", can be read back off the disc by the TrueDisc software. If disc damage prevents some of the file from being read, TrueDisc automatically uses patent-pending algorithms to reconstruct the missing data. This allows TrueDisc to restore the original file even when the disc is damaged due to age or abuse," claimed the announcement.
The TrueDisc format supports burning for up to 600MB of data on to CD-R and up to 4.2 GB of data onto a DVD-R.
TrueDisc is available now and requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later. It is priced at $89 USD but there is currently a discounted price of $52 USD.
Ricoh has launched the world's first 16x DVD+R Double Layer blank disc, that is officially certified by the DVD+R/+RW Verification Laboratories Group. Delivery of the first samples for hardware manufacturers started on 7th March 2007. The market for DVD+R double layer blank discs more than doubled last year and the boom in demand has continued unabated.
Compared with single layer discs, however, double layer media have hitherto required considerable time to write their large volume of storage space. With the development of the first 16x DVD+R DL Ricoh has now radically increased writing speed while at the same time significantly reducing the writing time for the medium.
The "Inverted Stack Method" invented by Ricoh is already regarded by some to be the best possible technique for the attainment of high recording speeds in high-precision DVD+R DL media production. This Ricoh production method differs considerably from the "2P method" in which all layers are stacked on a single substrate. Separate production of both recording layers as practiced by Ricoh, initially takes place separately on both substrates. The two components are then pressed together. Thus in practice Ricoh’s Inverted Stack Method provides increased precision for both recording layers.
It appears that some subscribers to Blockbuster's online DVD rental service are reporting problems with the service in recent weeks. In cases, customers are claiming to not have received movies from their queues for two weeks or more. One customer told Ars that after repeated fruitless calls to customer service, one rep told him the DVD rental system was shut down and the issue would be fixed shortly.
"We've been continually shipping product," a spokesperson originally told Ars. "If a customer feels like they are not getting a movie, they should follow up with our customer service. But in terms of product being allocated and shipped, there has been no interruption." However, users of many sites are complaining about similar problems.
"My experience is similar," said Mike, a customer from Texas. "I have the 3 at a time plan. I turned my three movies in to the store 8 days ago and they still haven't shipped me any new movies although I have about 30 available in my queue. The customer service reps keep giving me a story about a technical glitch. The only thing this company can do competently is charge my credit card for the monthly fee. I will be canceling my membership before my next renewal."
In less than a day of deliberations, a federal jury has found the VoIP company Vonage guilty of infringing on 3 of 7 VoIP-related patents that are held by Verizon. The jury that heard the case awarded Verizon $58 million USD in damages and stated that Vonage must pay royalties of 5.5 percent to Verizon if it wishes to continue using Verizon's IP.
In a statement after the decision was made, Vonage noted that the jury likely reduced the damages award from the $197 million figure Verizon was seeking because it was ruled that Vonage did not willfully infringe on the patents.Two of the three patents that were infringed were related to billing and not to the actual services.
Vonage says it plans to appeal the verdict and is assuring customers that there will be no interruption in services. They also stated that if Verizon's request for an injunction against Vonage was granted, it would be immediately appealed to make sure service was never interrupted. A hearing for Verizon's requestis to take place on March 23.
In a statement, Verizon said that "We are proud of our inventors and pleased the jury stood up for the legal protections they deserve."
Analysts feel the verdict should make other VoIP providers anxious at the prospet that Verizon will come after them as well, having this decision in their corner. Vonage, currently the biggest VoIP provider in the US, has 2.2 million subscribers.
Mexican authorities from the Attorney General's office (PGR), the Public Security Group from Mexico State, as well as local police, have stepped up their anti-piracy enforcement operations in the past two weeks, with significant results. These actions are part of the new administration's programme dedicated to stepping up operations against the organized criminal groups behind music, film and games piracy.
The significant amounts of pirate product seized are leading authorities to conduct follow-up investigations with the goal of determining cracking the structure of these organized criminal gangs. Here are more details on the numerous raids conducted...
Tepito
"Operation Rolex" consisted of raids against 16 warehouses and nine duplication labs in the suburb of Tepito that led to the seizure of 232 burners, 130,000 CDRs and 200,000 inlays. A total of 350 police officers and 20 prosecutors participated in the raid.
A further raid in Tepito against 160 warehouses and three replicating labs which netted 149,000 recorded CDRs, 160 burners and five million inlays. In addition, authorities seized two homemade duplicating blank CDR machines. A total of 250 police officers and 10 prosecutors participated in the raid.
Authorities executed search warrants in an area known as Matamoros Plaza in Tepito on 52 warehouses and one lab, which resulted in the seizure of 83 burners, 125,000 CDRs and six million inlays. A total of 400 police officers and 14 prosecutors participated in the raid
Puebla
A raid against 232 points of sale in the infamous "La Cuchilla" market in the state of Puebla led to seizures of 1.4 million CDRs, 1.2 million films, 300,000 games and 144 active burners. A total of 500 police officers and 13 prosecutors participated in the raid
Guadalajara city
Authorities in the city of Guadalajara conducted an operation in the major market of San Juan de Dios, raiding 95 warehouses, five labs and seizing 395,000 CDRs, 102 burners and almost one million inlays. A total of 150 police officers and five prosecutors participated in the raid
"We believe these raids have dealt a serious blow to the pirate groups, which dominate these markets and demonstrate the magnitude of music and film piracy in Mexico State. The local industry anti-piracy team provided logistic support for the raids. We congratulate the Attorney General's Office, Mexico State's Public Security Group as well as federal and local police officers for another job well done."Fernando Hernandez, head of the Mexican music industry association Amprofon, said.
Verbatim/Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co. has issues a warning on the company's website about a number of prominent and not so prominent brands in Australia and New Zealand distributing certain types of blank recordable DVDs with MCCMID codes and other information. These DVDs are manufactured without the same quality control and specifications as DVDs supplied by Verbatim in Australia and New Zealand.
The company is preparing to legal action to stop the misleading supply in Australia and New Zealand of these DVDs. An MID, or Media Identification Code, is used on the DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD-RAM recordable media. It is used to identify the manufacturer of the media and to help a DVD burner choose an optimal write strategy.
According to Industry sources, the HD DVD format is retaining a lead in the European market next-generation blue-laser optical disc drives/players/recorders. Toshiba's HD-E1 HD DVD player, accounted for an 85% market share in January, leaving Sony and Samsung Electronics equipment for Blu-ray Disc trailing behind with 15% of the European market.
Before the launch of the HD-E1, Toshiba's European market share for blue-laser products in 2006 was about 58%. HD DVD's lead in Europe may not last for much longer however, with the March 23rd launch of the Blu-ray-equipped PlayStation 3 (PS3) console approaching quickly.
Rising demand for HDTV equipment will boost consumer interest in blue laser HD formats. As more homes turn to HD, the format that can provide the best prices for both hardware and HD content should capture the growing market.
Cingular Wireless, the top U.S. mobile service provider, owned by AT&T Inc., is to announce an agreement with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. to offer everything from ringtones with famous wrestlers' voices to videos. The company believes that enough of its subscribers are Wrestling fans to make the offering worthwhile and successful.
World Wrestling videos will be available as part of Cingular's $19.99 a month media service plan. Cingular will also sell a premium video package for $4.99 a month featuring highlights from WrestleMania and other shows. Related ringtones will be sold for $2.49 each and graphics for $1.99.
The service is available for phones with high speed Web links and is expected to grow over the coming months. WWE is estimated to have 15 million weekly viewers.
Amie Street, a web based music downloading service that started up last July has recently come into the public eye by signing a new deal with the Nettwerk Music Group, a group with very well known names such as the Barenaked Ladies, Paul Van Dyke, and Avril Lavigne. Up until this point, Amie Street had sold music from independent artists and without DRM.
For those unfamiliar with Amie Street, the company is very unique. It not only offers DRM-free music but its pricing system is set up differently than that of its competitors, most notably iTunes. In their system, all the musc listed on the site starts out free, but as more and more people download the songs the price of the tracks goes up until it hits its peak of 98¢. The company says that it takes about 98 downloads for the price to hit 98¢. The Barenaked Ladies music selections have already hit that point and are listed at 98¢ apiece. Nettwerk's other artists are to be added over the upcoming months.
Amie Street, unlike iTunes, forces you to buy credits before you can purchase any tracks, but it also (like iTunes) allows you to choose whether to buy a full album or individual tracks. The album prices are affected by the prices of the single tracks so in reality you can purchase a DRM-free album for under a dollar if you get in early.
At the recent Game Developers Conference, Chris Hecker, the founder of "Defintion 6", unleashed an attack on the Wii and Nintendo claiming they fail to recognize games as an "art form".
His attack came during the "Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant session". Last year at the same rant session, he attacked the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for focusing on graphics instead of gameplay. He finished off his 2006 rant by asking "Will Nintendo save us?". Judging by his 2007 rant, the answer to that is "No".
Included in his rant were the following comments: "I have uncovered the secret to Wii manufacturing. The way you manufacture a Wii is you take two GameCubes and some duct tape".
He continues with: "This thing is totally underpowered... This is not about graphics, more polygons, all that kind of crap. What I want to be able to do is spend CPU to make the machine smarter, more interesting and more automatically intelligent.
"It's about interactivity - that is the key differentiator of our art form, and interactivity is about doing something interesting with that input and threading it back to the user. You can't do that with a POS underpowered computer."
Mark Cuban the tech billionaire has filed a lawsuit against YouTube asking it to report users who upload videos which one of his investments own the copyrights to.
Last year, when YouTube was purchase by Google, Cuban infamously called the move "moronic." He claimed that the video sharing site was based completely on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material and therefore should not be in existence.
Magnolia Pictures, the film distributor which is partially owned by Cuban is demanding that Google and YouTube report critical details of users who have uploaded clips of its movies, which most famously include the documentaries "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and "Capturing the Friedmans".
The subpoena expects Google to fork over the user details before March 20th.
Cuban has made it clear however, that the filing is more about making a point to Google and YouTube then to get individual users in trouble. He explained to Reuters this morning that "We don't expect to get valid user information. If we do, we will contact them and ask them what induced them to upload content they don't own."
Fox issued a very similar subpoena in January, except their lawsuit identified one uploader in particular, a man who had uploaded many Simpsons and 24 episodes.
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) has shown off a first-of-its-kind 3D online user community service for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console. The service, known as "Home," will enable users to create their own avatar and explore a real-time virtual community, as if they are playing a detailed 3D game for PS3. The service will become available globally beginning in fall 2007.
It allows PS3 users to interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share private content and even build and show off their own personal spaces to others in real time. Home will be available as a free download from the PlayStation Store and will launch directly from XMB (XrossMediaBar) on PS3. Home is a sleek, modern environment featuring spacious common areas; custom spaces dedicated to specific games; and personal apartments.
Each user is assigned an apartment in Home where they can invite others to join them as they show off their own style in an area they can personalize themselves with furniture, art and other items – even a different view from their windows. They can also show their personal video, pictures and other digital media content found on their PS3 hard drives in their apartments. Very rich interactive communication with others is achieved through built in text, audio and video chat, along with sophisticated emotional animations for each character.
Several movie download stores have teamed up with Macrovision, one of the world's largest DRM technology providers, for use of its technology in the distribution of major motion pictures and TV shows. Agreements have been struck with Netflix, BitTorrent, Movielink, and Instant Media to use Macrovision's Analog Copy Protection (ACP). Macrovision claims that the DRM technology will actually give customers more choices in viewing content.
Armed with Macrovision content protection technology, Netflix hopes it will be able to expand the amount of content available for immediate viewing online and Instant Media hopes the deal will make collaboration with studios easier since it re-enforced content protection.
"Macrovision's technology is a foundation for the growth of digital distribution in an open market," Macrovision president and CEO Fred Amoroso said. "By making media content protection easier to integrate in the distribution channel, we're enabling the distributors to execute innovative business models and respond to consumer demand for more access to their favorite content online."
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) confirmed today that eleven companies have filed a lawsuit against Yahoo's China division for about 5.5 million yuan (US$710,690). The companies accuse Yahoo! China of copyright infringement. It should be noted that up to 85% of all music in the country is believed to be pirated.
The IFPI said that China is an important market, and that the group is working to eradicate piracy in the country. Yahoo! China responded to the allegations by saying it does, and has always respected copyright and supports the fight against piracy. It also said that precedence has been set for such cases, and has shown that web site owners/operators are not liable for the actions of third party users.
Turkish Internet users are now greeted with a message when they try to access Google Inc.'s video sharing site informing them that its access has been blocked in the country. A court order was issued to telecommunications companies in the country after videos appeared on the site that reportedly insulted former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Turkish media reported that a "virtual war" between Greek and Turkish users of the site followed the videos, with more insulting video responses posted by both sides. The clip that started the whole fuss referred to Ataturk and Turks as homosexuals. Insulting Ataturk, the founding father of modern Turkey, or "Turkishness" is an offense which can result in a prison sentence.
Turkish users who try to access YouTube currently see this message...
"Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court".
Paul Doany, the head of Turk Telecom, said access to the site was blocked as soon as the court order came through. "We are not in the position of saying that what YouTube did was an insult, that it was right or wrong," Mr Doany told Anatolia news agency. "A court decision was proposed to us, and we are doing what that court decision says."
AT&T and Verizon Wireless (the top two U.S. wireless providers) have both announced new features that will allow customers to remotely record TV shows by programming their DVRs with their mobile phones. AT&T said that its subscribers can now use their mobile phones to record TV shows on home TVs using Homezone, a video-on-demand service that AT&T offers with satellite TV provider EchoStar Communications.
Verizon Wireless said its customers will be able to use their phones to program TiVo Inc. digital video recorders remotely, starting next week. The third largest provider, Sprint Nextel Corp., also plans to make a similar offer available later in the year through its venture with cable providers such as Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc.
While analysts agree that such services can help to either attract some new customers, or retain current customers as competition gets tougher, the demand for such features is not very high. A survey conducted by a Jupiter Research analyst showed less than 10% of respondents as interested in such features.
A new service launched by Amazon and TiVo will enable movie downloaders to purchase (or rent) movie and TV show downloads from Amazon's Unbox service and play them on a proper TV. "Amazon Unbox in TiVo" brings 1.5 million more potential customers to Amazon's download service. TiVo is currently offering an introductory offer of $15 in free movie and TV show downloads to those who sign up.
TV show episodes can be downloaded for $1.99 and movies cost between $9.99 and $14.99. The partnership between the two companies brings the service one step further than those offered by Apple and Wal-Mart, by making it easy for viewers to download content over the Internet and view it on a TV. Apple will soon attempt to accomplish this goal too with the Apple TV set top box.
Samsung Electronics Co. announced today that it has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory. The new laptop hard drives are designed to work with the ReadyDrive feature in Windows Vista, using the flash memory as a cache to limit the amount of time the hard drive spends spinning. Samsung claims this will mean 70% - 90% less power consumption. Currently only Windows Vista supports ReadyDrive, so it won't improve performance under any other OS.
The first 3 models from Samsung are 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB, and are available with either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. They also have a prototype with 4GB of flash memory. Later this year Intel is expected to start selling their own competing solution which puts the flash memory on the motherboard.
Microsoft's Live OneCare was the only one of 17 anti-virus programs to fail a test carried out quarterly by AV Comparatives of Austria. It managed to identify only 82.4% of 500,000 viruses used in the test, which included macro and script viruses, worms, backdoors and trojans. According to Andreas Clementi, senior tester at AV Comparatives, "Microsoft OneCare performed very low in the test, and did not reach the minimum requirements for participation." Out of the other programs tested, 14 got an advanced pass or better, while two got a standard rating.
According to a Microsoft spokesman they're "looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests."
The world's largest mobile phone handset maker, Nokia, has shown off its new N-Gage efforts at GDC. The latest development in the N-Gage mobile gaming brand provides a software, not a hardware, platform to run on Nokia S60 3rd edition devices. The company announced its next generation software development kit (SDK 1.0) for the new N-Gage games platform.
"The availability of the N-Gage SDK 1.0 today is the corner stone of Nokia's new development eco-system for developers to create connected mobile games in a familiar C++ environment," said Mark Ollila, Director of Technology & Strategy and Nokia Games Publishing, Nokia. "This single development channel impacts positively on development cycles and budgeting as well as creating new social connected gaming experiences that will lead the way to how people discover, buy and play games in the future."
Nokia also announced a new compliance testing program for SNAP Mobile's Java platform, which the company believes will lower the cost barrier of entry for game developers by combining a self-testing process with a traditional certification program.
"We are reinforcing our commitment to this industry with two significant initiatives that will help the mobile games industry evolve. Our N-Gage platform will deliver a global games platform that leverages the performance of the tens of millions of S60 converged devices that we are shipping each year," said Gregg Sauter, Director of Games Publishing, Nokia. "Likewise, our support for Java development continues to evolve with more tools for developers supporting SNAP Mobile."
Apple Computer Inc. has warned its users about using iTunes 7.1 with Windows Vista, especially when using iTunes with an iPod connected. Despite the iTunes 7.1 update adding support for the Apple TV device, as well as other things, Apple revealed that there were no proper fixes for known issues with Windows Vista yet, and that the company continues to work with Microsoft to resolve the bugs.
Apple has warned that using the Windows Vista "Safely Remove Hardware" feature can actually corrupt your iPod, requiring a full restore. iTunes text and graphics also reportedly have display issues with Windows Vista. iTunes and iPod are also still considered incompatible with the 64bit version of Windows XP as well.
Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming service has reached its milestone of 6 million members, months ahead of expectations. At E3 last year, Microsoft had set a target to double its Xbox Live member count (three million) to six million by June 2007. After hitting 6 million members, Microsoft has released some Xbox Live statistics.
Since the service launched in 2002, gamers have added up more than 2.3 billion hours playing games on Xbox Live, and now, each day, members exchange over 2,000,000 voice and text messages. Halo 2 is still the most popular game on the service to date, with Gears of War coming in second and Xbox Live Arcade title Hexic HD in third place.
However, even though Xbox Live has reached 6 million members, Microsoft did not announce how many of these are Gold members (subscription) and how many are Silver members (Free Service) - or at least how many were even temporarily paying for the premium service.
LG Electronics has knocked a third off of the price of its GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Disc (BD)Super MultiDVD burner (Super Multi Blue) for the Taiwan market. The model was launched in September 2006 for a price of NT$29,900 (US$908), and has now been dropped by LG to NT$19,900 (US$605). The burner features support for 4X speed burning to single sided single layer (SSSL) Blu-ray media.
4X is currently the fastest burn speed available for BD-R media. The reason for the price drop is to both clear out inventory and gain more market share since more Blu-ray models were released in the territory this year. Sony, Pioneer, Samsung Electronics and Philips may follow suit and lower the price of their hardware in the area.
Broadcom Corporation has shown off a new dual-channel AVC/MPEG-4/VC- 1/MPEG-2 video decoder system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed in a 65 nanometer process. The new high-performance video decoder SoC is being demonstrated at this week's CableLabs Winter Conference, and provides leading-edge functionality and performance when compared to existing set-top box (STB) solutions currently available.
"Our new 65 nanometer solution provides our customers with the industry's most advanced, highest performance, and most integrated solution for dual advanced video decoder media center set-top boxes," said John H. Gleiter, Senior Director of Marketing for Broadcom's Set-top Box line of business. "Customers will enjoy state-of-the-art performance, video quality, security, and system cost savings improvements provide by this new advanced 65 nanometer chip."
Announced today is the 65 nanometer Broadcom BCM7400B dual-channel video decoder solution. The BCM7400B video decoder enables set-top box manufacturers to develop extremely high performance media centers, integrating the most advanced hardware features and functionality to securely decode, store and share multiple types of media including HDTV, video-on-demand, Internet, and digital music content.
Microsoft Corp. is preparing to attack the policies of Google Inc., in prepared remarks to be sent to the Association of American Publishers, that regard copyright protection. Microsoft Associate General Counsel Thomas Rubin claims that Google's move into new media markets comes at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.
"Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs," Rubin said. "Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop."
He also addressed Google's YouTube service. "In essence, Google is saying to you and to other copyright owners: 'Trust us - you're protected. We'll keep the digital copies secure, we'll only show snippets, we won't harm you, we'll promote you,'" he said. "But Google's track record of protecting copyrights in other parts of its business is weak at best."
Microsoft's outburst is fueled by Google's dominance in web searching, which the Redmond-based corporation has been useless to break. YouTube also is set to stay far ahead of competition for traffic, including Microsoft's own Soapbox site. Also, Microsoft could be worried of Google's recent step into the business software market with a set of Web-based subscription services that could hurt Microsoft's progress in that area.
Sirius and XM issued open letters to their customers this past week hoping to ease the minds of consumers who were anxious over their upcoming merger. In the letters, the companies assured that all radios and receivers would continue to work after the merger, and that the current monthly fee for current members would not be raised in any way.
During the weeks that followed the announcement of the proposed merger analysts of both companies began to contemplate that the monthly rates would increase and also that newer radio and receiver models would replace the current ones.
There does not seem to be any plans for major changes in the near future, although the letters do leave the opportunity open for rate increases for new customers as well as new radios that have added functionality for the merged company.
XM had this to say in a statement about the proposed merger: "Sirius has millions of radios in the market, including many that are built into the vehicles manufactured by its automakers...Following the merger, XM expects that the existing radios will be able to receive a mix of programming from both services."
XM had its letter published in the Monday edition of USA Today, while Sirius has begun a new iniative called the "Sirius Guarantee" which is being printed in national papers.
In late February, The DVD Forum, during its 37th Steering Committee, approved the "China High Density Read-only Disc" (conveniently tagged as C-HD DVD-ROM) physical specification, which they termed as Version 10.0 (China only), in an effort to promote the HD-DVD standard in the huge Chinese market. All this is according to industry sources in Taiwan.
The sources also explained that The DVD Forum will design a licensing system for the C-HD DVD-ROM in China.
This comes at a time when the format battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is still very hot. Last week Sony showed off their base-level Blu-Ray Disc player, the BDP-S300 with a retail price of $600 USD which is meant to compete directly with Toshiba's HD-DVD players which sell for $499 USD.
Apple Computer Inc. has released new versions of its QuickTime software for both the Mac and Windows operating systems. The update addresses several serious security flaws with the software. A malicious individual could take advantages of the flaws by creating a modified QuickTime file that executes arbitrary code when run. This type of vulnerability could lead to a full system compromise.
Affected file types that have been corrected include QuickTime, MIDI, 3GP, PICT and QTIF files. Also updated today was Apple's iTunes software for both operating systems. The update adds support for the Apple TV device, which aims to bridge the gap between PC equipment and televisions by using a home network to stream multimedia using the iTunes software.
Electronic Arts chief executive Larry Probst revealed that the world's biggest publisher of video game software expects Sony's dominance over the gaming console market to slip in the current war. "We expect that there will be a more level playing field this time around than last time," said Probst. He still expects Sony to win, but with figures that are nowhere near those seen with the PlayStation 2 console.
Sony claims to have shipped more than 115 million PS2s globally, over 60% of all combined unit sales in the last console cycle that kicked off back in 1999. However, when Sony delivered its console a year later than its competitor with a much higher price tag, many looked toward Microsoft as an even more serious contender and the seemingly underdog Nintendo Wii console has enjoyed incredible success.
"I think the issue is that (the PS3 is) expensive," Probst said. He added that EA's prediction should not surprise anybody, saying even the crowd at last year's E3 conference were stunned to find out that Sony's high-end PS3 would cost $600 in the U.S. while the Xbox 360 was selling for $400. "No one should count Sony out at this point in the game. This is going to be a long race," Probst cautioned, saying that the PS3 delivers potent technology for the money.
According to research conducted by ratings firm Nielsen, the number of gaming consoles present in U.S. households with televisions has risen by over 18% since 2004. The report was titled "The State of the Console," and was published after a study was conducted by Nielsen between Q4 2004 and Q4 2006. The number of U.S. households with Televisions that also had a gaming console rose to 45.7 million from 38.6 million.
Overall, that is a rise of about 18.5%. In the time period, Nielsen noted that the number of U.S. households with televisions rose only 1.6%. The firm said that this report is the first in a projected series of studies that focus on trends in the gaming industry.
Two-thirds of all men in television-owning households aged between 18 and 34, and 80% of those aged between 12 and 17 have video game consoles in their homes. 74.4% of all console use came from the top 20% of American gamers.
Police in Naples launched an anti-piracy raid on a premises in in the suburb of Arzano, which turned up approximately 150,000 pirate discs, including music and movies. Police seized the counterfeit material, and also seized 276 CD burners and arrested the 25 year old male suspect. Police had been watching the location of the raid since Christmas.
The operation was carried out during the week of the main Italian music TV show Festival of Sanremo. More anti-piracy raids around the world recently also turned up huge numbers of counterfeit CDs containing software, games, music and movies. As a fine example, Guatemalan National Police in co-ordination with the Attorney General's Office conducted a massive raid in downtown Guatemala City that turned up over one million counterfeit discs containing pirated music and movies on February 9th.
Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide studios president Phil Harrsion has revealed in a recent interview that although the PlayStation3 does not have a dedicated video scaling chip, the console would be getting a form of upscaling in the near future.
“You know, we're not sure when it's coming, but we're going to have DVD upscaling on Playstation 3,” exclaimed Harrsion in his interview with Newsweek.
For those not familiar with DVD upscaling, it is the practice of "converting 480i/p material into a 720p or 1080i/p image for display on high-definition televisions that support higher resolutions." The result of this upscaling is a marginally improved image that is noticeable on fixed pixel TV's and monitors such as plasmas and LCD.
Upconverting DVD players are standalone DVD players that can upscale the picture to higher resolutions. Many powerful PC software programs intended for DVD viewing, such as Cyberlink PowerDVD and WinDVD feature upscaling to fit the native resolution of the viewer's monitor.
The rival Xbox 360 can also upscale DVD movies, but you need to purchase a VGA cable that must connect the console to the TV for that feature to work.
Microsoft Corp. has revealed that a new memory unit with a storage capacity of 512MB is to be released for the Xbox 360 gaming console. The new memory unit will be available worldwide starting on April 3rd and will cost $49.99 in North America. For a limited time, the new device will will be pre-loaded with the Xbox LIVE Arcade game "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved" from developer Bizarre Creations Ltd.
The original memory unit available for the console, which stored 64MB of data, will drop in price from $39.99 to $29.99. Microsoft also announced that the maximum size limit for arcade games available on the Xbox Live Marketplace would rise form the current limit of 50MB to 150MB.
Starting March 6, the first ever high definition episode of the Comedy Central series South Park will be available as a free download for 2 weeks, exclusively on Xbox Live Marketplace. From March 20 through April 3 Best Buy will offer the episode on a free HD-DVD with the purchase of any Xbox 360 console or its add-on HD-DVD player.
Future new South Park episodes will be offered for sale from Xbox Marketplace the week after they air.
On Friday, March 2, the US Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for webcasters. Under the new rates, originally proposed by SoundExchange - a former division of the RIAA, webcasters will be required to pay $0.0011 per listener, per song this year. The rates will be retroactive, meaning webcasters will also be responsible for paying the new 2006 rate of $0.0008 for webcasts from last year.
The rate proposal was accepted over the objections of the International Webcasting Association and individual webcasters. They have the right to appeal for a re-hearing within 15 days of the decision.
According to Kurt Hanson, a webcasting industry analyst for the web publication RAIN, the cost to webcasters "for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! - is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues." Hanson's analysis can be found on the RAIN website.
According to several rumors circulating online ahead of the Game Developers' Conference, Sony is set to make some significant announcements about the PlayStation 3 console. GDC Director Jamil Moledina said that Sony will reveal news that will make PS3 owners very happy. Gaming blog Kotaku has reported that Sony may announce "PlayStation Home" features.
According to the report, PS3 could soon be getting its own version of "Mii avatars" and "Xbox 360 achievements", with future PS3 titles featuring virtual rooms, where users "will receive items with which to adorn the room that are specific to the game," as part of the achievements system. Social networking features are also rumored, including text chat, voice chat and video features.
Another source said that Phil Harrison will reveal a more refined PlayStation Store, Connect Store support for movie and music downloads and wallpaper options as part of a firmware update coming on March 8th. As for the name "PlayStation Home", Sony recently registered the trademark for it. It is defined as "electronic games services provided by means of the Internet," for the "creation and development of virtual and interactive images and environments," and "introduction and social networking services, namely introducing electronic game players to others."
A handful of Police departments in the United States have turned to YouTube as another resource in catching suspects that have been caught on video. Patrolman Brian Johnson of the Franklin, Mass., Police Department posted a clip from a security camera showing two men using allegedly stolen credit cards at a Home Depot on YouTube. He then emailed about 300 people and organizations with the link saying he was looking the men.
"You don't have to be a technology wizard to figure out how to watch a video on YouTube," Johnson said of the decision to post the video on the world's largest video sharing site. In this case, the suspects were ultimately arrested. A handful of police departments have turned YouTube into a law enforcement tool, posting video clips of suspects and asking users of the site to help identify them.
Of course, as the online video revolution grows and millions upon millions more videos are posted to sites like YouTube, this kind of content may easily fade. There is also worry about the risk of fruitless tips, misidentifications or privacy problems. Another, more publicized case, came from Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada. Police posted a 72 second video clip showing a suspect who had fatally stabbed a man outside a hip hop concert.
Sony is set to bring its own MP3 players with video playback features to the market. The company is showing off it's new NW-A800 series, featuring a 2 inch LCD screen and support for MPEG-4 video playback. The device is less than 1cm thick. The battery life is being advertised as supporting 30 hours of music playback and 8 hours of video playback.
Music can be purchased for the player from the Sony Connect music download store. The ranger will be available from April and will cost (UK); NW-A805 2GB model - £119, NW-A806 4GB model - £149, NW-A808 8GB model - £199.
EMI, one of the big four record labels, has rejected an approach made by Warner Music Group, saying the offer was too low and format of the bid too cumbersome. "WMG’s proposal was considered by the Board which concluded that it is not in the best interests of EMI shareholders to entertain a pre-conditional offer which would entail prolonged regulatory uncertainty and unacceptable operational risk at a critical time for the Company," the music group said in a statement
It continued: "The Board also regards a price of 260 pence per share as inadequate, having regard to the stand-alone value of EMI, the synergies available from a combination with WMG and the risks identified above." In October 2000, both companies broke off from a proposed merger because the didn't anticipate regulatory approval.
Sony Corp. and Immersion Corporation have entered into a new agreement that will bring rumble technology back to Sony hardware. Sony had left vibration features from the PlayStation 3's Sixaxis controller due to ongoing litigation with Immersion. Recently, both companies settled the dispute and it was expected that an agreement to use Immersion technology in future Sony products would be reached.
"Our new business agreement with Sony is specifically intended to enable advanced vibration capability for the benefit of the PlayStation community." CEO of Immersion, Victor Viegas said. "We are happy to provide our technology in this regard and hope to make technical proposals very soon with respect to use of our technology in the PlayStation products."
Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment said: "We look forward to exploring with Immersion exciting new ways to bring the largest and best range of gameplay experiences to our customers. We are very excited about our new partnership with Immersion and the potential for new and innovative products incorporating their technologies."
The huge manufacturer Samsung, although a fully paid member of the Blu-Ray Disc camp has recently showed off a very powerful 17 inch widescreen notebook whose main component is an HD-DVD optical drive.
The Samsung M55 HD boasts a display of 1,920 x 1,200, which is ideal for 1080p High Definition content. "The screen's driven by an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 mobile GPU with 256MB of GDDR 3 video memory. The laptop's processor is a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 backed by 2GHB of 667MHz DDR 2 SDRAM and 120GB of SATA hard drive storage. The package also come with a pre-loaded Windows Vista premium version.
The M55 goes on sale soon for the hefty price tag of $3,186 USD or 2,419€.
This goes to show that there are no real complete supporters of either disc except for Sony and Microsoft. Samsung understands that at this moment in time, it makes no sense to completely back one format or the other.
Well known warez group PARADOX has provided tools that will make Microsoft's anti-piracy aims for Windows Vista much tougher. The group has provided tools and information on how to trick a Vista installation (x86) into acting as if it is installed on an OEM machine, which requires no product activation. Manufacturers such as Dell distribute pre-installed Vista installations on new computers.
These companies embed certain license information into their hardware products, which can be validated by a Windows Vista installation, removing the need for further activation procedures. The installation required hardware-embedded BIOS ACPI_SLIC information signed by Microsoft. So this method takes advantage of how Vista validates on OEM machines.
By using a device driver, BIOS ACPI_SLIC information can be fed to Windows Vista's licensing mechanism. This, combined with an matching product key and OEM certificate, will render any system practically indistinguishable from a legit pre-activated system shipped by the respective OEM.
The publishing arm of the Warner Music Group Corp., Warner/Chappell Music, has come to a deal with Microsoft to acquire compositions for Halo and Halo 2, as well as Age of Empires, Fable, Kameo and other video game franchises. The deal also includes music from upcoming games, including Halo 3. No financial terms of the agreement were disclosed.
Warner/Chappell will now claim and register Microsoft-owned copyrights worldwide and will identify and develop new synchronization, performance and music publishing opportunities for the Microsoft music publishing catalogs.
Ed Pierson, Executive Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs, Warner/Chappell Music, said about the agreement, "Warner/Chappell is proud to partner with a technology leader like Microsoft and delighted to be the worldwide publisher for the company's video game music catalog. We're confident we can develop and identify some exciting and unique new licensing opportunities for these well-known game compositions."
YouTube and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had reportedly been in talks about a content deal. Now, both have revealed an agreement that will bring BBC content to Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site. The non-exclusive deal will create three BBC channels, one for news and two for entertainment, on YouTube packed with short clips.
The BBC will use the YouTube deal as a promotional tool for its content, hoping to get some of YouTube's 70 million monthly users to its own sites. Advertising revenue that traffic on the channels generates will shared between YouTube and BBC (although the News channel will have no advertising at all).
Here are some details on the deals...
BBC: One of the BBC's two entertainment channels will be a "public service" proposition, featuring no advertising.
It will show clips like trailers and short features that add value - for example, video diaries of David Tennant showing viewers around the set of Dr Who or BBC correspondent Clive Myrie explaining how difficult it is to report from the streets of Baghdad.
The channel's main purpose is to popularise current programming and drive traffic back to the BBC's own website, and point the audience to the BBC's pages, where they can watch or download programmes in full, once the BBC Trust approves the corporation's catch-up television proposal, called iPlayer.
Since the added Blu-ray Disc components in the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console contributed greatly to both its high price (for a gaming console) and its delay in PAL territories, it is one of the PS3's most criticized features right now. Many consumers believe feel that Sony is forcing Blu-ray inclusion on the PS3 console to sneak the Blu-ray format ahead in the console war, but Phil Harrison denies this is the core reason for its inclusion.
"We needed to have Blu-ray disc from a game design point of view. The chipsets in PS3 chew through data at such a rate that in order to build variety and detail and quality into the games, we need more than nine gigabytes," Harrison said. "Now, the fact that we could also adopt the preeminent next generation movie format into PS3 was an added bonus, not an added cost."
The original PlayStation made use of the CD optical disc format, followed by DVD in PlayStation 2 (which worked as a DVD player), and neither formats need to be introduced to anybody; a testament to their incredible success. The Blu-ray camp hopes that this trend will continue with the PlayStation 3 and push Blu-ray far ahead of its rival, HD DVD in the ongoing format war.
Regardless of the massive amounts of news sources and blogs that interpreted research on The Onion Router (TOR) as the meaning it was "cracked", it remains a safe (perhaps the safest) way to gain anonymity while browsing and doing many other things online. Security research done by University of Colorado computer science instead tested a previously known vulnerability in the lab.
The developers of TOR responded to the blog response, with one member of the team saying, "Blogstorms can have real world consequences. Please ponder before you write, critically examine what you read, and ask us for updates." Tor anonymizes web traffic basically by routing data from the sender, through several nodes before it gets to the receiver.
A weakness that could be exploited in Tor is how the protocol tends to route traffic to devices which claim to have high amounts of bandwidth available. By modifying the software, a malicious user could attract more traffic through the network, and by setting up several of these servers, the chances that two could be included on the same path are increased.
If two malicious servers are included at the start and end points in a path, it becomes possible to identify the sender and receiver of the communications passing through. The original research team noticed the huge reaction to the news, and so posted an FAQ and claimed, "Tor is the most secure and usable privacy-enhancing system available".
BenQ has reportedly withdrawn from the DVD recorder market. The company's website has been changed, with all DVD recorders removed, and it has informed retailers that it is no longer selling the products. Disappointing sales was the main reason behind BenQ's decision. Since prices have dropped, BenQ has as decided to drop the segment when adjusting its product structure.
The company will decide whether or not to enter the Blu-ray or HD DVD recorder market based on market demand. Back in 2003, it established Philips BenQ Digital Storage (PBDS), a joint venture with Royal Philips Electronics, and in January 2005, announced a 400GB hard-disc DVD recorder.
Having lost its deal with Viacom and subsequently being told to remove about 100,000 clips, YouTube is getting more success in signing up small media partners. The New York Times reported that YouTube is striking deals with hundreds of small media partners, but didn't specify how many were made since Google Inc. bought YouTube last year.
YouTube officials were quoted as saying they are getting about 200 new media partners, mostly small, each quarter. For example, YouTube recently signed a deal with the National Basketball Association to create a channel which would display content from the league and allow users to upload their own demonstration videos.
YouTube also reached a deal with Wind-up Records, an independent record label, to stream music videos and permit YouTube users to incorporate music tracks in their own videos. The company said it has made most of its partnerships quietly, signing up more than 1,000, ranging from the Sundance Channel to small independent video producers.
Earlier this week, Michael Alan Crooker filed a lawsuit against Microsoft in the Massachusetts Supreme Court claiming that Microsoft falsely advertised that its product, Internet Explorer would keep his information and browsing habits secure.
In 2004, the FBI raided Crooker's home based on reports and evidence that he had bomb-making materials. Federal agents did find "laboratory devices, apparent IEDs, fermenting castor beans, chemicals and chemical equipment appropriate for the processing of castor beans into ricin, and what appeared to be ricin and ricin precursors in various stages of development, indicating that Crooker was successfully manufacturing ricin."
After finding all these materials, the FBI then confiscated Mr. Crooker's computer. The FBI broke through his Compaq DriveLock security layer encryption mechanism and found a vast array of file including homemade sex videos and and cached hardcore pornography. The embarrassment of this led Mr. Crooker to start the lawsuit.
He claims that he set Internet Explorer to automatically delete his browsing history every 5 days but that the browser failed to do so. In his words "Any day beyond those parameters is supposed to be permanently deleted and is not supposed to be recoverable." Mr Crooker seems to have a valid claim, but the larger problem appears to be that Circuit City, the retailer he purchased his computer from specifically told him that Windows XP, Internet Explorer and the DriveLock would completely keep his information secure.
According to the market research firm IDC, Nintendo's new Wii console will continue to outship and outsell the competition, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, throughout 2007 and 2008.
However, the firm does not see a clear cut winner anytime soon. The Xbox 360 enjoyed a year's head start over its competition and the Wii is selling very well, but even those factors leave no winner as the dominant console.
IDC had this to say in a statement: "IDC believes hardware shipments of Nintendo's Wii will capture a little more than a third of the worldwide market by 2008, rising slightly above Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360"
The firm then continued by observing that: "Nintendo is the only one of the three manufacturers working to grow its accessible market for its hardware and software by broadening its audience beyond the traditional market"
While Sony and Microsoft continue to strive for more powerful hardware and home entertainment packages, IDC feels that Nintendo will continue to keep capturing new consumers or those that would otherwise be afraid of more powerful, expensive systems.
The firm firmly believes that by leaving Sony and Microsoft to fight it out for the higher end market, the Wii will continue to penetrate the market.
Office Live LLC., an online only media company that gives free professional advice as well as run a few websites, including Officelive.net and Autoofficelive.net has started a lawsuit seeking to get an injunction stopping Microsoft from using the "Office Live" name.
Office Live LLC. has had the name "Office Live" federally trademarked since 2002, well before Microsoft launched their Office Live service in 2006.
In late December 2006, after the release of Microsoft’s Office Live services, Office Live LLC. filed the lawsuit against Microsoft, but after talks with Microsoft they decided to refrain serving the lawsuit until both sides could work out a deal. However, when the companies met in February, all talks collapsed and an agreement could not be met.
The CEO of Office Live LLC. had this to say in a statement: "It is shocking that Microsoft would have so little regard for another company's intellectual property rights that it would select a name belonging to another company. Online software may be the next big thing, but Microsoft has no right to use our trademark without permission."
DVD Suite 5 is a new product aimed at Windows Vista users from CyberLink, the maker of PowerDVD and other DVD related programs.
According to a company press release issued today, "CyberLink DVD Suite 5 now allows our complete range of DVD applications to be enjoyed on Windows Vista," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "Vista users can continue to enjoy the advanced features and technologies related to DVD creation offered by this powerful and easy-to-use software suite."
Two versions of the suite are available. DVD Suite 5 Standard includes PowerDVD 7, PowerProducer 4, MediaShow 3, Power2Go 5.5 without MP3 and Dolby, PowerBackup 2.5 Express, InstantBurn 5, PowerDVD Copy, LabelPrint 2, and iTunes 7. DVD Suite 5 Pro adds PowerDirector 5, Dolby audio output for PowerProducer 4 and Power2Go 5.5, unlimited MP3 ripping for Power2Go 5.5, and additional archiving features for PowerBackup 2.5.
Toshiba has denied reports that the 51GB HD DVD disc it showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January has been submitted to the DVD Forum for approval. The 51GB HD DVD disc is achieved by packing 17GB of data per layer on a triple layer HD DVD disc. In the past few days, several news sources and blogs reported that the disc was submitted for approval, which it has not been.
While this site did report the news also, the staff was confused by what seemed to be a re-emergence of news from January with seemingly unconfirmed claims. "We’re puzzled ourself by where these reports came from," said Junko Furuta, a spokeswoman for Toshiba. She added that Toshiba has not made any further announcements about the disc since CES.
When the disc was first announced however, the company did say it wanted to get approval sometime this year. Nevertheless, we apologize for also reporting the inaccurate item.
Verizon Wireless has introduced the first commercial mobile television service in 20 states in the U.S., which includes full length programs and quality that is similar to regular television. A Verizon / Vodafone venture will charge customers a $15/month subscription fee for the service which includes 8 channels, broadcasting content 24 hours a day. It was developed by Qualcomm's MediaFlo.
Verizon has been experimenting with video content in an effort to make up for revenue lost as mobile phone calls become cheaper. Verizon Wireless is the second largest mobile phone provider in the United States, and so far its video services have not received much attention from customers, due to its low quality and high prices.
The first phone to support MediaFlo is the U620 from Samsung. It is being sold for $199, or $149.99 for customers who sign a two-year contract. Verizon plans to add another phone, from LG Electronics Inc. in a matter of weeks. Available channels include a feeds from MTV and programming from CBS, NBC, ESPN, Fox, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.
The DVD Forum has approved the burning of Content Scrambling System (CSS) protected content to DVD-R media at Steering Committee Meeting in Tokyo. "CSS Managed Recording" would make it possible to burn CSS protected content from a DVD source, or download source, to a special type of DVD-R disc for use in stand-alone DVD equipment. The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) recently allowed movie-burning kiosks in retail stores to burn fully CSS-complaint DVDs.
There is really no point in offering consumers an option to purchase downloadable movies if they are completely confined to a computer monitor. DVD-R burning has become so popular, that a possible answer to a successful service is to allow users to download movies and then burn them to a blank DVD disc which can be played on any DVD hardware that they own.
The CSS copy protection system is deployed on DVD-Video releases and has been hacked for years, beatable literally with tools that are now years old.
Electronic Arts Inc. has teamed up with Apple Computer Inc. to sell music from video games the company develops through the iTunes music store. The move from EA, the world's biggest video game publisher, shows how gaming companies are exploring new ways to use the Internet to sell gaming content and other content. Downloads of full songs are priced the same as the rest of the store's offerings, at 99c each.
EA already sells ringtones for $2.99 each, and also sells games such as Sudoku and Tetris on iTunes for $4.99. A list of the available music has been published at www.ea.com/eatrax. Good Charlotte, Jet, Franz Ferdinand, Scissor Sisters and Arctic Monkeys are some of the acts that teamed up with EA in the past.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Movielink, the movie download specialist, is on sale for $50 million USD.
The huge games and movie retailer and rental specialist Blockbuster, is in deep talks to buy the online movie rental and download site.
Movielink, which is jointly owned by MGM Studios, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. will be sold for $50 Million USD (equal to about 38 million Euro) in cash and other stock options.
The move should help Blockbuster to continue fighting in its rivalry with Netflix, the largest online movie rental site.
It has been a good start for Joost, an Internet TV service created by the original founders of Kazaa and Skype. After striking a deal with Viacom to provide content from its networks, after Viacom abandoned YouTube in a failed agreement, Joost is now reportedly hooking up with JumpTV, which owns the rights to 270 TV stations in 70 countries.
Time magazine reported that both will soon announce their deal. Joost is now battling for the interest of the average Internet user to steal thunder from giants like YouTube and MySpace. While both have achieved incredible popularity, Joost will use its features, including robust protection of content, to win the hearts of content providers allowing it to offer premium video.
YouTube has got its own deals however, including one with NBC and is currently reportedly talking with other content providers, including the BBC. YouTube also moved further into the political arena with You Choose '08, a YouTube service that allows U.S. Presidential hopefuls to post videos and interact with members of the YouTube community.
The running legal dispute between Sony Corp. and Immersion has come to a close finally, with Sony agreeing to pay $121 million to settle the ongoing patent infringement litigation. Both companies are now looking at possibility of Sony including Immersion's "touch feedback" technology in future products after features were removed from the PlayStation 3 (PS3) as a direct result of this dispute.
Sony Corp.'s gaming unit said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the federal circuit ordered the payment of damages, pre-judgment interest, costs, and interest to Immersion. In March 2005, Immersion won a judgment against Sony that would have halted PlayStation 2 (PS2) sales until royalties were paid.
Sony appealed the ruling, asking for a new trial at the time, but the motion was denied.
In another case of possible exploding/combustible laptop batteries, Lenovo, the Chinese laptop manufacturer, is voluntarily recalling 100,000 batteries from laptops in their IBM ThinkPad line. The certain batteries in question are manufactured by Sanyo.
The batteries being recalled are Lithium-ion batteries which are known to be very sensitive to the daily abuse a laptop sustains.
Due to the chemical sensitivity of the Lithium-ion battery, continued abuse to the battery pack itself can cause the circuitry that is designed to keep the battery safe to fail. This effect is amplified if there is a manufacturing flaw, which can cause the battery to catch on fire or even explode with continured abuse.
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, if the "laptop is struck forcefully on the corner, such as from a direct fall to the ground, the battery pack can overheat and pose a fire hazard to users. This is not an internal battery cell defect."
Lenovo has additional information for all its consumers on its website, including call numbers and laptops that are impacted by this recall. Lenovo also suggests to not use the battery pack and keep your notebook on AC power.
According to the Times Online, O2 has signed an exlusive deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to the United Kingdom.
Although Vodafone was the early favorite for the contract, it seems O2 has come away with the deal. It is also believed O2 will revenue share with Apple from revenue generated from each new iPhone customer.
T-Mobile is expected to make a similar deal for exclusive rights in Germany and Orange is close to making the same deal for France.
In the US so far, the iPhone has been a great success despite its hefty price tag.
An anonymous hacker has discovered a way to hack Microsoft's Xbox 360 console in a way that could have allowed an alternative operating system to run on the hardware. For the hack to work, physical access to the hardware is required to take advantage of a vulnerability in the Xbox 360 hypervisor.
The hypervisor provides encryption and decryption services for the console, and controls access to memory. This ensures that all games and other code run on the console need to be cryptographically signed with Microsoft's private key and run in non-privileged read-only mode.
Flaws in the interaction between unprivileged code and the hypervisor led to the groundwork for the hack. The hacker tipped off Microsoft about the problem and the company quickly produced a patch. Proof of concept code and details were published on BugTraq on Wednesday.
Severity:
Critical (Unsigned Code Execution in Hypervisor Mode)
Vendor:
Microsoft
Systems Affected:
All Xbox 360 systems with a kernel version of 4532 (released Oct 31, 2006) and 4548 (released Nov 30, 2006). Versions prior to 4532 are not affected. Bug was fixed in version 4552 (released Jan 09, 2007 - not a Patch Tuesday).
Video game publisher, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. got themselves in a bit of hot water some time ago over their infamous Hot Coffee unlockable in the smash hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The company was brought up on lawsuit charges stating that the company had been distributing video games with sexually explicit content under the wrong ERSB rating, according to a recently released court document.
A US federal magistrate in Manhattan issued a signed order Tuesday allowing this case to go into settlement. The magistrate has given a March 12th deadline for the details of this settlement to be agreed upon. Obviously since settlement has only just begun, no official numbers have been announced on how much Take-Two can be expected to pay for its follies. In a letter, the lawyer for Take-Two stated that the parties, "agreed to engage in settlement discussions with the hope of amicably resolving this matter."
Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site, YouTube has been banned in Government schools in Victoria, Australia's second most populous state. The 1600 schools in the region have blocked YouTube due to an assault on a student that was later uploaded to the video sharing site. Education Services Minister Jacinta Allan said the ban was made to fight cyber-bullying.
The case, which is still being investigated by the police, included a group of male students, who attacked a 17 year old girl and then uploaded the video of the attack to YouTube last year. The attack took place in the outskirts of Melbourne. Allan said the schools and their ISPs already filtered Web sites that were available to students, and YouTube had been added to their list.
"The state government has never tolerated bullying in schools and this zero tolerance approach extends to the online world," Allan said. "All students have the right to learn in a safe and supportive learning environment -- this includes making students' experience of the virtual world of learning as safe and productive as possible."
Microsoft Corp. will release the next firmware update for the Zune music player device this month, according to Zune Insider. The site quotes the Zune release manager confirming that the Zune Firmware Update 1.3 will be available Mid-March. Here is what he said it will include...
We’re fixing the skipping problem that some users were experiencing – that is, content acquired from Zune Marketplace will no longer skip when played on the device.
Improved device and software reliability, when it comes to device detection, and improved sync'ing.
We’ve made some changes to the FM Tuner so it no longer drains the battery when in sleep mode.
Microsoft was relatively happy with how the Zune player performed over the 2006 holidays, even though the device still can't compete with Apple's iPod, and probably won't for a long time. Other Zune rumors have since emerged however, including a possibility of gaming content for Zune in the near future.
The recently released BitTorrent Entertainment Network promised to be a safe haven for digital downloaders everywhere. Unfortunately the new service was not met without a slew of problems.
Most of the problems stemmed after the consumer has already submitted his or her money for the digital content they wished to download. Early reports have shown that payment is received fast and easy, but when it comes to downloading files, people with PC's failed to be recognized by the service, yet people with Macintosh machines could browse perfectly. The problem with Mac users was that the files were not Mac-compatable and would have to be transferred to a PC to be viewed. Of course this is where the DRM practices come into play and quickly render the files utterly useless.
Not a great start for a noble venture. It seems that BitTorrent has their work cut out for them to ensure a secure and smooth ride for its consumers before people become frustrated and weary with the new service and decide to get their media elsewhere through less legal means.
Candidates for the U.S. 2008 Presidential Election are attempting to get some publicity from Google Inc's video sharing site, YouTube. Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson, and Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, have made their own channel on You Choose '08, setup by YouTube to allow candidates to exchange views with users.
Candidates can post videos on a specific subject and members of YouTube can post video responses or questions for the Candidates to answer. The politicians will of course, have control over what actually appears on their channel, but YouTube has proven to a weapon to use against a political opponent in the past.
If you remember, Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia, lost a closely fought election when a video surfaced on YouTube, showing him referring to a rival's staffer as "macaca", which is an African monkey. The man was of Indian origin.
Sony has confirmed that only a limited number of games will be playable on the European PlayStation 3 (PS3) console due to the removal of the hardware necessary for full support. However, the company said the number is supported titles is increasing every day and that by launch, about 1000 titles will be fully supported by the system.
"The situation is changing everyday, but on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1000 PS2 titles," Sony's president of worldwide studios Phil Harrison revealed to blog ThreeSpeech. Sony has noted that consumers expect backwards compatibility as a standard feature, especially since the full support was originally promised by the company.
However, the console maker believes that early adopters will be more interested in PlayStation 3 titles than playing their old PS2 games, and by providing regular updates, a steady stream of classic games will be supported by the system. "We're working to introduce a resource to the Web to detail which titles will have backwards compatibility. And as we make firmware upgrades, we will be able to add to that list," said Harrison.
Released yesterday by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), the FAIR USE Act has already received a great deal of criticism from everyone's favorite digital chaperone, the RIAA. The FAIR USE Act was submitted as a bill before US Congress in hopes of limiting the amount of control granted to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). RIAA representatives have stated that Representative Boucher's bill is a blatant attempt to undermine the securities of intellectual properties granted by the DMCA.
The RIAA released a statement saying "The DMCA has enabled consumers to enjoy creative works through popular new technologies. The DVD, iPod and the iTunes Music Store can all be traced to the DMCA. Online games, on-demand movies, e-books, online libraries, and many other services are coming to market because of a secure environment rooted in the DMCA's protections."
The term secure environment is the essential core of the DMCA. The meat of what the DMCA limits is the ways in which Digital Rights Management can be circumvented by making such tools to do so a taboo practice. This, in turn, gives content providers free reign to limit exactly how consumers can digest said content. The same can be said that without DMCA, content providers would be forced to make their product that much more appealing to consumers to assure public interest.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent out a stark warning to U.S. college students about downloading and sharing music files illegally on the Internet. The trade group, which represents the recording industry in the United States, including the big four major record companies, also offered students a way to settle disputes out of court.
The RIAA said it has sent out 400 letters to 13 Universities warning about copyright infringement lawsuits against students who use the University networks for piracy. It has asked the Universities to notify students that they will be sued, but can settle the cases before any lawsuit will be filed.
The trade group will continue to send out hundreds of letters each month in an effort to stamp out file sharing amongst students. Thousands of P2P users across the United States have been sued by the RIAA for using software like Limewire and Kazaa to download and share music files without paying for them.
According to BigChampagne, more than 1 billion songs are traded for free monthly, setting file sharing way ahead of the legal market. The RIAA and global record industry has blamed this statistic for a rapid decline in physical CD sales since 2000.
Cinézime, a French "video on demand" company for independent movies, will now offer some of its movies without DRM.
Its been a long time coming and finally the Apple TV has shipped, allowing consumers and critics to review and see if the Apple TV can be a hit like iTunes and the iPod.
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service has struck yet another content deal; this time with Major League Baseball. The deal will bring sports highlights to the iTunes download store, priced at the usual $1.99. The content includes a "MLB.com Daily Rewind" highlight show, as well as two weekly "Game of the Week" full-length games.
