According to Digitimes and Arstechnica, the much talked about 65nm version of the Xbox 360's "Xenos" GPU will be coming out sometime this fall.
The new GPU will be made on TSMC's 65nm process, due to the new availability of the 65nm eDRAM that goes into the product.
The console's "Xenon" 65nm CPU however, according to Chartered Semi, will be available by mid-2007 and so in theory a version of the console with a 65nm CPU and 90nm GPU could be available in the next few months.
Microsoft will want to begin using the new, smaller chips as soon as possible because the chips run cooler and that will help in redesigning the console's interior for lower costs and higher reliability.
The changes of instituting the new chips will eventually make the 360 cheaper to manufacture and those savings will be passed along to the consumer eventually when the console drops in price.
Basically, wait until the 65nm CPU and GPU are both in the console, as they new units will run cooler, and last longer.
According to Semiconductor Today, Shiroishi Semiconductor Inc., a subsidary of Sony, has claimed that they will be increasing production of the blue-violet laser diodes used in all Blu-ray Disc drives to an industry-leading 1.7 million diodes per month. The company has also set plans in motion to increase production to 5 million a month soon.
Increased production of the diodes will help lower prices of Blur-ray drives for consumers and hopefully lower the price of Sony's PlayStation 3
"The right question to ask is whether the full bill of materials is below $499, allowing them to cut price and still avoid losing money. I'm not competent to answer whether it is, but I am competent to say that when cost is below $499, we should look for a cut to that level," Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter told GameDaily BIZ. "The point is that if they're ramping capacity to [5 million diodes], they probably are coming down the cost curve for MPEG chips, dedicated disc drive processors, and every other component. Hard to say for sure, but I'd guess that Sony could squeeze a hundred dollars out of its cost by mid-year, maybe more."
"My guess is that you will see a price cut this year," he continued. "I think that the introduction of the Xbox 360 Elite gives Sony an opportunity to cut price and claim that they offer Blu-ray for only $20 more."
The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular and well-known public torrent tracker sites has announced it will start a new music download site in which the user pays whatever they can afford to download the tracks.
The Swedish-based file sharing organization has been a target of the MPAA, RIAA, and IFPI for some time now as the organization has a blatant disregard for the authority of those groups and becuase they provide a massive forum for the sharing of copyrighted material online.
The new music site, Playble.com will be a monthly subscription service but with a twist. The individual user sets what they want to pay, not the record labels or the site's administrators.
Co-founder Peter Sunde, says that "the artist will receive a portion of the user's fee every time his song is downloaded."
The site will be set up with the the Swedish glam-rock band, Lamont, which has been a vocal opponent of the current structure of the record industry.
"After lengthy discussions about the future of the record industry and its implications for the many talented artists and songwriters around the world, we discovered that we held the same vision," the group said in a statement on its website.
On Monday, the Bush administration added China, Russia and 10 other nations to its so-called priority piracy watchlist for failing to "sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy."
The 12 nations, as well as 31 other countries who were placed on a lower priority list, will be subject to extra scrutiny and eventually, if the administration sees it fit, they can bring trade cases before the WTO.
The list was reported in an annual report that the administration is required to give Congress that highlights problems that American corporation are facing with copyright policy worldwide, which the corporations contend is costing them billions in revenue each year.
"We must defend ideas, inventions and creativity from rip-off artists and thieves," U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab said in a statement accompanying this year's report.
The annual report, known as a "Special 301 Report," placed China, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India,
Israel, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela on the high priority list and the U.S hopes that Russia will fufill commitments in upgrading copyright protection. A U.S.-Russia accord last year involving copyright policy was seen by the Bush administration as a key milestone in Russia's efforts to join the WTO.
After the RIAA sent out its latest round of pre-litigation letters to universities around the country, the University of Wisconsin-Madison declined to pass on the letters to its students until a judge ruled in favor of the RIAA.
Today, according to the Capital Times, a federal judge has ordered the university to pass on the letters and hand over the names of the 53 students.
"U.S. District Judge John Shabaz ordered the university Wednesday to release the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses associated with each of the Internet connections," says the story. "The RIAA is likely to use the names and addresses to send settlement letters to students before it tries to proceed with a lawsuit."
Ken Frasier, the interim CTO at UW-Madison, has spoken up against the ruling however stating what many know; that IP adresses do not necessarily lead directly to people, especially if unprotected wireless is involved.
"Students share Internet ports and computers, and some IP addresses may lead to common areas such as labs," said Frazier in the story.
Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chris Liddell said that the company expects the platform-exclusive Halo 3 to boost the sales of Xbox 360 consoles when it is released later this year. "Halo 3 is clearly going to have a positive impact in two senses. One, it gives us more confidence in the number of consoles we think we're going to be able to sell next year," he said in a conference call while discussing Microsoft's Q3 results.
He added: "In terms of the direct impact, obviously it's a first-party product so it's reasonably profitable from our point of view, and it will be several hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue next year." Halo 3 is due out in Autumn and is a key product in Microsoft's 2007 line-up for the Xbox 360.
Slower sales of Xbox 360 consoles in Q3 resulted in a revenue drop for the company's Entertainment and Devices division. "Sales during the quarter in terms of sell-in were around 500,000 consoles. Sell-through was higher than that, so our inventory levels did come down to normal levels," Liddell said. "We did see a good inventory movement during the course of the quarter."
Nintendo Co. Ltd. has set a goal to double its combined annual Wii and DS software sales to about 300 million units. The Japanese video game maker did not give any time frame to reach this goal. "As a mid-term target it would be appropriate for us to establish a market in which we can sell about 300 million units of DS and Wii software," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told a news conference in Osaka.
Nintendo recently announced a 77.2% increase in profits helped by the overwhelming success of its Wii console and the DS handheld. In the year to March, Nintendo managed to sell 5.84 million Wii units, just barely missing its target. The company now hopes to sell 14 million Wii consoles in fiscal 2007/8.
Joost has signed up 31 advertisers worldwide ahead of the launch of its free Internet video service. It was founded by the founders of Skype, and original founders of Kazaa, Niklas Zennstrom and partner Janus Friis. The advertising deals are a major boost for Joost as it is set to compete with the likes of Apple Inc. Joost is currently still under beta testing ahead of its launch expected within months.
Viacom and CBS are two examples of major content deals Joost now has under its belt. Joost has set its sights on long-form programming instead of the YouTube approach which targets short-form amateur videos. The company currently has about 100 employees across the U.S. and Europe and is working with about 20 companies to develop marketing campaigns for its clients.
Companies that have agreed to support Joost's network include Coca Cola, Intel, United Airlines, Nike, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, EA, Nokia, Vodafone, General Motors Europe, Warner Bros, L'Oreal Paris and IBM. "Joost delivers a distinct environment: the ability to micro-target audiences with new and unique ads during professionally produced programming,"Nick Loria, Joost's senior vice president of global advertising, said in the statement released on Thursday.
Four men have pleaded guilty to selling pirated software on the Internet auction giant, eBay. The four sold counterfeit Rockwell Automation software with a retail value of more than $19.1 million through the service, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Eric Neil Barber of Manila, Arkansas; Phillip Buchanan of Hampton, Georgia; Wendell Jay Davis of Las Vegas; and Craig J. Svetska, of West Chicago, Illinois pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
Each of the defendants now face up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Three other defendants have also received felony convictions in the case. Neil Barber admitted to 217 eBay auctions for the software, making him $32,500 in profit compared to retail value of $1.4 million. Phillip Buchanan sold the software at 67 auctions, earning a profit of $13,100 compared to a retail value of over $2 million.
Wendell Jay Davis admitted to selling 53 pieces of Rockwell's software and earning $17,000 compared to a retail value of nearly $8 million. Craig J. Svetska admitted to 376 auctions, making a profit of $59,700 compared to a retail value of more than $7.6 million. Rockwell Automation produces specialized factory management software, with prices ranging from $900 to $11,325.
For some people, the idea of using a $50 antenna along with an LCD or Plamsa HD display that cost thousands of dollars makes little or no sense. However, it appears that in some areas, it is the perfect solution. Some local TV channels broadcast in HD over-the-air. Depending on signal and other factors, sometimes cable and satellite companies offer lesser quality due to compression on the signals.
"Eighty-year-old technology is being redesigned and rejiggered to deliver the best picture quality," said Richard Schneider, president of Antennas Direct. "It's an interesting irony." Schneider started producing antennas in his garage some years back and sold them from the trunk of his car. Now his company employs 7 people and did $1.4 million in sales last year.
"People thought I was nuts. They were laughing at me when I told them I was starting an antenna company," Schneider said. TV stations still broadcast analog signals and most now transmit HD digital signals as well. Getting a proper digital signal from an antenna will result in excellent picture quality, according to Steve Wilson, principal analyst for consumer electronics at ABI Research.
No matter how many discovered methods are banned, teenagers seem to have a natural ability to find a way to cheat during exam time. Baseball caps have been banned during exam times in places because answers can be written under the brim. Mobile phones were banned because students were found sending text message answers to each other. Now MP3 players are being thrown out because students are using them to cheat too.
Devices like Apple Inc.'s iPod and Microsoft's Zune are easily hidden, while an earbud and wire can be hidden from supervisors. For example, some students have been caught with an earbud and wire concealed in their sleeve which can be held to their ear easily by pretending to rest their head on their hand. MP3 players have been found loaded with mathematic formulas and other material.
"It doesn't take long to get out of the loop with teenagers," said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. "They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast." Mountain View banned digital audio players of all types when cheating activity was discovered. "A teacher overheard a couple of kids talking about it," said Maybon.
While Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division has announced a drop in losses, the company has shown a loss in revenues for the division. The Culprit? - Microsoft is blaming lower Xbox 360 unit sales. In the three months ending March 31st, the division made an operating loss of $315 million, compared to $402 million last year. Revenues fell to $929 million from $1.2 billion, a drop of about 21%.
500,000 Xbox 360 consoles were shipped during the quarter, compared to 1.7 million in the same period of 2006, which was the first full quarter the console had on the market since its launch in late 2005. The total number of shipments since the console was launched stands at about 11 million.
However, the first nine months in total of the company's fiscal year tells a different story of the division's performance, showing a rise in Xbox 360 console, peripheral and software sales. Adding on the sales of the Zune music player, there is a 42% year-on-year increase in revenues to $4.9 billion.
UK consumers may be pleased to hear that the BBC's proposed partnership with ITV to launch a free-to-view digital TV service transmitted via satellite has been given the go-ahead. The proposed service would include high-definition (HD) content. While the BBC already sends out its channels via satellite unencrypted, Sky offers more than 100 other free channels but requires that customers get their set-top box to decrypt them.
The BBC/ITV partnership would offer more channels to viewers free of charge as long as a set-top box is purchased. Of course, a dish also would need to be installed. It would offer more content than Freeview and would also have HD programming. Broadcasters are waiting for the transition to all digital transmissions to free up bandwidth for HD on Freeview.
The proposed service from the BBC and ITV also would be an advantage for users who live in areas where the Freeview signal is too weak.
In an announcement this morning, the Canadian government stated that they will be joining the U.S. WTO complaint against China over copyright infringement and intellectual property protection.
The government said they will be a "third party" in the complaint which was announced earlier this month.
The Department of Foreign Affairs claims that Canada's participation is based on "concerns expressed by Canadian stakeholders on a range of issues related to China’s intellectual property rights regime."
Michael Geist, however, does not agree with the Department's claims. He points out that China only imported $13 million dollars worth of Canadian culture, which is 0.5% of total Canadian culture exports. This fact alone leaves little reasoning behind the coalition except perhaps that Canada has succumbed to U.S. pressure, says Geist.
Although the EU declined to join the complaint when it was filed sources say now that it will, along with Japan, will join the complaints in the coming weeks. We hope this is on their own accord and not because of U.S. pressure.
According to a report by the Nikkei financial daily, Toshiba Corp. hopes to sell around 3 million players that are compatible with the HD DVD optical disc format in the current year to March 2008. Compare that target with 250,000 units in the last fiscal year. The report didn't cite any sources for the target. The global market for next-generation DVD players is seen at 4 million - 5 million units, with Toshiba hoping to take 60%-70% share.
According to the newspaper, Toshiba plans to continue to lower prices of HD DVD hardware, always keeping it lower than Blu-ray Disc. Toshiba would need to keep shipping lower-priced players to the United States, the largest market. Earlier this month, Toshiba slashed $100 off the price of its entry-level stand-alone players, bringing their price tags down to $399 and $499.
Hitachi subsidiary, Hitachi Plasma Patent Licensing (HPPL), has filed a lawsuit against LG Electronics and one of its subsidiaries for apparent use of Hitachi's plasma display panel technology. HPPL has been negotiating licensing terms with LG Electronics and LG Electronics USA but talks have proved fruitless, leaving HPPL to file a lawsuit to resolve the conflict.
Hitachi claims that technology used in LG's plasma display panels infringe as many as 7 of its patents. The company is seeking monetary damages and an injunction against LG which would block it from importing the panels into the United States. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, Hitachi showed off a sub-$2,500 50-inch 1080pHDTV plasma and LG followed with a 50-inch plasma a month later.
Apple Inc. sold 10.5 million iPods in the first three months of 2007, helping the company to record an 88% increase in profits. Profits rose from last year's $410 million to $770 million. Sales of iPods, along with strong sales for MacBook computers, boosted Apple's sales from $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion. "The Mac is clearly gaining market share," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Obviously, the company has said it is "very pleased" with its performance in the three months to 31 March, which was the most profitable quarter in the company's history. Demand for iPods rose 24% compared to last year and sales of Macintosh computers rose by 36%. "The company is growing substantially faster than the market and will continue for some time to come," said Jim Grossman of Thrivent Financial.
Nintendo has gotten a boost in profits thanks to demand for the Wii console and DS handheld. The company's net profits grew 77.2% to 174.3bn yen (US$1.4bn) in the year to 31 March and sales grew 90%. In the year, Nintendo sold 23.56 million DS consoles and hopes that figure will stay around the same for this year. Nintendo also hopes to sell 14 million Wii consoles in 2007/8, after selling 5.84 million in the year to March (since launch).
Nintendo share prices have doubled in the last year thanks to the success of its latest products. The products currently sold by the company aim to also appeal to casual gamers or even consumers who have never tried games consoles more than a handful of times. "The video game industry is now on a growth path," the company said.
Nintendo's Wii currently has two powerful rivals; Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) and Microsoft's Xbox 360, but its lower price tag, innovation in control and differing views for "next generation" has helped it to outsell both since it was released.
According to ATRACLife, the new Sony B100 series of portable MP3 players will kill off two of Sony's mainsteads, the ATRAC codec and the SonicStage file transfer application.
SonicStage, the bane of all previous Sony players, was very unpopular, and with the release of the B100 series, it will be gone. The same goes for the ATRAC format (Sony's competitor to MP3, WMA, and AAC) which was also offered on all previous players.
Shipping in May and with price unknown at the moment, the series will offer capacities of 1 GB to 4GB and FM radio and recording. It will also be able to play the above mentioned formats.
Although new Nine Inch Nails content has been available online and free at their website, NIN.com for some time now, the band made an interesting announcement on their website yesterday. The brief announcement stated that the band was releasing three new tracks for download but that they would be available via torrent protocol and that the torrents had been uploaded to The Pirate Bay.
The Pirate Bay is and has been, one of the largest and most popular public torrent trackers and the defiance of the admins to bullying by the US entertainment industry has made the site a symbol of the torrent community.
The three songs released are "Capital G", "My Violent Heart" and "Me, Im Not", and NIN's decision to upload these tracks shows that at least one band understands the importance of torrents in reaching out to their target audiences.
Irish Gardaí have seized about 3,000 counterfeit CDs and DVDs as part of an investigation in the midlands. The goods were found at five houses in the Edgeworthstown area of Co. Longford which were searched on Thursday morning. The Gardaí were assisted in the investigation by the Irish National Federation Against Copyright Theft (INFACT). The counterfeit movies, music and pornography was seized along with about 40 burners and 60 air rifles.
The goods were intended to be sold at at markets in the border and midlands area. The goods and equipment seized are valued at well over €80,000. No arrests have been made in connection with the searches, which uncovered the goods at two of the rented properties. A follow-up investigation is continuing.
Pinnacle Systems, Inc. is to launch its next-generation Pinnacle Studio line of video editing software. The suite is expected to reach store shelves in May 2007, the Pinnacle Studio 11 family is designed to meet the needs of a wide range of video enthusiasts with three products – Studio, Studio Plus and Studio Ultimate. The product family offers powerful video creation and sharing capabilities that address the latest consumer video trends.
The software supports new HD media types like AVCHD, the new operating system Microsoft Windows Vista and web publishing. "There are key trends happening from High Definition becoming truly accessible for video consumers, the proliferation of user generated content on the web and the introduction of new operating systems like Windows Vista," said Jeff Hastings, general manager for Pinnacle Systems.
He added: "Over the past months, we have focused on bringing the best tools to our Pinnacle Studio application for our users to take full advantage of these latest trends in video creation and consumption. AVCHD editing, HD DVD disc burning and one-click publishing to the web are among the new capabilities we are introducing with Pinnacle Studio 11, while preserving the intuitive, user-friendly experience for which our Studio software has become famous."
Sony Electronics has added three AVCHD high-definition camcorders to its line-up, including the world's smallest and lightest AVCHD high-definition camcorder, the Handycam HDR-CX7. It can record nearly three hours of full HD 1080 video on an 8GB Memory Stick PRO Duo media card (LP mode). Weighing just 15 ounces with the supplied battery, it provides ultra-portability as well as a virtually crash-proof recording system, instant archiving to Memory Stick PRO Duo media (sold separately), and effortless connection to a PC via USB for editing and back-up.
The new HDR-SR7 AVCHD high-definition camcorder can record more than 22 hours of full HD 1080 video on its built-in 60GB hard disk drive (LP mode). In addition to long recording times, this model offers compactness and Sony's HDD Smart Protection system to safeguard against data loss as well as easy connection to PCs via USB.
The new HDR-SR5 AVCHD high-definition camcorder can record more than 15 hours of full HD 1080 video on its built-in 40GB hard disk drive (LP mode). In addition to long recording times, this model offers compactness and Sony's HDD Smart Protection system to safeguard against data loss as well as easy connection to PCs via USB.
"Camcorder users are quickly embracing non-linear camcorder formats, such as hard disk drive and flash media, because they make it easy for anyone to view and access footage quickly," said Linda Vuolo, director of camcorder marketing at Sony Electronics. "Our models offer the added advantages of superior high-definition picture quality. With the widest range of consumer high-def models, we can satisfy the needs of virtually everyone."
The European Parliament has voted to pass the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2), designed to criminalize people for intellectual property breaches. Many opposed to the legislation say that it is dangerously unclear and that it has passed almost unchanged. However, the bill has at least been narrowed to exclude P2P file sharers, according to Italian MEP, Umberto Guidoni.
"Unfortunately, we were not successful in rejecting this directive, but at least we managed to secure some limitations that protect the private not for profit use of P2P and file sharing." Guidoni said. The directive now passes to the Council of the European Union, where ministers from member states will consider how to apply the directive in each state.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) spokesman Danny O'Brien said that the directive has passed without many amendments opponents requested and leaves consumers at risk for heavy criminal penalties. "We'd be satisfied if the scope of the directive stuck to the examples that the commission give as to its effect, which is copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting (which is the definition for criminal sanctions in TRIPS)," he said.
Former White House aide and former president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Jack Valenti, has died aged 85. He had been at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore for several weeks after suffering a stroke in March and died of complications from the stroke at his Washington, D.C., home on Thursday. "In a sometimes unreasonable business, Jack Valenti was a giant voice of reason,"Steven Spielberg said in a statement.
Spielberg added: "He was the greatest ambassador Hollywood has ever known, and I will value his wisdom and friendship for all time." When it comes to movies in the digital age, Valenti comes up regularly in controversial debates. In 1998, he lobbied for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), predicting that the Internet could become a popular venue for copyright infringement and cause damage to the Industry.
Valenti also made headlines in the 2003 Oscar Screener debate, in which sending screener copies of movies to critics and voters in various awards shows was banned. While Valenti heavily defended the ban to protect against Internet piracy, he backed down in 2004 to avoid a lawsuit being filed against the MPAA. However, some of Valenti's most famous work with the industry goes back a few years.
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs has cast doubt on the rumors that Apple will be forced to implement a music subscription model alongside its pay-once download service. Apple's iTunes is responsible for about 2.5 billion legal music downloads since the store first launched. As the company is getting ready to negotiate terms with record companies again, many believe Apple may have to submit and offer a subscription model too.
Record companies like subscription services because it provides recurring income, and as soon as a customer doesn't pay a fee, they lose access to their catalog of music. "Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," Jobs told Reuters. "The subscription model has failed so far." He added that, "people want to own their music."
Apple is expected to push more record companies to explore DRM-free music downloads in the negotiations. "There are a lot of people in the other music companies who are very intrigued by it," Jobs said of the move to sell songs without copy-protection software. "They're thinking very hard about it right now." The company had predicted that by the end of the year, half of the songs on iTunes could be DRM-free. "I think we're going to achieve that," he said.
Ohio University has finally decided that something had to be done about their P2P problems. After being tagged as the top piracy school by the RIAA last month, the University has decided to completely ban P2P from their campus network.
Starting tonight, the campus IT will begin to monitor for all P2P activity and if they find any computer engaging in file sharing, the computer will be taken offline until the student contacts the school's service desk.
"Left unchecked, P2P applications can consume all available network bandwidth," said Ohio University CIO Brice Bible. "In fact this happened at Ohio University years ago when the original Napster file-sharing program became widely available."
So far, Ohio University's actions seem to be a solo effort as other schools have yet to try an effort such as banning P2P. Some other schools did not rule out that option for the future however.
Some schools were afraid that by throttling P2P, they would also be stopping legitimate P2P from occuring. As one spokesman said "We're sort of stuck in the middle on this issue," he said. "We're getting pressure from the RIAA and being bombarded with preliminary notices, but there's nothing we can do other than pointing students to our acceptable use policy. If we try to kill off the Azureus traffic, we run the risk of throttling legitimate P2P traffic, too."
Yesterday, Apple confirmed that they had plans to bring full-length feature films to its iTunes store in Europe before the end of 2007.
The plans were confirmed by Apple's vice president Pascal Cagni, who is charge of the European branch of the company. Mr Cagni also confirmed that the company was launching the iPhone in Europe during the 4th quarter 2007.
In other Apple news, a company executive said Apple was going to add at least 70 outlets inside other retail stores in Europe by the end of the year.
Yesterday, Fuh Yuan and Wal-Mart both denied that the story reported earlier, that millions of dollars of HD players had been purchased by Wal-Mart for sale at $299 USD, and that there had been no deal made yet.
Fuh Yuan issued a statement stating that Wal-Mart was shopping around searching for a mass of HD-DVD players but there had been no deal made, nor a price set.
Wal-Mart only gave a brief denial of the reports, which lead analysts to suggest that Wal-Mart was indeed a supporter of HD-DVD and that they were searching for a mass amount of players in the format.
We may not know where Wal-Mart stands until the holidays or even beyond and for now the retailer will continue to sell players and discs in both formats.
On the manufacturing end, Toshiba said it will continue to license its HD-DVD technology to Chinese manufacturers in the hopes the prices of HD-DVD players will continue to plummet. Toshiba's current entry level bargain player, sold at $399 USD, is widely considered to be sold at below cost price, and $399 is still pretty expensive and aimed mostly at early adopters not the casual consumer.
After almost a decade of being the top video game maker, Sony now finds itself in third behind Nintendo and Microsoft and a turn around is obviously necessary.
Yesterday, in the latest string of developments in an effort to turn the company around it was revealed that PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi would leave the company by the end of June.
Sony expects to have a large $2 billion USD loss for its video game unit, fueled by slow sales for the PS3 and high operating costs for the console.
Kutaragi wil be replaced by Kazuo Hirai, the president of the worldwide PlayStation unit. Hirai is considered an ally of CEO Howard Stringer, the man who many feel asked for the resignation of Kutaragi.
Stringer and Kutaragi had a few disagreements over the years, and according to the Wall Street Journal, one of those issues was Kutaragi's lack of communication with other Sony officials. The disagreement eventually lead to Kutaragi losing control of daily operations. Further angering officials, Kutaragi went far over budget for PS3 development costs and questioned Sony's manufacturing practices.
BitComet 20070426 Beta has been released, providing a whole host of GUI improvements and bugfixes. BitComet is a BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP download management software, which is powerful, fast, very easy-to-use, and completely free. It contains many advanced features for BitTorrent download and extends its leading BitTorrent technology to HTTP/FTP to accelerate downloading up to 5 - 10 times faster, or more. AfterDawn users have downloaded this item almost 1.5 million times.
Here is the changelog...
GUI Improved: add an option in BT task properties dialog to add this torrent file to my shared torrent list
GUI Improved: add "view task" command to the context menu of my shared torrent list
GUI Improved: add a filter in the toolbar of peer shared torrent list
GUI Improved: display peer shared torrent file number in peer shared node of fav list
GUI Improved: add an option to enable BT task search for HTTP/FTP download source in perferences dialog
GUI Improved: add commands to import/export task list and global settings under file menu
GUI Improved: add "rename task" function in context menu of task list
GUI Improved: detail error information will be displayed in tooltip when mouse cursor hover on the red-cross icon of a task which encounter error like disk full
GUI Improved: task rating information will be displayed in tooltip when mouse cursor hover on comment region of the task list
GUI Improved: add hotkey Ctrl+Home/End to move selected tasks to the top/bottom of task list
GUI Improved: support scroll information in all panes on which the mouse cursor is hovering by rolling mouse wheel
GUI Improved: add an options in perferences dialog to enable submit video file snapshot after task download finish
GUI Improved: add an options in perferences dialog to enable protection against ARP cheating attack from LAN
GUI Improved: new designed BitComet resource browser to accelerate open web page from BitComet
GUI Improved: improve displayed information layout in task summary pane
GUI Improved: add "minimize to system tray" to system menu of BitComet button in windows taskbar
GUI Bugfix: all tasks will be displayed as in queue if enabled auto-start task when download rate below specified value
GUI Bugfix: all tasks displayed in task list will be removed if launch clear recycle bin in recycle bin context menu even they are not in recycle bin
Core Bugfix: fix a bug sometimes lead to memory leakage
Sony Corp. is to launch its rival to Google Inc.'s YouTube and other video sharing sites in Japan on Friday. The service, eyeVio, is expected to launch outside of Japan eventually but Sony wants to to gauge the reception at home before going worldwide. Last month, NBC Universal and News Corp. unveiled their plans to enter the area later this year.
"This is part of Sony's quiet software revolution," CEO Howard Stringer said at a news conference. "It's an opportunity to transmit user-generated video anywhere you want to, anytime to anybody, in a protected environment." Sony said that it would closely monitor the content uploaded to the service, hoping to avoid legal trouble.
Viacom filed a billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, accusing it of tolerating user piracy. Sony aims to creative a service that will attract content providers and also protect the image of advertisers. "We believe there's a need for a clean and safe place where companies can place their advertisements," Sony spokesman Takeshi Honma said.
Thanks to a three-year old company named Intent MediaWorks, P2P users will be able to download free and legal music via their regular P2P applications such as Limewire or Shareaza. What is the catch? When you start the download, a pop-up will appear asking the downloader to view an ad (either text or video) and in return they weill obtain the music legally and for free.
MediaWorks has done extensive testing on how to embed pop-ups in music and video files unobtrusively and the company says that surveys show that 60 percent of users are willing to endure the ads.
"Consumers don't want to rip people off," says Les Ottolenghi, president and co-founder of MediaWorks. "They just want to get music as easily as possible."
For the past few months, MediaWorks has been seeding P2P networks at a very fast pace. In February alone, its media content was downloaded 1.7 million times and the company expects that number to increase to 10 million by December.
For every 1000 views, it costs the advertiser $5.80 and usually $30 or more for videos, creating a healthy revenue stream for all involved. MediaWorks shares the money with artists and the record labels behind the artists which can choose to promote thier own artists in the ads.
In an astonishing announcement by the MPAA at the LexisNexis conference this week, Dan Glickman has stated that the movie studios have fully committed to interoperable DRM and believes that consumers should be able to play their legally purchased video material on any item in their household. Glickman also surprisingly announced that a plan was in the works to allow consumers to rip their DVD's for use on home media servers and iPods.
The plan is still in early stages but is a huge shift from the normal movie industry mindset. Throughout the speech Glickman stressed that DRM must be in use but should not restrict the consumer.
He also stated that the movie studios were willing to have a technology summit where content producers, IT companies and academics could work as a team to get DRM issues resolved. He made a point to show off Movie Labs, a $30 million dollar project funded by the studios as proof that all in involved where committed to inoperability.
In response to questions about the ripping of DVDs, which is currently illegal under the DMCA, Glickman answered that consumers would legally be allowed to rip their movies but suggested that some form of DRM would still be necessary. He did not elaborate.
Earlier this week, Ty Roberts, the CTO of Gracenote, made the bold claim that the music industry was "about to cave in the next six months" on the issue of DRM in music downloads.
Although Mr Roberts believes, and rightfully so, that it requires less "friction" now to get illegal content than it is to acquire the legal versions he also feels that the complete loss of DRM may not be so good for the music industry in the long run.
Paul Jessop, CTO of the RIAA, agreed with Mr Robert's latter statement as he stated that most consumers would see an open format download as a free download. He did however say that the RIAA wants the hassles of DRM to be sorted soon. The interoperability issues of DRM have been harming everyone in the business and the industry is calling out for an open DRM format or even the abandonment of the technology as a whole.
Jessop also said he did not care what decisions the labels make in the future in relation to DRM but he does see DRM in single downloads ending soon. DRM however, will still be necessary in monthly subscription services like Napster, he noted.
So far, flexible or open DRMs have not yet been widely developed and so interoperability will continue to be a problem at least in the near future.
We have added three new guides to our guide section covering several features of the AVS Video Converter, which is a part of the AVS Video Tools software bundle. AVS Video Converter is an easy to use software aimed especially for those who prefer a straight forward approach to video conversion, and do not want to fiddle with the details. More experienced users, who aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty, may find other, specialized tools more to their liking.
Anyone who has recently wanted to purchase a Nintendo Wii has almost certainly had problems finding one. The company is hoping to change that. According to a Nintendo spokesperson, the company plans to bump up production for the Wii in an effort to meet the high demand for the console.
"For the first three months of this year we have been producing one million hardware units per month. We are increasing the manufacturing capacity and forecast to ship 14 million in this fiscal year to our distributors and retail customers globally," the spokesperson said.
"We have put solid production plans in place to ensure a steady flow of product through 2007. We are constantly replenishing Wii supplies however with such high demand, stock is still flying off shelves so consumers should continue to be in touch with their local retailers to confirm when new stock is arriving."
These plans came after Nintendo's year-end financial results announced that 5.84 million Wii consoles had been sold since launch. Although that is a very high number, demand still continues to outstrip supply in many key markets.
When asked to comment about the shortages the spokesperson had this to say: "We are increasing our production capacity of Wii units, but with the unprecedented demand for the console we can’t predict that at this time."
Linux users may be happy to know that a couple of days ago Nero released the latest Linux version of its software suite, NeroLINUX v3.0.0.0 Beta. This version brings about some GUI improvements and follows its Windows equivalent with support for Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD burning. This version requires at least Kernel 2.4 as well as Glibc 2.3.2, libstdc++6 3.4 and GTK+ 2.4.10 (or later).
Some of its functionalities include...
NeroLINUX is able to burn the following formats
Data CDs/DVDs (ISO9660, UDF and UDF/ISO9660 Bridge)
As many of you may have read in the past couple of days, it seems that Jeanl has stopped the development of the excellent tools FixVTS and MenuShrink. MenuShrink can convert a motion menu to a still menu and keep all functionality, which helps greatly with backups on single layer DVDs. FixVTS skims through a DVD-Video compilation and adjusts it to better compliance, which fixed many problem while opening files with DVD Shrink and other tools.
The homepage for the tools (hosted by Videohelp.com) seems to have disappeared and there is no real explanation for the halting of development. However, it seems very likely that some of our favorite DRM companies may have been behind this, which followed the development halt of RipIt4Me. Sooner or later the details will emerge and we will know who to blame for a cheap shot against a developer of open source tools.
The source of both tools has been published so development of either can be picked up by anybody willing. Of course, you get your FixVTS and MenuShrink downloads right here at AfterDawn, as neither tool can be considered as capable of circumventing copy protection.
John Kennedy, Chairman and Chief Executive of International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has released a statement to the press concerning the ruling against Yahoo! China. IFPI filed 11 separate claims for an injunction and damages against the Chinese internet search engine Yahoo! China on behalf of local and international record companies in January 2007 after the service walked away from talks regarding its alleged infringement of the record companies' rights.
"This is a good news day for the music industry. This judgement will boost the growth of a licensed digital music business in China and provide better protection for intellectual property in this vast, exciting market. The ruling promises to improve the whole environment in which the local and international music industry does business in China.
"The Beijing Court has confirmed that Yahoo! China has clear responsibility for removing all links to the infringing tracks on its service. Since this is a judgment made under new regulations in China, today's judgment supersedes the previous decision on Baidu and confirms the responsibility of all similar music search providers in China.
After Blu-ray disc sales hit 1 million on Monday, the Blu-ray camp was quick to claim they were building an insurmountable lead.
Today however, the HD-DVD Promotional Grouphas disputed the Blu-ray claims, stating that 998,059 HD-DVD discs have been sold. The 2000 disc difference is certainly not an insurmountable lead.
"As more HD DVD titles hit the market and as prices for HD DVD hardware continue to drop below the $400 mark, we're seeing more equal week to week movie sales ratios between the formats," a group spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also claimed that presales for "The Matrix Trilogy" and BBC's "Planet Earth" showed strength for the format.
The group also took issue with the fact that the Blu-ray groups include the PlayStation 3 in overall hardware sales. They claim that when "true set-top boxes" are compared, HD-DVD holds a 4-to-1 margin over its rival.
"Bottom line is that HD DVD is staying focused across the board on creating great products at great prices," the spokesperson added.
Yesterday, Yahoo! Music launched the first legal lyrics website, thanks to a licensing deal with Gracenote, the company famous for CDDB. According to the press release, lyrics for over 400,000 songs from the Big Four will be initially available.
Although this is obviously not the first lyrics site available online, this is the first official and legal effort. Current lyric sites are known to have questionable advertising models such as spyware and many of the lyrics are incorrect.
"The highly fragmented music publishing industry (not record companies) owns the right to publish lyrics and has been very slow to pull together and bless a way of legally distributing them on the Internet. As a result, lyrics have been relegated to rogue sites riddled with popup ads, inconsistent formatting, and often incorrect transcriptions," remarked Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo! Music.
BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner and tons of independent music publishers have all opened their catalogues to Gracenote which is making its library available for free for the first time since they started building the library in 2005.
"Now lyrics take their rightful place next to artist bios, discographies, videos, and downloads. All free to you, dear music lover. So check out the lyrics to hits like I’m The One, Start!, Freewill, or even Michelle (that’s right, we have The Beatles)," added Rogers.
George Foreman has introduced a new grill for his line, and this latest one is iPod-ready.
The aptly named iGrill is a stand-up grill with a 10-watt speaker set that can play music while the main grill cooks your food. There is a USB port so the iGrill will also work with most digital audio devices besides the iPod.
The grill is already available and holds a $150 retail price.
According to reports by Gizmodo and Arstechnica, the releases of Samsung's 50 and 58 inch wireless HD-plasma displays will be delayed by Hollywood.
A Samsung senior marketing manager, Bill Dickey explained that the sets would be ready to ship earlier than their September street date if it werent for Hollywood's concerns about the security of the wireless transmissions. Apparently the market is ready for the product but the movie studios are not.
The movie studios have said they would not have an issue with the displays if they would output lower resolution video. They would not have an issue with 720p but 1080p is another story.
Of course Samsung would like to have 1080p output on thier TVs but the studios are afraid that the "wireless transmission methods used for the displays—which uses 802.11n—may not be tight enough to keep people from recording the HD content stripped of its DRM."
The movie studios need to approve of Samsung's wireless system by June if the company hopes to have the TVs ready by thier target date of September. "We have the technology, we are just waiting on approval and are currently negotiating for approval for June," said Mr Dickey.
In a seemingly ridiculous promotional effort for Blu-ray, Sony Europe has created a new website entitled "The Museum of Low Resolution".
The interactive site shows us Sony's vision of the future, a future where Blu-ray is the only high def format, and a world where low resolution TV is a long forgotten memory worthy of its own museum.
If you visit the site you can tour three virtual "museum exhibits", the "Time Tunnel," "The Science Room," and "The Art of HD."
"The Art of HD" gives a visual explanation of what Blu-ray is through a few interactive flash based exhibits that explain the disc's resolution power and storage capacity.
It is an interesting website if you are curious to check it out although be prepared for Blu-ray propaganda.
In a follow up to our Folding@home story here, the latest stats for the project show that over 250,000 PlayStation 3 users have now signed up. The number is very impressive considering the project has only been active for one month.
Stanford University's research now reports that they are enjoying computing power of 700 teraflops in a single moment, with 400 of those coming from PS3 owners.
Standford also reported that the console has helped bring recognition to the project and that PC contributions have increased 20 percent.
"The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward," said Vijay Pande, associate professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead.
"Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases."
The project also released a software update yesterday, version 1.1. The new update "improves visibility of donor locations on the globe, folding calculation speed and protein viewing. There's also additional language support, help screen hints, and improved donor-name length and character handling."
In China, a bootleg DVD of Spider-man 3 has hit the streets with a $1 price tag, premiering 2 weeks before the movie even debuts in the US.
This latest report is sure to anger the MPAA and American movie distributors especially because the movie reportedly cost $500 million dollars to make.
Earlier this month, the US filed complaints against China with the WTO claiming the China was not doing enough to punish movie pirates and that their restrictions on media imports were violating trade rules. China criticized the move and the Vice Premier, Wu Yi, threatened that the complaints would "badly damage" cooperation, and emphasized that China was doing alot to enforce copyright protections.
"The United States Trade Representative, the USTR, has totally ignored the massive strides China has made," Wu told an intellectual property forum in Beijing.
China did however say that they would formulate an anti-piracy action plan and that they had arrested 998 people last year for copyright infringement.
"Over the last few years, the amount of manpower and work that China has put into protecting intellectual property rights and the results that have been achieved, have been unprecedented," Wu said.
"Every year we have nationwide events to protect intellectual property and we have always kept up the pressure on the pirates. The effects of this clean-up get better every year."
Sony however, has so far claimed that the DVDs are a hoax and are really just copies of Spider-man 2. In a statement Sony reported that "Contrary to news reports about stolen copies of 'Spider-Man 3' being sold illegally on the streets in China, our investigation in China has revealed no case of the film being pirated to date...After an initial investigation of online sites worldwide, we have so far found no pirated copies of 'Spider-Man 3' on the Internet."
Sales of PC games seem to be poised for a sales resurgence in the U.S., reversing an almost decade long decline. In 2006 sales increased to over $970 million, a 1% gain over 2005, when they fell over 13%. So far this year the trend seems to be continuing, with January and February figures showing a 48% increase over the same period a year earlier.
The biggest reason for the improvement in 2006 seems to be the 43% growth in sales of PC role-playing games. While consoles, starting with the PS2, have come to dominate such genres as first person shooters and driving games, the more complex controls and interface of role-playing games tends to give the PC an advantage.
PC games will also be getting some help from hardware vendors. Besides being the parent company of Alienware, one of the first computer retailers to specialize in gaming PCs, Dell is also now selling high end gaming computers. Hewlett Packard, on the other hand, is working on prototypes for new hardware, like a display that wraps around the user, and plans to have some new products available for sale later in the year. Microsoft is also targetting the gamer market with a new USB adapter for connecting XBox controllers to a PC.
In an update to our article here,HP has hit Acer with four new counts of patent infringement adding to the 5 counts from the previous suit which was filed last month.
In an effort to protect its 20 percent share of the global PC market, HP added the new counts which include alledged infringements "covering power and heat management, regulation of the data bus, and video scaling".
According to IDC, Acer is on track to replace Dell for #2 in market share and has been experiencing large industry growth in the past year, growth larger than its competitors.
It is obvious that HP is doing anything they can to protect their market share lead from Acer and the new suit asks that all sales of Acer machines with alledged patent infringements be stopped completely. HP is also asking for a large cash damages sum and with such giants fighting it seems this dispute will drag on for a long time.
Reports have been coming in from many sources claiming that Wal-Mart is ordering 2 million high definition players produced by the Great Wall Corporation in China and developed by TDK in an effort to sell inexpenisve next generation players. The reports claim the players will be sold for under $300 USD however the type of next generation player is still up for debate.
A translation of the Chinese reports indicate that the players are “Blu-ray (or blue light) HD DVD players" which is confusing as both formats use blue or violet lasers. Until there is an English announcement we may not know which format the players are intended for.
Wal-Mart spokesperson Mellissa O’Brien would not comment on the apparent deal between the retailer and its Chinese manufacturing partners, but did offer to Home Media Magazine, “[Most] of the shoppers asking about and purchasing either Blu-ray or HD DVD are already pretty savvy technically about both — they are the kind of consumer that absolutely wants the very best and latest in quality that's available. It's not quite yet a product the average shopper is attune too, but we anticipate that will change very soon as prices continue to come down.”
Yesterday, Beijing's No. 2 Intermediate People's Court ordered the Chinese arm of Yahoo! to pay 210,000 yuan ($27,000 USD) to the record labels that had brought the suit forward claiming that the search engine infringed copyrights by allowing links to pirated music on its engine.
Included were such giants as Warner Music Group, Universal and BMG.
After the decision was handed down, the company stated that they would be appealing, arguing that "it was already doing all it could to protect intellectual property, and shouldn't be held liable for content on third-party sites".
In a similar case last year, the court ruled in favor of the search engine Baidu.com and so the Yahoo decision was somewhat surprising.
However, the court decision did admit that Yahoo wasn't completely to blame for the infringement, despite the fact that their links helped aid the piracy process.
The case was filed by the IFPI in January and after the decision was handed down, the group praised the court:
"This judgment will boost the growth of a licensed digital music business in China and provide better protection for intellectual property in this vast, exciting market," chairman and CEO John Kennedy said.
"The judgment gives our members the legal basis to require all music search engines in China to remove infringing links from their service - which we will do," he continued.
Today, the German media conglomerate Bertlesmann settled with Warner Music for over $110 million.
The agreed settlement is related to Bertlesmann's involvement with the original Napster that was infamous for being the beginning of P2P and mass music piracy. In 2000, Bertlesmann invested heavily in Napster and has been paying for that decision ever since.
In the past year they have settled with Universal for $61 million and EMI for a undisclosed amount.
Rumors have been swirling for weeks that internet giant, Amazon will be the next major name to enter the world of unprotected music sales.
Amazon hopes to open the MP3 download store in May and many analysts see the retailer being the only company that can truly compete with iTunes.
According to a recent report in the UK's Times Online, Amazon has approached "all the music majors in the past fortnight" in hopes to launch its store by May. Amazon hopes to launch by May because that is when iTunes will begin selling DRM-free music from EMI and Amazon would like to launch with DRM-free music from EMI as well in order to compete.
Although Amazon's heart is in the right place, they will have a tough time competing with Apple. Apple has begun renegotiating with the Big Four and industry executives have stated that Apple will have the upper hand in pressing for DRM-free music due to their immense market share. Although the labels keep a strict facade about DRM, industry sources have noted that the rest of the Big Four following in EMI's footsteps is just "a matter of time."
According to Home Media Research, Blu-Ray has become the first high definition format to sell one million discs, an incredible milestone that was achieved in under a year. Also released in the figures from HMR was that about 70 percent of high def movies sold in the first quarter of 2007 were Blu-Ray discs.
March sales were a hefty 75 percent for Blu-ray according to HMR.
Industry analysts have suggested that those numbers are due to the fact that there are an increasing number of blockuster movies on Blu-Ray disc, most of which are only on BD and not on HD-DVD.
“Sales of Blu-ray Disc titles have taken off since the first of the year,” said Andy Parsons, Chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association’s U.S. Promotion Committee and Senior Vice President New Product Development at Pioneer Electronics. “Blu-ray Discs have been outselling HD DVD by more than two to one since the beginning of the year and the gap is steadily widening. It’s exactly what we’ve said all along would happen - the strong support for Blu-ray among movie studio and equipment manufacturers means that consumers have more choices when it comes to players and titles. And they’re choosing Blu-ray by an ever-increasing margin.”
In an interesting announcement, Sony boss Phil Harrison has stated that Sony would like to open up the PlayStation 3 further to independent game developers in the near future.
"I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone," Harrison said in an interview.
"We were one of the first companies to recognise this in 1996 with Net Yaroze on PS1. It's a vital, crucial aspect of the future growth of our industry."
Harrison admits that nowadays the avenues into homebrew are not as open as they once were and that is because the processes "are largely closed by the nature of the videogame systems themselves being closed".
"So, if we can make certain aspects of PS3 open to the independent game development community, we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent," he added.
This is certainly a different approach than Sony has taken with their PSP console. Many homebrew developers for the PSP have often been struck down by firmware updates by Sony hoping to lock out hackers and pirates.
We hope to see something good coming out of this announcement in the future.
A few weeks back we reported that Sony had dropped the price of the the PSP in North America from $200 to $170 USD and it seems in the aftermath of that decision, Sony is deciding to drop the price of European PSPs as well.
Sony's plans are to cut the price from GBP 149.99 to 129.99 and EUR 199.99 to 169.99, starting May 4th.
In addtion, the price of Platinum titles such as Tekken and Killzone will drop to GBP 14.99.
"PSP is unique and is constantly evolving. It offers the widest palette of mobile entertainment, from gaming to video, music, photos and Internet," said Sony UK managing director Ray Maguire.
"But now the exciting possibility of connecting remotely to PlayStation 3 makes PSP more relevant than ever. So what better time to offer a brand new price point, and the launch of five new Platinum titles?"
Hew Raymond Griffiths, the leader of the warez group "Drink or Die" and who has already spent 3 years fighting extradition to the US from his home in Australia, has pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement” and could possibly face 10 years in prison along with a $500,000 fine.
Griffiths, who had never even visited the US became the first foreigner to be extradicted to the US to face charges of copyright infringement. He had spent 3 years in an Australian prison fighting the extradition, but a court in Australia ruled against him earlier this year.
Back in 1999, Griffiths proclaimed that he was in control of more than 20 of top warez servers worldwide and made the bold claim that he would never be caught.
In 2001, he and a few others were busted during US Custom raids under the banner "Operation Buccaneer" and Griffiths was identified as the leader of DrinkOrDie.
In Feburary he was arraigned in court and yesterday pleaded guilty to the charges against him.
In the past week, the Xbox 360 Elite has been opened up and dissected and experts have checked every aspect of the new console.
During this inspection, the new 120 GB HDD was checked and it turns out Microsoft is overcharging for the drive, and overcharging alot. The drive is a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 2.5" laptop drive and doing a quick google search exposes that the drive sells for $100 average.
Im sure Microsoft can justify the extra $80 they are charging the consumer for the drive, but the question is, will we buy their reasoning?
Fastmac, an optical drive maker for Macs, announced today that they had begun shipping the first and only Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade "for Apple's PowerBook, iBook, and MacBook Pro notebook systems".
The new slimline, slot loading drive is compatible with standard DVD and CD media and will also provide up to 50GB of storage per disc.
The new drive is priced at $800 and requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.
For the past few months, Polish authorities have mounted an operation against a file sharing DC++ network situated on the campus of Koszalin University of Technology.
On Wednesday, police officers assisted by ZPAV, the Polish branch of the IFPI and MPAA, raided the campus, and seized one main PC running the DC++ hub software, 10 laptops and 60 hard drives. According to the police, an astonishing 35,000 GB of pirated movies, music and software was available to download from the network.
The three administrators of the hub, students of the college, were arrested, and more charges seem iminent.
In the last 6 months, ZPAV claims to have caught 267 uploaders, offering a total of 778,000 music tracks for download on file-sharing networks.
Today, Sony released the first usage statistics for the PlayStation 3's online service, the PlayStation Network.
According to Dave Karraker, Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior director of public relations, the Network now boasts more than 1.3 million users worldwide and of that number, about 600,000 come from North America. In total, about 3.7 million pieces of content have been downloaded from the PlayStation Network since launch but Sony did not reveal how many of those "pieces" were games.
Of course, the PlayStation Network cannot compete with Xbox Live yet, but this strong start implies that perhaps the free Sony Network will be able to compete in the future with the pay-for service from Microsoft. To date, Xbox Live has 6 million users who have downloaded 25 million Xbox Live Arcade games from Xbox Live Marketplace.
Jon Lech Johansen, known on the internet as "DVD Jon" for his infamous cracking of anti-piracy protection on DVDs has posted on his blog that he is searching for a few talented coders that would be interested in working for DoubleTwist Ventures. To date, the company has reversed engineered Apple's FairPlay DRM system and it seems they are looking to do more in the near future.
Johansen's blog said the company is looking for a "reverse engineering specialist to work on DRM interoperability technology and the company also wants to hire a "senior code monkey to work on audio/video products".
DoubleTwist is working on interoperability technology that would allow users to play music bought from Apple's iTunes store on any portable device not just an iPod.
This new effort is an interesting development and one that we will keep a close eye on.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Sony was reconsidering its pricing strategy for the PlayStation 3 in hopes of accelerating sales in North America and Japan.
Their article quotes Sony president Ryoji Chubachi as saying, “We are re-examining our [PS3] budgeting process in terms of pricing and volume. Sales assumptions change and the market is competitive. We are in the midst of revisiting our strategy for the PS3.”
However, after those comments were made, Bloomberg News quoted a Sony spokesperson refuting the comments. “PS3 prices and shipment plans for the future should be determined by market trends and competition. Sony currently doesn't have any specific plan to cut the PlayStatio 3's price,” said company spokeswoman Mami Imada in Tokyo.
At this point, with PlayStation 3s being sold at considerable losses, it seems impossible to drop the prices, even to increase sales.
We hope Sony reps can all get their stories straight so there is no more confusion as to the current pricing strategy.
According to Sony America, the European launch of the PlayStation 3 has constrained supplies to North American retailers.
Although the company stated that PS3 sales were up 2 percent for the month, they added, "We continued to find ourselves supply constrained in March due primarily to the shift in manufacturing focus to the PS3 PAL version to support the launch of the system in Europe."
The Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 by over 70,000 units but for the month, its sales were down 12 percent. The Wii finished with double the sales of the PS3 but saw its sales fall by 22 percent.
In non next-gen news, the Playstation 2 outsold all the the next gen consoles, and both the Nintendo DS and the PSP sold very well for the month.
"March 2007 showed a 24 per cent increase in retail dollars generated year-over-year for the PlayStation brand in North America with total sales of USD 447 million, due in part to the addition of the PS3 platform as well as the strong launch performance of God of War II for PS2 at retail," the company's statement reads.
"On the software front, we were pleased to see sales increases from February for both the PSP and PS2. PS2 software showed a 29 per cent increase with the launch of God of War II and PSP software demonstrated a 13 per cent jump."
Although Sony CEO Howard Stringer recently called the European launch of the PlayStation 3 a success, sales around the UK have been dropping and in response several prominent UK retailers have decided to drop the price of the PS3 to as low as £387.87, almost £40 less than the suggested retail price.
“PS3 performed well pre-launch and the first week of release, but since then sales have dropped considerably,” said Gameseek.co.uk boss Stephen Staley. “I am sure the deal will help matters. I personally believe the cuts are down to overstocking from launch. Credit goes to Sony for supplying all of the demand, however this has left most retailers with a lot of stock and with the consoles costing around £400, you can imagine it’s not healthy for any business to have a lot of PS3 consoles gathering dust in a warehouse."
“We are obviously selling the console at a loss to try and attract new customers to our site. We are sure the PS3 is going to be big business for us over the next eight years so to get a good foothold in this market is essential," Staley added.
The retailers are hoping that these price cuts will help spark some sales growth of the PS3s that are not leaving store shelves as quick as they would hope.
Starting on April 29th, consumers can sign up for a new music download subscription service started by Circuit City and Napster. The service, entitled "Circuit City + Napster" will give users access to Napster's unlimited content service as well as offer 99 cent single song downloads.
The service will work just like Napster does now (unlimited downloads for $15 a month) but now, just like its main competitor, iTunes, users can purchase prepaid cards for tracks in bundles of 15, 25 and 60 or purchase single tracks for 99 cents. These tracks are yours forever, unlike the Napster tracks which are no longer functional when you stop paying for the monthly subscription.
"Our goal with music and movies is to excite and inspire our customers to fully enjoy their portable and in-home electronics, and we're thrilled to enter this strategic relationship with Napster," said Irynne V. MacKay, Circuit City's senior vice president and general merchandise manager for entertainment. "Circuit City + Napster will offer our customers a new avenue to find, share and delight in music. Increasingly, consumers are turning to the digital environment for entertainment and this new service will give our customers easy access to the content they want, when and how they choose to enjoy it."
As reported last month, Take Twosued Jack Thompson in an effort to win a restraining order against him.
According to last boss, Jack Thompson has settled with Take Two, and agreed to the following terms:
-He will not sue or threaten to sue to block sale or distribution of any game published by Take Two or its subsidiaries (i.e., Rockstar)
-He will not communicate to Take Two or anyone doing business with T2 (like, say Wal-Mart) any accusation that the company committed any wrongdoing by selling its games. Thompson is not restricted from criticizing the content of T2 games, nor is he prevented from acting as counsel in lawsuits brought against Take Two by other parties
-He will make any future contacts with T2 through its attorneys
On the other end, Take Two dismissed their claim and dropped the contempt of court charge against Mr Thompson.
It seems for the time being, gamers can play their violent games in peace.
For the first time in the Czech Republic, a man has been sentenced to prison time for illegal music file sharing.
According to officials, the man caused damage of about one million crowns ($50,000 USD) and for his crimes he received a 7 month sentence.
"We have uprooted the myth that the Internet is an anonymous environment. This simply is not true. Everybody who gets on the Internet actually becomes...a specific, non-anonymous participant," Jaromir Soukup from the Czech branch of the IFPI said.
Petra Zikovska, the head of the Czech branch of the IFPI stated that the group has been fighting against unauthorized music file sharing for over a year.
Zikovska also stated that on April 11th, the police, in cooperation with the IFPI, raided the homes of 13 suspected file-sharers and seized 20 PCs and hundreds of CDs so it seems more sentencing may be coming in the near future.
Soukup said that those who "violate copyright face up to two years in prison and a fine twice as high as the damage caused."
He also mentioned that the sentencing should help the public learn that unauthorized P2P file sharing is illegal as he understands that many do not know that it is.
On Tuesday, Panasonic issued a firmware update, to v2.0, for its DMP-BD10 Blu-ray player which adds support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD High-Resolution audio formats.
According to Panasonic, the update adds the following fixes and enhancements:
-Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio are supported. A new decoder is incorporated to support the latest high quality multi-channel surround sound formats.
-Functions of EZ Sync(North America) or VIErA Link(Europe/UK, Oceania) are enhanced.
-You can now seamlessly operate multiple connected components with one remote control.
-Improved playability and stability
Its good to see that firmware upgrades are coming out for next gen players, and we hope to see more upgrades in the near future.
With Sony's latest system update, released today, PlayStation 3 gamers will soon be able to download and play PSone titles on their new console.
The firmware update, to version 1.7, introduces new technology that which will enable the console to play PSone titles bought from the PlayStation Store. These titles were only currently playable on the PSP but that is set to change. Also included in the update is the ability for save data for the PSone to be used on the PSP, and improved support for vibration functions on older console peripherals, including the Logitech GT-Force Pro steering wheel.
The update is for all owners, including those in Europe which had not had the option to download any PSone titles until today.
Sony also released a firmware update for the PSP, version 3.40. A new security system will force PSP owners to upgrade to the new firmware update if they want to continue playing emulated PSone games on their handheld.
According to the BBC, Microsoft has designed a new color barcode which can store extra information and be scanned using camera phones and webcams.
The new barcodes, entitled "High Capacity Colour Barcodes" will appear next to the current UPC codes on upcoming DVDs and Xbox 360 titles.
Research engineering director Gavin Jancke described HCCB as "more of a 'partner' barcode", adding, "The UPC barcodes will always be there. Ours is more of a niche barcode where you want to put a lot of information in a small space."
The barcode itself will include 8 colored triangles which can hold as much as two times the information that a UPC code can. Consumers can use their webcams or camera phones to scan the new barcodes and access the data which can include the URL of a website offering downloadable content for the game or even an email address.
Jancke also added, "The capability of these new bar codes to store more data in a smaller space should provide a rich resource for the industry and consumers alike," "The new code offers several advantages over existing black-and-white bar codes most people are accustomed to seeing on product packages, enabling new consumer experiences, more visual appeal where aesthetics are important and the ability to incorporate advanced security features."
DisplayPort, a digital display interfaced standard developed by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to replace DVI and VGA as the new standard for connection (mainly) PC equipment, is now set to use fiber-optic cables as an optional alternative to copper. Luxtera Inc. has gotten the go ahead from VESA to develop DisplayPort technologies using CMOS photonics as the DisplayPort task force approved the addition of Hybrid Devices to the specification as a standard alternative solution to copper cables.
"This addition is another technical advantage of the DisplayPort standard. It opens new opportunities for the industry to standardize and certify optical video interconnect solutions for longer reach display applications such as digital signage and projection systems," said Earl Joseph, Program Vice President of IDC's High-Performance Systems.
This is the first time the industry has recognized and approved high performance optical video interconnect technology, with the broad based support of the PC industry. For major PC and display manufacturers, a product must have a logo in order to be considered for sale. Now one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of optical video interconnect technology, such as Luxtera's CMOS Photonics, has been removed.
Cyberlink Corp. has released the retail version of the PowerDVD Ultra application in Germany. The software, which is a player for the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) optical disc formats, was released online on Christmas Eve 2006. With optimized hardware acceleration for graphics processors, and compatibility with leading HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives, PowerDVD Ultra delivers the ultimate high-definition movie experience on both desktop and notebook computers.
"We're proud to announce the launch of CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra in European stores," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs really do offer a totally new entertainment experience, and PowerDVD Ultra provides all the features necessary to make the most of the latest high-definition disc content."
The online version of PowerDVD Ultra initially released allowed users to either install a HD DVD player or Blu-ray player, but has been replaced by a single dual-format player. Consumers who bought the online version before February 15 can request a free replacement with the latest online version.
Roxio, a division of Sonic Solutions, has released the CinePlayer DVD Decoder Pack, an enhancement for Windows Vista that provides high-quality DVD viewing in Windows Media Player. The Windows Vista version of Sonic's extremely popular plug-in for Windows XP, CinePlayer DVD Decoder now also supports Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound for enhanced audio enjoyment.
"We are extremely pleased that Roxio is one of the technology leaders engaged in supporting the launch of Windows Vista and is working with us to bring the DVD playback experience to all Windows Vista users," said Justin Hutchinson, Senior Product Manager in the Windows Business Group. "By making the CinePlayer DVD Decoder available to end-users, OEMs, and corporate accounts, Sonic is enabling people to enjoy quality movies experiences on Windows Vista."
Nero has announced the addition of high-definition (HD) video authoring and playback capabilities to Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced. The updated version allows users to harness the full power of high definition video, including AVCHD and editable Blu-ray (BD-AV) video capturing, authoring and playback. An optional plug-in adds HD DVD-Video playback capabilities as well.
"Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced includes more than 20 industry-leading applications in a single suite, making it the most powerful and versatile digital media entertainment solution available," commented Udo Eberlein, Chief Operating Officer, Nero AG. "The addition of AVCHD, Blu-ray and HD DVD support places Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced on the forefront of high definition video creation and management."
AVCHD, a new camcorder format developed by Sony and Panasonic, uses the highly efficient MPEG-4AVCcodec. With Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced, users can now Capture video from AVCHD camcorders, manipulate the footage, and then use the suite's Nero Vision application to author the content to a wide range of commonly used media formats such as DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, Memory Sticks and SD cards, in full HD quality (up to 1080p).
According to AT&T, Apple Inc.'s iPhone is on track for release to the U.S. market by the end of June. A senior executive with AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive deal with Apple to offer the infamous iPhone in the region, made the comments on Wednesday. "Our expectations are good. Our testing has been good," said AT&T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson. "The iPhone is on target to launch in June."
The iPhone is by far one of the most anticipated consumer electronics products of this year. It is Apple's first mobile phone, which the company hopes will mimic the success of the iPod, which was sold an incredibly 100 million units. Lately therre has been speculation spread mostly by blogs indicating that technical problems would delay the iPhone.
AT&T claims to have received requests for iPhone information from 1 million consumers through a website setup for the purpose. Stephenson did not reveal how many iPhones will be available at launch however. "We're sorting through that right now," he said. "We got a million people waiting to buy it so we're hoping we get a million." He made the comments while in Boston to speak at a Boston College Chief Executives' Club luncheon.
According to an interesting study carried out by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the negative reporting that surrounds violent video games leads many gamers to try them out. The study suggested that violent games that frequently made the headlines were the most attractive. The report also dismissed the idea that videogames have an absorbing or addictive effect on the player.
"We were particularly interested to see that this research suggests that, far from having a potentially negative impact on the reaction of the player, the very fact that they have to interact with the game seems to keep them more firmly rooted in reality," commented David Cooke, director of the BBFC.
He added: "People who do not play games raise concerns about their engrossing nature, assuming that players are also emotionally engrossed. This research suggest the opposite – a range of factors seem to make them less emotionally involving than film or television."
The research was conducted with the help of games players, journalists, parents and industry figures. All types of games were included in the study, ranging from Rockstar's famous Grand Theft Auto series and Manhunt to Championship Manager and Sims. The linking of Manhunt to the 2004 murder of teenager Stefan Pakeerah, tempted most of the respondents to try out the title.
Today, the RIAA released its year-end shipment stats for 2006 and the results were not surprising. Physical media shipments declined again while downloads continued to skyrocket.
Overall revenue declined again as sales of digital media failed to recoup the losses of falling CD sales.
For the year 2006, the RIAA reports that manufacturers shipped 553.2 million units which included all physical media like CDs, singles and vinyl albums as well as music videos. That number is a 13% decline from last year and almost a 50% decline since 2000.
Digital sales however, continue to be a huge success for the music industry. The RIAA reported a 27.6% increase in sales from 2005, and if you were to remove mobile downloads such as ringtones, the increase is a hefty 63%.
Although those numbers are nowhere near the growth of 166% from 2004 to 2005, the industry is still very pleased with the numbers.
"Today's music marketplace has challenges but it also offers reason for hope and optimism," said RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol. "The appetite for music is as strong as ever and a digital marketplace now worth nearly $2 billion has emerged virtually overnight."
We reported a couple days ago that users were reporting playback issues with a few of Sony's new DVD releases .
Sony has now reported that they have fixed the glitches on the releases Casino Royale, The Pursuit of Happyness and Stranger Than Fiction.
According to Sony, the problem was due to an update of its ARccOS copy-protection system which Sony has been using on all its DVDs for the last two years.
“Recently, an update that was installed on approximately 20 titles was found to cause an incompatibility issue with a very small number of DVD players (Sony has received complaints on less than one thousandth of one percent of affected discs shipped),” the company said in a statement. “Since then, the ARccOS system has once again been updated, and there are no longer any playability problems.”
Sony reported that they will be replacing all "broken" discs as well. All that is necessary is to call their Customer Service at 800.860.2878 and ask for further instructions.
Future buyers of Sony DVDs should be warned however that ARccOS is known to have compatibility problems with some models of Sony, Toshiba and Harman Kardon DVD players.
According to handset component makers, the manufacturing of Google handsets have begun and shipments of the phone are expected to officially commence by Christmas 2007. The makers also said they expect the shipment volume to reach as high as one million units.
The makers pointed out a few features of the phone. The phone will "support Texas Instruments' (TI) 3G platform and EDGE, pointed out the makers. The handset, however, will not feature GPS functionality. The device will also feature built-in G-mail and Google search."
Industry watchers also expect Google to partner with European provider Orange for the launch of the handset. Google has been in communication with other service providers as well, but nothing is set in stone yet, according to sources.
Yesterday, Pioneer debuted its Blu-ray Disc Combo drive model, the BDC-S02 in Beijing. The player is set for immediate launch in China and soon the rest of the world at a very affordable price of $299 USD.
According to Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan, "The BDC-S02 can playback high-definition movies on BD-ROM, BD-R (recordable), BD-R DL (single-sided double-layer), BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-RE DL discs as well as common DVD and CD discs".
This is good to see that Blu-ray players are starting to come down in price and hopefully the competition will bring forth even more price drops.
Just hours after the worst mass shooting in US history occurred on the campus of VT (our hearts go out to the families of the victims), Jack Thompson found his way onto Fox News and blamed the shooting on violent video games.
Be reminded that this was hours before the suspect was even identified.
We dont have exact quotes of what Thompson said, but watching the video you can plainly see that many of his comments are misleading and some are just false.
It is saddening to see that Thompson is using a massive tragedy to pawn off his personal agenda.
Today, Sony and SanDisk jointly announced that they are developing a new solid state storage media for video recording. The cards, SxS memory cards, will have data transfer rates of 2.5 gigabits per second and will benefit from space and weight reduction thanks to their Express Card specifications.
"Sony and SanDisk share the goal of providing leadership in high-performance, high-capacity recording solutions for professional video," said Eli Harari, Chairman and CEO of SanDisk. "I am proud of the close cooperation we have had with Sony over the years, and I look forward to the exciting new products that SxSTM memory cards will enable."
In the announcement, Sony said they will adopt the new memory cards into their professional camcorders "XDCAM EXTM" series later this year.
So far there is no word on pricing or an exact launch date, but they should be on shelves by the end of 2007.
The incredible BBC series, Planet Earth, is due for a dual-format high-definition release in a week and Amazon has seen incredible interest in the title. It has been Amazon's most ordered high-def release for some time now, but over the past weekend, it hit whole new heights. The HD DVD version jumped to #4 on Amazon's overall list of top selling DVDs while the Blu-ray version reached #17 in the same time frame.
The unusually strong orders for Planet Earth through Amazon has even exceeded the famously high levels for Casino Royale which hit #7 on the Amazon chart shortly after its release last month. Of course, it is also important to point out that Casino Royale is listed for $26.95, compared to Planet Earth's $69.95 price tag.
The pre-order success for Planet Earth also coincides with what appears to be a sales recovery for HD DVD, at least on Amazon. Since the start of the year, HD DVD dragged behind Blu-ray, but over the past three weeks Amazon's figures show an impressive growth in HD DVD sales. Of course, these figures are only for Amazon and don't reflect the market overall.
North Carolina State University (NCSU) is reportedly advising students that have been targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to push back. The University's Student Legal Services department has been advising students to fight back all the way to federal court. NCSU is one of many Universities in the U.S. that received pre-litigation notices from the RIAA in February.
The RIAA targeted the unidentified students and offered an early settlement option to avoid going to court. Some universities were quick to comply with the RIAA and forward the notices on to students while others insisted they are not capable of identifying the students based on the information they received.
NCSU did forward the notices on to students but only one of the targeted students came forward to settle, while 23 others face a "John Doe" lawsuit instead. The director of student legal services at NCSU, Pam Gerace said that the RIAA said it might have use for the names in the future and so advised students not to give away their identities yet.
Once the RIAA gets the names of the students from NCSU however, they will no longer be able to hide behind the University.
The HD DVD Promotional Group has announced that HD DVD is the first format to sell 100,000 stand-alone players in the United States, adding that recent price drops led to boosts in sales. However, the sales of Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drives or PC drives are not part of the overall figure, which would be significantly higher if even the Xbox 360 drive was included. It is also the first time sales numbers on either format hardware has ever been released.
Toshiba recently dropped the price of its entry-level player to $399 after Sony announced it would ship a $599 Blu-ray player in the summer. The Xbox 360 HD DVD drive is currently the cheapest option if you own an Xbox 360 console, selling for a much lower $199 (can also be used with Windows Operating system).
"Retailers are showing a significant increase in sales volume this month so far," Toshiba's marketing chief Jodi Sally said. "On Amazon.com, our HD DVD players continue to rank among the top ten best sellers of all DVD players, which says a lot about how consumers relate to price."
As has widely been reported, HD DVD and Blu-ray's Advanced Access Content System (AACS) has been the target of several successful attacks that have led to Blu-Ray and HD DVD movie titles being decrypted, ripped and shared on the Internet. Even though AACS LA moved to tackle the attacks, hackers have stayed ahead. This is bad news for both formats (from movie studio's perspective at least), but Blu-ray has had BD+ up its sleeve.
BD-Plus is described as a more advanced copy protection technology, yet its still unseen and unproven. The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has decided to bring forth its planned release to re-enforce protection of content on Blu-ray discs. It differs from AACS in many ways, but mainly because each disc can install a small piece of encryption software on a player, so that each disc has its own key.
Once BD+ is available it will add between seven to 28 days per title to production time, with 20th Century Fox being expected to release the first BD+ title. The studio slowed the production of new discs ever since the successful AACS attacks at the end of 2006.
Google Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eric Schmidt revealed on Tuesday that YouTube is ready to roll out a tool that will allow content providers to automatically report acts of piracy on the popular video-sharing site. Schmidt said that the tool, dubbed as "Claim Your Content", will squash accusations that the company tolerates piracy by allowing users to upload infringing material.
Of course, his comments were directed mainly at Viacom Inc., which last month filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube accusing the site of copyright infringement. The two have been involved in a war of words ever since about which entity the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides more protection to in this case.
"As that product rolls out, the issue becomes moot," Schmidt said in response to questions from an interviewer's question about how the tool might affect the suit. "We are automating that process to claim that content."Microsoft Corp. recently stopped taking new users for its Soapbox video sharing site until it improves anti-piracy measures.
A piracy crackdown carried out in Rome included the arrest of a sacristan working at the Naples' main cathedral (Duomo di Napoli). His son was also arrested as part of an investigation carried out by the Fiscal Police (GdF) from Rome, who were acting with arrest warrants issued by the anti-mafia Public Prosecutor of Naples.
The case led to the arrest of 11 members of a criminal organization, headed by a man the police refer to as "!F.V." from Naples, as well as the seizure of 143 burners, 14,000 pirate CDs and DVDs, 222,000 jewel boxes and 40,000 inlay cards. The sacristan and his son were identified as the major suppliers to the organization of downloaded music and movie pre-releases from internet. The alleged members of the criminal gang are facing a 400-count indictment.
Today, the US Department of Justice announced another guilty plea in connection with "Operation D-Elite", the first operation to ever target individuals who commited copyright infringment on a BitTorrent tracker site.
Sam Kuonen, 24, pleaded guilty to two counts of felony conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and "criminal copyright infringement in violation of the Family Entertainment Copyright Act." Mr. Kuonen could possibly spend five years in prison and/or a fine of $250,000.
Mr. Kuonen’s guilty plea was the fifth conviction connected with Operation D-Elite and the operation is not yet finished.
Mr. Kuonen was one of the main uploaders on Elite Torrents and his conviction, along with the four before his (admins and other uploaders) are a warning from the government that torrents arent as safe as you imagined.
Former Electronic Arts veterans who worked on such hit titles as Need for Speed, FIFA and the 007 series have announced that they have formed a new development team entitled Jet Black Studios.
The new independent studio will focus only on Nintendo hardware, creating and liscencing new products for both the popular Wii and the DS.
"With the launch of our new studio we've brought together all the key elements to develop top games," commented co-founder and CEO Roger Freddi.
"Both the Nintendo DS and the Wii's Wi-Fi capabilities provide an advanced medium for Jet Black to bring already popular franchises to an even broader worldwide audience," he added.
Jet Black will be working with Flashman Studios a businees management firm which liscenses projects for Pixar, Warner Brothers and Sony Online.
"We are confident in the capabilities of Jet Black's exceptional team, and know our strong global alliances and years of game experience will help grow its business," said Brad Young, CEO of Flashman.
"Our proven success in cultivating the right match of intellectual property, publisher and developer will allow Jet Black to do what they do best – build great games, create inspirational ideas and develop great technology."
Speaking to the Financial Times, Sony CEO Howard Striger declared the European launch of the PlayStation 3 a success, citing that almost 800,000 units had already been sold since launch.
According to Stringer, "(USD 199m) revenue changed hands and that's probably the largest consumer electronics sale in history."
Stringer also argues that "Perhaps we lived up to the expectations in Europe in a way that perhaps we didn't in Japan", therefore helping the PS3 become a success in Europe unlike the bust it is in Japan
Stringer however also know that the console wars are nowhere near over, "The silo walls are down - we're staring across the walls at each other but we haven't quite shaken hands all the way around."
After having bounties placed on thier heads by Malaysian crime bosses last month and subsequently going into hiding, the MPAA's polycarbonate sniffing dogs, Lucky and Flo, have ended their run in Malaysia and have moved north, to the Philippines.
They dogs began their raid in broad daylight at the Makati Cinema Square Mall in the Manila capital. Owners of stalls in the mall were said to be in a frenzy stashing their pirated DVDs or even locking up their stores behind steel shutters.
According to the sources, the dogs sniffed out over 300,000 pirated discs in the first hour alone.
Neil Gane, the MPAA's international senior director of operations, stated that "Lucky and Flo will be here for a considerable amount of time and we will be going all over Manila, and we are also contemplating going all over the Philippines."
"As you can see, the dogs have been very, very effective."
After the dogs helped seize millions of dollars of pirated discs in Malaysia and the bounties were placed on their heads, the dogs went into a protection program of sorts before they were recently moved to the Philippines.
However, in a shocking turn of events, Malaysian pirates, in an effort to make back the money they lost due to the dogs, have increased their porn productions and many of the new discs include child pornography.
"The pirates make more money selling pornographic discs," said Fahmi Kassim, chief enforcement officer at Johor's domestic trade ministry.
We've added three new guides on using VideoReDo Plus in our Guides section.
The guides are intended to take you all the way from installing VideoReDo Plus to opening and repairing your MPEG source files to removing commercials from TV captures.
Sony has shown off its new dual-layer version of the XDCAM Professional Disc media, which more than doubles the storage capacity and recording capabilities of the original single-layer optical media. These upgrades, combined with faster transfer rates, significantly increase the XDCAM system's potential as an efficient production technology and as a long-term archiving option.
The new dual-layer disc, model PFD50DLA, has a total storage capacity of 50 GB. Professional users can record up to 4 hours and 30 minutes of high-definition content on the dual-layer disc when shooting in MPEG HD 4:2:0 mode at 18 Mbps, or 3 hours and 20 minutes at 25 Mbps, and 2 hours and 30 minutes at 35 Mbps. In DVCAM mode, users can record about 3 hours and 10 minutes of content onto the new disc.
"This disc’s unique combination of extensive recording capacity and high transfer rate ideally positions the media for a wider range of broadcast and professional video production applications," said Jo Ann Vozeh, director of Sony Electronics' professional media group.
The PFD50DLA media is for use with the new XDCAM HD products planned to be available in September, including the PDW-F355L camcorder, PDW-F75 deck and PDW-U1 drive unit. Using blue-laser technology, the new dual-layer disc can attain high density recording of more than 10 times the capacity of a consumer DVD (4.7GB) using red-laser technology.
Plextor has announced the immediate availability of the PX-240A Ultimate 3-in-1 CD-RW Drive. The new CD-R/RW/ROM drive is RoHS compliant and fully compatible with the new Windows Vista operating system. The PX-240A drive introduces a new level of CD drive performance and features. The PX-240A 3-in-1 CD-RW drive delivers lightening fast CD recording speeds of 52X CD-R and 32X CD-RW, as well as 52X CD-ROM playback, with broad-base CD media compatibility.
The drive features a 2MB buffer and Buffer Underrun Proof Technology to prevent buffer underrun errors and allow multi-tasking. High-quality Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) eliminates pops, clicks, and hisses for superior sound quality. The PX-240A also supports Ultra DMA-2 for fast data transfer, and S/PDIF connector for digital audio equipment.
For easy connectivity with personal computers running the Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems, the new internal Plextor drive features an E-IDE ATAPI interface. "Both our consumer and OEM customers have been asking for a rock solid burner that can deliver the highest quality CD recordings with the fastest performance," said Michael Arbisi, vice president of channel sales for Plextor.
A federal judge has awarded attorneys fees to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) after a law punishing retailers for selling violent video games to minors was struck down last year. The state will now have to pay the ESA's $91,000 legal bill. The law originally passed in July 2006, and would have fined retailers between $100 and $2,000 and also subjected them to up to one year in prison for selling violent games to minors.
The ESA immediately filed a lawsuit, claiming that the law was unconstitutional. Judge James Brady agreed and in August 2006, issued a preliminary injunction against it. In November, Judge Brady made it permanent.
"This Court is dumbfounded that the Attorney General and the State are in the position of having to pay taxpayer money as attorney's fees and costs in this lawsuit," wrote Judge Brady. "The Court wonders why nobody objected to the enactment of this statute. In this court's view, the taxpayers deserve more from their elected officials."
Louisiana has joined several other states that have been forced to pay the ESA's legal bills. "It's unfortunate that some officials continue to believe that unconstitutional laws are the answer, when time and time again courts have thrown out these bills and proven them to be a waste of taxpayers' dollars," said Gail Markels, senior vice president and general counsel of the ESA in a statement.
After DVD-Video's Content Scrambling System (CSS) was cracked and all DVD titles could easily be decrypted and copied, movie studios looked to technology to re-enforce copy protection of DVDs. One of the biggest known attempts is ARccOS, which seems to have made its return in the DVD versions of Casino Royale, Stranger Than Fiction and The Holiday.
However, once again the attempt to protect content from pirates has affected legitimate consumers. Due to the added DRM on these DVDs, several older players (including Sony players) are having problems playing the discs. Some of the players render no more than a brief title screen.
One consumer who inquired about the defective DVDs was told by Sony that it is the responsibility of the manufacturer of his DVD player to provide a firmware update that fixes the playback problems with the technically "broken" DVDs.
Jalipo, a new distribution network for online video and television content, launched today with partners including Al Jazeera English and BBC World. Former president of Sony Europe, Chris Deering, acts as chairman of Jalipo. The site is set to offer a pay-as-you-go credit service to consumers wanting to watch live events and video-on-demand online.
"We're hoping to create a much more user friendly way to buy video content that means you can now monetize your content online while still maintaining your rights," Chief Executive Alex Taylor told Reuters. "This is absolutely not for user-generated content. If you were looking to put us into the marketplace, I would put us at the other end of the market to YouTube. This is rights protected, territory restricted and monetized every minute."
The market for online video content is set to continue growing over the coming years. Last year, Google bought YouTube in a $1.65 billion deal. The user-generated site is currently involved in a $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom Inc. accusing copyright infringement.
Nokia and Samsung have agreed to work together to boost standards in mobile television. Nokia said in a statement the two handset makers wanted to encourage greater adoption of broadcast mobile TV services. Mobile phone manufacturers and content providers alike are interested in technology that allows mobile phones to get television content, but the market is being held back by the lack of accepted standards.
Currently, there is around half a dozen competing systems. Nokia and many other players in Europe favor the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast - Handheld) standard for mobile video. Competing technologies include MediaFlo and DMB, which have gained ground on DVB-H in recent months.
Nokia said it and Samsung plan to make their DVB-H mobiles work with the same standards as the Nokia network services system.
Joost, the internet TV platform has just announced that they have signed another content deal that will add more channels to their ever growing catalogue.
This latest deal is with the critically-acclaimed independent film and television producers ALL3MEDIA International, Alliance Atlantis, September Films and Wall to Wall. The deal also includes well known independent distributors IndieFlix and Shorts International.
In their press release, Joost made an interesting and very bold claim as well:
“Content creators and owners of all sizes are utilizing Joost’s high-quality, piracy-proof Internet platform.”
They can of course keep the piracy to a minimum if they keep commercials and adverts to a minimum but saying the platform is piracy-proof is too bold of a statement, especially from the creators of Kazaa.
Barely a week after Corel issued an update to WinDVD 8 in an effort to close a security hole opened by AACS hackers, word has spread from hackers that claim the newest update has been cracked as well, and that the newest method is unstoppable.
The new method involves the Xbox 360's HD-DVD add-on drive and its ability to capture the "Volume Unique Keys" as they are read by the drive itself.
According to Arstechnica, "The latest attack vector bypasses the encryption performed by the Device Keys—the same keys that were revoked by the WinDVD update—and the so-called "Host Private Key," which as yet has not been found. This was accomplished by de-soldering the HD DVD drive's firmware chip, reading its contents, and then patching it. Once that was done, the firmware was soldered back onto the drive."
Although performing the hack is technically difficult, "arnezami", a hacker who has been at the center of AACS cracking says its unstoppable. "They cannot revoke this hack...No matter how many Private Host Keys they revoke we will still be able to get Volume IDs using patched xbox 360 HD DVD drives."
Today, Adobe announced that they will be introducing the Adobe Media Player, a desktop application that will give users the ability to play all flash videos without the need for a plug-in for your regular web browser.
The media player will giver users the ability to view flash videos offline on a full screen and will also include a "favorites" feauture that will automatically download new episodes of their favorite video podcasts.
The Adobe Media Player promises to "deliver, monetize, brand, track and protect video content" for content publishers. The Media Player will also include DRM-infested streaming encryption, content integrity protection and identity-based protection.
The Adobe Media Player should compete with Quicktime and Windows Media Player and will be available as a free beta release later this year before it is fully released by the end of the year.
According to the data tracker Media Create, Nintendo consoles continue to hold the top spots in Japanese sales charts.
For the week ending April 8th, sales of the Nintendo DS and DS Lite rose a staggering 28 percent to reach 110,935 units and Wii sales rose to 52,583. Another data tracker, Enterbrain, tagged total sales of the Wii in Japan at 2 million as of April 13.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Sony PSP came in third, selling 31,503 units.
Only 14,520 PlayStation 3 were sold during the week and that brings the total to 826,000. PlayStation 2 sales dropped to 14,234 units.
The Xbox 360 rounded out the market with a lowly 2963 units sold for a total of only 346,500 units sold since the console was launched in December 2005.
A spokesperson for Sony has confirmed that the company is considering production of a new model of the PlayStation 3 that would include a larger HDD.
This latest comment again opens up the rumor mill that began last month when Sony filed an FCC application that includied references to an 80 GB model.
The spokesperson, Satoshi Fukuoka said the decision is "in line with our strategy as we had planned to choose models based on consumer needs".
"[the company]is considering introducing the model with a bigger hard disk" stated Fukuoka as well. He declined to comment further.
With the recent discontinuation of the 20 GB model in North America, it will be interesting to see what is in store for the PS3.
In a move that will emulate the DMCA, a new copyright legislation will be coming to Canada and could possibly be introduced as soon as this spring.
A Canadian law professor, Michael Geist, suggests that the new bill is very similar to a failed bill that was introduced last year but this new edition adds tougher anti-circumvention laws and "carves out additional exceptions for educators."
The new copyright reform, whenever it comes should adress "fair use" in Canada because the current model is very limited. It only allows fair use when it is intended for "research or private study." There are a few extra exceptions such as news reporting, educational institutions, and museums and libraries, but there are no ways to use the content or even comment on it without getting a liscense from the copyright holder.
For those not familiar with the US model for "fair use", it allows allows for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."
The criticism and comment section are the largest exceptions to copyright law as it allows anyone to create parody video clips using protected content. Although very vague, the US model allows for a good share of flexibility, but that has also become a problem for groups who do not belive in fair use.
Alan Arthur Johnson, a British Labour Party politician and the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, has called upon Internet websites to help tackle the growing problem of cyber-bullying against students and teachers. He said that video websites such as YouTube should ban malicious video clips of teachers and school students and filter them like already done with pornographic content.
Johnson spoke about the problem at the National Union of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) in Belfast. "Cyber-bullying is cruel and relentless, able to follow a child beyond the school gates and into their homes," he said. "The online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer."
Teachers now have the right to confiscate mobile phones in the classroom to prevent bullies from recording footage of teachers or students for malicious intent. He believes however that online video sites have the power to make a huge difference, saying, "without the online approval which appeals to the innate insecurities of the bully, such sinister activities would have much less attraction".
According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the group which organizes the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, over one quarter of homes in the United States now have a high-definition TV set. Approximately 35 million HDTVs are in American homes today, accounting for about 28 per cent, and according to the trade group, the figure is set to grow by another 16 million by the end of the year.
Of those who own a HDTV set, the CEA claims that 86 per cent say they are "highly satisfied" with their TV. Last year, Frank N. Magid Associates reported that only about 15% of households had an HDTV, but projected that number would climb rapidly. The increasing amount of HD content being made available is giving consumers more incentive to invest in a HD display.
A 15 year old boy in Australia caused the removal of hundreds of video clips from Google Inc.'s YouTube service by pretending to be an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He sent a signed letter to YouTube falsely claiming he represented ABC, and asked the site to remove clips of a popular local comedy series that were uploaded by users of the site.
Shortly after, lawyers for ABC contacted the boy and he apologized for his actions. "Everyone does dumb stuff when they are 15," the head of ABC television comedy, Courtney Gibson, told ABC Radio. "We really appreciate that he's apologized and we'll be following up with him next week." She said it wasn't clear why the teenager decided to take the action.
YouTube does not block video content subject to copyright from being uploaded to the site, but will remove it once requested by the copyright holder. Viacom Inc. has sued Google Inc. and YouTube for more than $1 billion, accusing it of copyright infringement for allowing users to upload its video content.
Chinese authorities have destroyed DVDs, CDs, software and illegal publications in the latest campaign to curtail rampant theft of intellectual property. The move follows a U.S. complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) against Beijing over piracy in the region. Workers across the country burned 30 million pieces of smuggled and pirated audio and video material, software and 11 million copies of pirated and illegally published books and magazines.
"Through the act of destruction, we wish to show to the world the firm determination of the Chinese Government in protecting intellectual property,"Long Xinmin, chief of the State Press and Publication Administration, was quoted as saying. He added the campaign also aimed to "improve the awareness of the general public in fighting against pornography and illegal publications."
Law enforcement officers in the provincial capital of Guangzhou used shredding machines to get rid of 10 million pirated discs and 500,000 illegal publications. China also warned that the U.S. complaints against Beijing in the WTO could damage commercial relations between the two countries.
SpeedBit, an Israeli company located in Herzliya and Haifa, claims its new download accelerator can download a film in under 20 minutes (depending on connection speed, of course). The company is tackling a huge problem with video downloading; downloads take too long and can be hundreds of times larger than music downloads. This problem has led many consumers away from movie download services. The company plans to roll out the video accelerator by April 19th.
The company is still working on the product and it is far from what SpeedBit aims to achieve with it. "Reducing the time to download movies to around 15 minutes will definitely lead to a big upsurge in penetration of the trend," predicts Andrew Hargreaves, an electronics industry analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, a Portland (Ore.) investment bank.
An early, free version of the product designed to improve delivery of Streaming videos from YouTube was rolled out in March, and nearly one million copies already have been downloaded. "Our accelerator deals with the common problems of buffering and freezing and dramatically improves the quality of the viewing experience," says co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Idan Feigenbaum, a 29-year-old, self-taught computer programmer
Microsoft has responded to complaints that the Xbox 360 console scratches discs during normal usage. A dutch TV show recently put the console to the test and has been nagging Microsoft with the results. Kassa, a show which specializes in consumer complaints, ran a test which proves that the console scratches discs under normal use (no movement while playing while on a flat, stable surface etc.)
The show blamed the majority of the problem on a TSST drive that is missing parts that stabilize the disc. Many Xbox 360 users have reported similar problems on web forums. "As we were not involved with the experiment of Kassa and have little insights in the testing methods, we are not able to respond in detail on the results. It is possible that scratches on discs originate from frequent use. However, we have no indication that the results of the tests from Kassa are a large scale problem," Microsoft said in a press statement.
"Of course it is important to us that our customers have the best possible game experience and therefore we take these test results very serious. Xbox owners who think their discs are scratched as reported by Kassa, should contact us. We will investigate the console and when needed repair it so it becomes a full functioning console. We will also inform Xbox owners how they can obtain replacements discs in case they require them."
Lorne Michaels, the creater and producer of Saturday Night Live cant seem to understand NBC's position on YouTube.
The SNL clip "Lazy Sunday" is often credited with bringing YouTube to new heights of popularity, yet NBC's lawyers continually shoot down the benefits of having SNL clips on YouTube and therefore clips are hard to find, at least for prolonged periods of time.
Michaels however, wishes NBC would put more clips on YouTube: "YouTube has been great for us...I think it's simple for me. If the work is good, I want the most number of people to see it -- period. Anything that leads to that would be my objective."
Michael's decision makes sense considering the wild popularity of YouTube and the huge amount of views a few SNL clips have gathered, but until NBC decides to change their business model, Micheals will not get his wish.
Although there was a decrease of 5 percent in overall revenue in 2006, a new report by the Australian Recording Industry Association shows that there was at least an 8 percent increase in the volume of CDs sold, as compared to 2005.
The report also showed that Australians bought 3x as much digital music in 2006 as compared to 2005.
The CEO of the association, Stephen Peach explained the drop in revenue: "People continue to be interested in music, although the average value of CD sales is continuing to decline," Mr Peach said. "At a time when the CD seems to be dying, we are selling more units than ever before, although [the retailers] are needing to sell more and more CDs to earn less money."
Despite the added sales of full CDs, the sales of CD singles have dropped drastically.
"The decline in the CD single market is most likely a migration to the digital market," Mr Peach said, "but album sales on digital are still not significant.
"It still takes a long time to download, an album and people who use digital music seem to buy tracks, rather than albums."
Mr Peach also stated that sales of digital music increased over 300 percent but digital music only accounted for 5 percent of the Australian music market, nowhere near the percentages in the US and Europe.
Western Digital has developed a range of IDE and SATA hard disks featuring capacities up to 500GB, designed with use with audio-video content. The company claims that 500GB is sufficient for "30 hours of HD video". The drives have been tweaked to be suitable for AV applications. The company claims they can deliver playback of 12 HD streams at once and can be used for CCTV to record 16 standard-definition streams simultaneously.
Digital video recorders (DVR), HDTV and other new video-related technologies created whole new demands for hard disk drives. Putting performance aside, even just creating drives that perform quieter than their standard counterparts is essential. They must also be much more reliable.
"These are not for desktop PCs," said WD technician Alexander Patterson. "They are for DVR, PVR, set-top boxes and low-end security systems." A new feature called IntelliSeek synchs the head movement to disk spin, so the head arrives at the right moment to read the data it wants as it passes underneath. This cuts both power consumption and noise.
According to a Financial Times report, the number of gaming companies located in the United Kingdom has drastically fallen over the past six years. Last month, SCi Entertainment announced it would open a studio in Montreal, Canada, which would begin developing four games for next-generation systems. The move followed many other studios who have decided to move some interests away from the UK.
Tiga, the UK trade association for game developers, conducted a study which showed that in 2001, there was 400 independent game studios, but now there is only about 150. Australia and Canada have been successful at attracting developers by offering incentives for companies relocating to the regions. The state of Victoria in Australia offers A$375,000 over two years to locally based game developers.
In Canada, grants and tax breaks are offered to the companies. Many of the UK businesses have simply just closed too, while others have been acquired by bigger corporations.
The European Union will not follow a United States complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) about piracy in China, a senior European official said on Thursday. Viviane Reding, the EU Information Society and Media Commissioner, said that talks seemed a much better option but did say that protecting intellectual property rights is a fundamental concern for the EU.
"We will follow it as observers. We will try in bilateral discussions and bilateral talks to find solutions with our Chinese counterparts," she told a news conference in Beijing. "We agree with the substance, and that IPR has to be preserved and that there has to be fair remuneration for those who have invested in research and development or for the copyright of those creating content."
She added: "We do not at this moment think that it is time for the European Union to go to the WTO court."
According to a new poll on tech site Pocket-Lint.co.uk, many music downloaders would consider paying extra per music track download if it included no Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. In 62% of respondents confirmed they would pay more for DRM-less downloads when asked, "Will you pay extra for DRM free music?". About 38% said they wouldn't pay extra for the downloads.
EMI and Apple Inc. are currently experimenting with DRM-less downloading through iTunes, although the downloads cost more for the added benefits. Without DRM, users that download the tracks can store it on a lot more players instead of just iPods and can use the file like they use any other. The iTunes offering followed an open letter from Steve Jobs that questioned the benefits of DRM and urged the industry to take steps to drop it.
A question that must be asked however is whether consumers should view DRM-less downloads as "new" and somehow "superior" to before. Does the lack of DRM make the music sound any better? Considering the music industry has been selling unprotected CDs but still enforcing restrictions on downloads of the same music, should consumers consider nothing less than DRM-less downloads without the price hike?
Apple's iPod has had a history of significant improvement by model since it was originally released, helping it to become the most popular MP3 player in the world, selling over 100 million units. Therefore, rumors and speculations about upcoming iPod improvements are constantly doing the rounds, and it has been wondered by many when exactly Apple Inc. will add WiFi support to an upcoming iPod.
Well, if you were to believe the latest whispers about the gadget, Apple will release an iPod this year that features WiFi, according to component makers in Taiwan. Universal Scientific Industrial (USI) has been named as a supplier for the WiFi technology, while Foxconn is expected to produce the finished units.
Adding WiFi to an iPod could allow communicating with iTunes without the need for a USB cable to transfer music to the device and perhaps streaming audio and video content. Of course, these rumors are often completely wrong too, but it would make sense for Apple to try to improve upon Zune's wireless support.
Warner Music Group is unhappy that the music download service, AnywhereCD, has been selling albums owned by the label without any included Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. AnywhereCD was launched by Michael Robertson, original founder of MP3.com. While the service does offer downloads in the MP3 format with no DRM, customers can only choose to buy full albums, unlike services like iTunes where individual tracks can be picked.
"Last year I decided it was time to revisit selling music in the MP3 format," Robertson wrote on his personal web site. "I reached out to many labels and all were polite and open to meetings. My message was to use the MP3 format to boost sales by offering a new buying option for online music fans." Album download prices range from $9.95 to about $19.95, higher than the deals offered by iTunes.
However, it is argued that the restriction-less MP3 files have benefits over rival services. On the same day that AnywhereCD launched, Warner demanded that its music not be sold DRM-free, saying the service was in "flagrant" violation with their agreement. "Accordingly, we have sent them a notice of termination and they are required to immediately remove all of our content from their site," the music label said in a statement.
According to the Financial Times, next week, Universal Music will begin discussions with Apple to renegotiate their licensing with iTunes. Universal is just the first of the "Big Four" to begin discussions and the other labels should begin their discussions in a few weeks.
According to the report, the music labels will ask Apple to add a subscription model to iTunes, and that Apple's decision in that matter will be a part of the negotiations to renew their music licensing agreements.
The report also suggests that a new subscription model would provide a boost in sales and bring the labels more money. Another demand of the labels is for variable song pricing, a move that would allow the labels to increase the price of more popular songs.
Apple however, argues that both those models would push the consumer back to piracy, and iTunes, which has sold over 2.5 billion songs and owns 75 percent of the legal digital music market is in a very good position to make decisions that they see fit.
"The record industry, in particular, has long been frustrated that Apple has reaped most of the profits of the burgeoning online music market through sales of its iPod player," the Financial Times writes. "By contrast, they have earned only modest royalties from digital music sales because most of the songs on iPods and other devices result from illegal download."
This week,Phillips launched "VTrack", a watermarking system that the company hopes will help analysts and law enforcement agents trace back illegally distributed materials such as movies.
The goal of the "Vtrack" is to protect content that is played over PayTV. The watermark will be so unobtrusive the company says, that viewers can fully enjoy thier movies but at the same time the watermark will provide a means to contain piracy trading.
Andrew G. Setos, president of engineering at Fox Group, stated his enthusiasm for the new technology: "We are thrilled that Philips has entered the market with a session based, forensic watermark system. Forensic watermarks have already shown their merit in PayTV applications and help our premium content from unauthorized redistribution by counterfeiters and others".
Phillips is confident in their new technology stating that it can never be seperated from the content or even modified. Phillips indicated that even after quality reduction, scaling, cropping or compression the watermark was still intact.
A new study has reported that Canadian and U.S. teenagers have increased their legal downloading of music as compared to the fall 2006 period.
The 13th bi-annual edition of the survey showed a few key numbers. 83 percent of teenage students download music online compared to 79 percent in fall 2006. 36 percent of those teens now buy their music from online music services such as Napster and iTunes compared to only 28 percent last period.
The survey also reported that use of illegal p2p downloading from unauthorized services fell eight percent to 64 percent.
"While P2P sharing is still the primary way teens get their music, buying online music is becoming more mainstream," stated one of the analysts who helped with the survey.
Although the research team only surveyed 1800 teenagers from 11 different cities in both Canada and the US, the numbers do seem to suggest a very slight move away from unauthorized downloading.
When you browse over forums and websites about file sharing, many users who consider themselves more "advanced" often openly tout their membership to X numbers of private BitTorrent trackers whilst blasting public sites like ThePirateBay. Of course, just because a tracker is private does not mean it is immune to the action taken against other BitTorrent sites.
Peter Anaman, a senior internet investigator for legal firm Covington and Burling, claims that his organization successfully "infiltrates" private BitTorrent tracker sites. Of course, he didn't name any that are currently being monitored extensively. "Many groups didn't start off as private. They became private because they felt threatened, so we were able to get in when they were open," he said, which possibly might serve as a hint to a power user about which trackers to avoid.
He indicated that his organization maintains a number of contacts which assist it in gaining access to additional private sites for information gathering. "Once you’re in, you never take action. You just listen," he told The Guardian. Of course, some trackers are really "private" and have always been and we can be sure that BT users aren't dealing with Hollywood movie-style spies, no matter how much these groups spruce up the language they give to the press. Still though, it serves as a story to send to the next annoying kid that claims he is rolling in private tracker memberships on forums that you frequent.
Sonic Solutions unveiled CineVision 2.0 today, a major upgrade to the company's professional encoding system that has been enhanced to tackle the complex encoding challenges of next-generation Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD DVD optical disc formats. This new version sets a new standard for control and workflow efficiency with a range of features and enhancements including the integration of best-of-class Digital Vision image enhancement technologies, advanced segment-based editing functionality with multi-take capabilities, and dual-format legalization control.
CineVision 2 also further improves encoding quality of all codecs used for next-generation high-definition video: H.264 (AVC), VC-1, and MPEG-2. "To keep pace with the growing demands of our high-definition services, it is critical that the tools we use are not only extremely proficient, but also allow us to work more efficiently," said Jeff Huang, VP of New Media at Elektrofilm Digital Studios. "With CineVision 2.0, Sonic is not only releasing an outstanding application, but perhaps more importantly, they are applying their deep understanding of all aspects of the high-definition title workflow to deliver a solution that empowers us to increase productivity so that we may better serve our clients' needs."
Samsung Electronics Co., LTD. has confirmed today that it will release a new hybrid HD DVD / Blu-ray Disc (BD) player to the market "in time for the holidays". Samsung's Duo HD player (BD-UP5000) will fully support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats and their interactive technologies, HDi and BD-J. With the Duo HD consumers can enjoy additional studio content such as trailers, director's comments, more elaborate interactive menus and behind the scene footage.
"We welcome Samsung's Duo HD player as another solution in the marketplace that will help reduce consumer confusion and buyer hesitancy towards HD media," said Ron Sanders, President of Warner Home Video. "This is an innovative product that can move us closer to mainstream consumer adoption of HD technologies." The player will directly compete with a hybrid player already available from LG.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has given the thumbs up to the games industry in a study released that explores the marketing of violent material to children. The study covers mainly video games, music and movies, comparing each industry's self-regulation efforts. It also examines how much each industry tends to market its adult or mature content to children.
The FTC found that each industry was in compliance "for the most part" with regulations prohibiting advertising adult products on TV shows or in magazines that are aimed toward a teenage or younger audience. It had harsh criticisms for Internet advertising which it described as "an increasingly important medium that reaches millions of children each day."
While it gave examples of movies, music and video games advertised on websites with a young target audience, it noted that only the gaming industry has rules that restrict web advertisements. Under the rules, advertisements for adult games are not to appear on websites that have youths under 17 as 45% or more of its audience.
The FTC also said the games industry has made great progress in enforcing its rules at retail. A "mystery shopper" test, which involved a child shopper attempting to buy products intended for an adult or mature audience at a selection of stores, gave the favorable result for the games industry.
The European arm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has shown its opposition for the IPRED2 directive that is being proposed to harmonize European copyright law. The group is concerned that legislators have failed to define their terms clearly and that it may harm legitimate businesses. It claims that IPRED2's new crime of "aiding, abetting and inciting" infringement will affect innovators.
Examples of those that could be effected are ISPs that refuse to block peer-to-peer file sharing networks, media sharing services like YouTube and open source coders. "With the new directive, music labels and Hollywood studios will push for the criminal prosecution of these innovators in Europe, saying their products 'incite' piracy - with EU taxpayers covering the costs." the group says on its website.
The draft specifically excludes commercial rights that are patent protected, and excludes personal use from the criminal sanctions of the bill. The draft defines "commercial scale" infringement as "any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profits purposes" but the EFF fears that the definition is not good enough.
Even though women outnumber men on the Internet, they find viewing videos on the Internet less appealing than men. 97 million women will use the Internet in the United States this year, compared to 91 million men, according to a study by eMarketer. "Men are more visual than women, who tend to communicate in writing and or in words," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst with eMarketer.
She said that men are generally ahead of the technology trend, but was surprised by the results for women because women tend to watch more television than men. "Women are more likely to use the Internet to get things done, to accomplish tasks, to check something off of a checklist that they need to do," Williamson said.
She added: "Men are more likely to use the Internet to have fun. And a lot of what you see on youtube.com is silly, time-saving kinds of things that maybe women don't feel they have the time for, or don't want to have the time for." She said the gap will close when Internet video sites like YouTube get more content that is more appealing to them.
In a huge move today, CBS has agreed to deals with Microsoft, Time Warner, Joost, ComCast, AOL, CNET Networks and a few others to allow content distribution in exchance for revenue sharing.
CBS already has many of its shows available online at cbs.com and through iTunes.
With the new deal, viewers will be able to watch popular shows like CSI and Survivor as well as sports shows, news, and other content for free online. The advertising revenue generated from the content will then be shared by the partners in the new deal.
The deal is probably most important for Joost, the on-demand online content distributer that is still trying to make a name for itself in the industry. So far, Joost has made deals with MTV, Comedy Central, BET and Paramount Pictures and this latest deal will add significant content to their roster.
Yesterday, the Beatles and the music giant EMI agreed to finally settle their dispute over royalties the band believed were owed to them.
This move has fans hoping now that the Beatles catalogue will become available on iTunes.
The dispute dates back to 2005 when the living Beatles and the widows of the deceased Beatles sued EMI claiming that they were owed $60 million USD in missing royalties from sales dating between 1994 and 1999.
Although the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, an EMI spokesperson confirmed the settlement, "I can confirm that we have reached a mutually acceptable settlement and that we are not going to say anything more than that."
We hope that with this hurdle jumped, the Beatles music can finally move legally into the 21st century.
Following closely after the release of its firmware update 1.3 in February, a new firmware upgrade, version 1.5 has become available on Toshiba's official support site.
The firmware update is for all of Toshiba's second-generation HD-DVD players and will help fix connectivity and playback issues.
According to the official documentation by Toshiba, "As part of our commitment to provide world-class service to our customers, Toshiba is supplying this firmware update for use by purchasers of Toshiba HD DVD Player models HD-XA2, HD-A20, HD-A2, HD-A2W and HD-D2. This firmware update addresses certain disc playback and HDMI/DVI related problems identified by Toshiba."
You can also choose to upgrade directly through the player's ethernet port or you can call Toshiba directly and ask for a firmware CD which they will send free of charge if you are a registered owner of an HD-XA2, HD-A20, HD-A2, HD-A2W or HD-D2.
In the past month there have a been a couple of movies that have caused issues on standalone HD-DVD players such as "Children of Men" and the new NIN concert disc and now there are reports of playback issues on standalone Blu-Ray players for the animated movie/game "Dragon's Lair".
After the reports were made that some players could not play the game and other drives, including the Playstation 3 were getting audio sync problems, Digital Leisure, the movie's publisher noted that that some players would be prone to playback issues.
"Due to the lack of Java standardization many players just aren't able to handle proper playback," said the company.
They also stated that the game would work on the following players guaranteed: The Samsung BD-P1000, Panasonic DMP-BD10, PowerDVD for the PC, Sony BDP-S1 and the PlayStation 3 (they could not replicate the audio sync issues reported).
If you do not have those players, then chances are you do not want to purchase this game yet until firmware updates enable BD-Java support in the players.
The Chinese government has moved to clamp down on so called Internet gaming addiction but limiting the number of hours that can underage gamer can play. The government hopes that by limiting the points that can be achieved after a given time, young gamers will be less motivated to continue playing. An under-18 gamer will earn less points after 3 hours of gameplay, and after 5 hours will earn none.
The gamer will also receive a warning instructing that he/she is now entering "unhealthy game time". A recent report from the China National Children's Centre said that 13% of under-18s who used the web were addicted to online gaming. There is an estimated 17.8 million fee-paying gamers in China, about 20% of which are under 20 years old. A farther 10% are younger than 16.
Online game companies based in China have been given three months to install anti-addiction software. Last month, the Chinese authorities banned any new cyber cafes from opening this year in an effort to combat addiction. It has also set up a department, charged with monitoring the content of games.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK has slapped yet another consumer electronics company, this time for a possibly deceptive/untrue claim made in an advertisement. Creative has been ordered not to advertise its Xmod sound-enhancement system as a device that can take an MP3 track and process it to sound better than CD quality audio, unless of course, it can prove it to be true.
A complaint was filed by an audio engineer after he read Creative's claim in an email-distributed advertisement. The ASA judged that Creative has thus far failed to provide "evidence to show that the sound [Xmod] delivered was better than CD quality", but did say that the claim was "objective and capable of substantiation", meaning Creative has the right to prove it.
The engineer that complained about the advertisement also objected to Creative's claim that the device provided "an experience beyond studio quality". However, the ASA agreed with Creative in that case, accepting that the operational sound specifications, 24-bit quantisation at 96kHz, is within the range used by studio-specific equipment.
Toshiba Corp. has told a news conference today that it plans to produce and market large organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays by 2009. Company president Atsutoshi Nishida made the announcement, which follows plans and developments from several other companies to bring OLED's benefits to the consumer electronics market over the coming years. OLED is expected to be a fierce rival for liquid-crystal display (LCD) and Plasma display technology as it progresses.
Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology has a huge benefit in that it does not require a backlight like LCD, which means a very thin panel can be produced. It also produces fast moving images very well and its power consumption is even lower than LCD, which is already considered to be a low power consuming technology.
OLED displays are already used in digital cameras, cellphones and other devices with relatively small panels. Sony Corp. also has plans for OLED TVs, saying that it will start selling the displays in 2007.
Microsoft Corp. is well aware of two main hacks for Vista activation, performed by tricking the installed operating system into identifying the computer's source as an OEM. However, the company does not view the hacks as a widescale threat just yet, but said it may take action if it appears that more hackers decide to take breaking Windows Vista OEM activation as challenge.
"Because Windows Vista can't be pirated as easily as Windows XP, it's possible that the increased pressure will result in more interest in efforts to hack the OEM Activation 2.0 implementation,"Alex Kochis, a Microsoft senior product manager, wrote in a blog. Two main hacks that the company has identified include either modifying the BIOS of the motherboard to make it "appear" as being OEM sourced or simply fooling the operating system with a software driver installation.
"Our goal isn't to stop every 'mad scientist' that's on a mission to hack Windows. Our goal is to disrupt the business model of organized counterfeiters and protect users from becoming unknown victims. This means focusing on responding to hacks that are scalable and can easily be commercialized," Kochis said. The last time Microsoft faced the hacking of an operating system activation was with Windows XP in 2001.
Sony Corp. plans to be one of the first to market TVs that use organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology later this year. The company announced on Thursday that it will begin selling the ultra-thin displays in 2007, joining several other companies that are interested in bringing OLED's benefits to the consumer electronics market. OLED technology is expected to be a fierce rival for iquid crystal displays (LCDs) and Plasma TVs.
Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology has a huge benefit in that it does not require a backlight like LCD, which means a very thin panel can be produced. It also produces fast moving images very well and its power consumption is even lower than LCD, which is already considered to be a low power consuming technology.
At a display forum in Tokya, attendees showed their support for OLED by ignoring the 50-inch+ Plasma displays and instead gathering around Sony's 11-inch OLED displays. "LCD and plasma displays look faded in comparison," said a Denso Corp. employee who declined to be named. OLED displays are already used in digital cameras, cellphones and other devices with relatively small panels.
Nintendo has updated the Shop Channel to include the final version of Internet Channel or Wii Opera. It is completely free to download, at least until July. Before you download the browser you need to install system update which enables Parental Controls.
The new final version comes with some new and improved features:
- Parental Control support
- Optional Internet content filter provided by Astaro (available soon)
- Improved start-up speed
- Clearer text when zoomed-in
- Improved Wii Remote navigation
- Improved scrolling and zooming
- Built-in search via Yahoo! or Google
- Option to hide Toolbar
- New cursor animations and operation sounds
- Ability to view page security information
- Option to delete cookies
- Built-in support manual
Creative, although in competition with Apple in the MP3 player market, continues to cater to the iPod crowd with impressive accesories.
Their newest releases are four lines of docking accessories for the iPod. Three include speakers while the last is made to pair with home theater systems or televisions.
The "X-Fi Sound System i600" is a copy of Creative's Z600 for the Zen Vision:M. The "Playdock i500" and "TravelSound I" are also copies of existing docks, the Zen's Z500 and the TravelSound Zen V. All three have built in speakers.
The new "Xdock Wireless", which was first showcased at CES, will connect wirelessly to any X-Fi remote reciever, which can then be wired to a home theater system or speakers through line out, digital audio, s-video or composite.
After reports surfaced that the 20 GB model of the PlayStation 3 were becoming extinct,Sony has officially stopped offering the model to retailers in North America.
The decision, based heavily on the low demand for the model was not surprising.
Dave Karraker of Sony America stated, "At launch, we offered two separate models of PlayStation 3 to meet the diverse needs and interests of our PlayStation fan base. Initial retail demand in North America was upwards of ninety percent in favor of the 60GB SKU, so we manufactured and shipped-in accordingly. Due to the overwhelming demand for the 60GB model from both retailers and consumers, we have ceased offering the 20GB model here in North America. In addition to the larger internal hard drive, the 60GB PlayStation 3 features added storage media slots and built-in Wi-Fi not found in the 20GB system. Based on retailer and consumer feedback, we have decided to focus our current efforts on the more popular 60GB model."
Although there is no decision yet as to whether the 20 GB model will be sold in Europe, this move seems to indicate that the lower end model will soon be gone forever.
The RIAA has sent out a new round of pre-lawsuit letters to over 21 colleges and universities marking the third time this year that the group has sent out mass letters to colleges in hopes to stop the alleged p2p piracy that occurs daily on campus networks.
The letters the RIAA sends to colleges simply include an IP address and a date stamp. The college then needs to match that address to one of their students.
The RIAA does however, offer a discounted settlement price to the college students, a price somewhere lower than the $3000 USD that other alleged offenders are forced to pay to settle.
431 pre-lawsuit letters were dispatched to the following schools:
"Bates College (7 pre-litigation settlement letters), Brown University (12), Central Michigan University (24), Colby College (5), College of William & Mary (12), Cornell University (19), Fairfield University (15), Florida International University (16), Indiana University (28), Keene State University (19), Kent State University (19), Morehead State University (10), Ohio University (50), Oklahoma State University (16), University of Massachusetts – Amherst (32), University of Maryland System (25), University of Michigan – Ann Arbor (23), University of New Hampshire (17), University of New Mexico (16), University of Pennsylvania (17), University of Rochester (22), and Williams College (9)."
In a first for Latin America, the music and film industries in Brazil are coming together to combine their anti-piracy efforts. Apdif, which is the anti-piracy arm of the music industry in Brazil, will be merging with Adepi, the organization that acts on behalf of the film industry, to form a new association called Associacao Antipirateria Cinema and Musica (APCM).
Brazil is still one of the major pirate markets in the world, with more than one billion music tracks illegally downloaded each year and counterfeit discs accounting for up to half of all CDs and DVDs sold in the country. Such rampant piracy directly affects Brazilian composers, artists and producers as local repertoire accounts for 75 per cent of the music market.
Total losses to the audiovisual and music industries in Brazil are estimated at US$198 million per year. According to data provided by the Brazilian National Anti-Piracy Council (CNCP), pirate products cost the Brazilian economy two million jobs per year and reduce tax revenues by US$15 billion.
"Piracy in Brazil is undermining the ability of the music and film industries to invest in the next generation of local talent. Lower revenues from current sales mean less money to invest in new artists. Buying films and music from pirates means participating in a form of cultural suicide," said Antonio Borges, General Director of APCM. "The music and film industries are teaming up to help the police in their investigations into the criminal gangs involved in both physical and online piracy. We hope that today's announcement puts these people on notice."
After having over 2 million movies sold in the past 9 months through its iTunes store, Apple today has introduced a new catalogue of movies from MGM pushing their total to over 500 movies available.
The new movies will cost between $9.99 and $14.99 each for such titles such as "Dances With Wolves," "Mad Max," "The Great Train Robbery" and "Rocky," and the prices are about equal to buying an "older" physical DVD from a store or online.
"It's exciting to be bringing so many amazing films from our catalog to iTunes," said Douglas A. Lee, MGM's executive vice president of Worldwide Digital Media. "We have an unrivaled movie library and are looking forward to adding even more films in the future so users can take their favorite movies with them wherever they go."
We hope to see more titles available in the future from all distributers.
While the iPod continues to be the market leader for portable mp3 players, recently selling its 100 millionth unit, Microsoft has been working on the 2.0 version of their Zune player and hopes to have its one millionth sold by June of this year.
Currently, the 2.0 is a little way aways from becoming a reality but Microsoft has revealed that they will be selling the first generation Zune in two new colors, "Watermelon Red" and "Baby Pink".
However, perhaps unknowingly, a Microsoft Zune engineer has revealed more than a few details for the new Zune 2.0.
The design of the new Zune will be identical except it will be thinner and include a larger HDD.
According to the engineer there will also be a new "Flash Zune" that will specifically compete with the iPod Nano and Shuffle.
According to the Microsoft employee, "the Flash Zune measures 3" x 1.25" x 0.25" vs. 4.4" x 2.4" x .58" for the original Zune and 3.5" x 1.6" x .25" for the 2G iPod Nano."
The flash Zune will have the same abilities as the current 2GB iPod Nanos and will include built in WiFi.
Microsoft plans to manufacture over 1.5 million of the new flash Zunes throughout the calender year of 2007.
Recently, consumer electronics giant Apple Inc.announced that its market leading iPod music devices had sold 100 million units since launch in November 2001, making it the fastest selling music player in history.
Apple's online music outlet the iTunes Store has enjoyed similarly great success. It boasts the world’s largest online catalog with over five million songs, 350 television shows and over 400 movies. The iTunes Store has sold over 2.5 billion songs since its debut as well as 50 million TV shows and over 1.3 million movies. The diamond combination of the iPod and the Store has kept Apple sitting pretty at the summit of the digital music market.
Despite rivals Microsoft putting a lot of effort behind the release of its so-called "iPod killer" Zune & Zune Marketplace combo, the software maker has done little to rain on Apple's parade, with modest sales since its launch last November - although Microsoft remains confident that it will have reached its one-millionth Zune owner by June.
Following the strong initial results from the PlayStation 3's (PS3) performance while taking part in the Stanford Folding@Home project, Sony has entered into talks about using the same techniques for commercial uses. The PS3's idle CPU cycles are used to calculate research for the Stanford University project. The overall goal is to understand protein folding, unlocking the mysteries behind life-threatening conditions.
However, the Financial Times has reported that Sony and several companies may be interested in using the same technique for commercial purposes. "We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications," said Sony's chief technology officer, Masa Chatani. It is estimated that, on average, 10,000 PS3s working in a distributed computing network can match the performance of 200,000 PCs (of course, PC equipment varies considerably so take these figures with a pinch of salt).
"A start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilize this kind of infrastructure," said Chatani. Of course, Sony would need to come up with some form of incentive for PS3 users to be involved with any commercial distributing-computing project. Maybe finding out how to cure Alzheimer's disease and other conditions that affect millions of people served as incentive enough for 30,000 PlayStation 3 users to sign up for Folding@Home.
Sonic Solutions has announced Scenarist Designer PS 2.0, a plugin that serves as a major advance in menu-design workflow for high-definition formats. Scenarist Designer PS 2.0 automates the conversion of Adobe Photoshop graphics into standardized interactive menu components suitable for authoring for both Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD DVD format in the very popular and powerful Sonic Scenarist package.
Extending the efficiency and precision of automated menu generation to designers on all Photoshop-supported platforms, Scenarist Designer PS 2.0 handles the advanced content modes of both high-definition formats and is now available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Designing menus for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles is very different from DVD-Video.
Scenarist Designer PS 2.0 is unique in that it returns the control of menu component creation to the professional graphic designer who can create menus for high-definition titles using the industry-standard Adobe Photoshop. By basing the menu-design process on familiar concepts such as using layer sets to group button elements, Scenarist Designer PS 2.0 lets designers stay focused on the visual aspects of their work without worrying about the details of conversion for various output formats.
Last month, we reported that Judge Colleen McMahon blocked the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from dismissing a case against Patricia Santangelo without prejudice. The judge found that the case must be dismissed with prejudice or proceed to trial allowing Santangelo to clear her name after being accused of copyright infringement and illegal file sharing by the trade group.
A stipulation of discontinuance with prejudice was entered yesterday by both the plaintiffs and defendants, which now leaves Santangelo eligible to file a motion to recover her attorneys' fees. Of course, the RIAA will oppose the awarding of the fees. This particular case has been ongoing since 2005, when Santangelo claimed no knowledge of such infringement happening in her home.
The RIAA subsequently targeted her children, who were aged 15 and 11 at the time. The RIAA would prefer to walk away from any case that it cannot win quietly than ever see a defendant exonerated of the alleged crime.
The WashingtonPost.com award-winning website has recognized the demand for improved video content from established brands on the Internet as video podcasting/vodcasting enters new heights of popularity among Internet users. The website announced today the availability of high-definition video podcasts designed to be viewed on a proper HD television or computer monitor.
The company has made the new content available via iTunes and promises that the videos conform to the highest specifications for the new Apple TV device, allowing for the highest quality experience on your HDTV set. All washingtonpost.com videos are shot with high-definition cameras, and the series available on iTunes has a resolution of 720p.
"The demand for high quality video via the Web is surpassing that of the supply. Consumers are eager to adopt HD content to move away from the drab experience of watching it within a small box on their computer screens," said Tom Kennedy, Managing Editor, Multimedia, washingtonpost.com. "High-definition is the future of video; we have moved beyond standard definition to provide viewers with a higher standard. We knew we needed to evolve past web video to remain a relevant, innovative news source."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a brief with a New York district court, urging a judge to allow Rolando Amurao, a target of an RIAA lawsuit, to fight back with counterclaims of his own. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Amurao for copyright infringement but has now moved to dismiss the claims made.
Amurao however, believes that the RIAA's case was meritless and that it was intended to harass him and has countersued for a declaration of non-infringement and a finding of RIAA copyright misuse. In its brief, the EFF has argued that giving the accused his day in court will increase the RIAA's accountability in the industry's broad lawsuit campaign against file-sharing.
"If Amurao's allegations are true, then he has the right to clear his name," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "It's simply unfair to shield copyright owners from the consequences of careless lawsuits. Counterclaims like Amurao's help make sure that the RIAA can't simply dismiss its case and walk away when an innocent target fights back." Since 2003, the RIAA has filed thousands of lawsuits against file sharers in the U.S. However, at times the RIAA's tactics have shown to be sloppy and careless, yet most accused decide to settle because it is the more affordable option.
Users of WinDVD 8 now need to update their software because an HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc security group has begun pulling the encryption keys of PC software that have been hacked to allow unrestricted access to next gen discs.
The update for WinDVD will close the security hole and in the process, obtain new encrytion keys for the software.
Manufacturers have been working on removing the keys with some help from the AACS Licensing Administrator.
Hackers recently discovered how to sniff out protection keys by using an approach based on "figuring out memory changes made after playing high-def discs on their PCs."
The unlimited access to the keys allowed hackers to unscramble the content that was ripped from the discs and allowed them to make copies of the movie at their discretion.
With this newest update by the industry, the ball is back in the hacker's court.
A research team with members from Intel, Purdue, and Carnegie Mellon have created a technique that will accelerate P2P file sharing from 30-70 percent.
For users who are familiar with torrent and regular p2p downloading can agree that although still fast and effective, if there are few seeders and a large amount of downloaders, then your speeds will be effected.
The research team has stated that they have found a way to get around these limitations by using a technique called "Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET)". They plan to present the technique tomorrow at the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.
SET in itself uses a lot of different techniques to help boost speeds. Many shared files contain peices of identical data. Examples of such pieces are music files that only differ in tags, movies dubbed in different languages and updated versions of applications and software.
SET divides large files into smaller segments first then uses a search method called "handprinting" to find similar files. If it finds any individual chunks that are identical then it adds those to the user's search or current download.
A result of using SET will be an expansion of available sources for any given file. Showing off SET in practice, the software seemed to work well. Using a P2P network such as Limewire, their rate of download for an MP3 track accelerated 70 percent. The results were almost as good when they tried downloading a movie trailer.
The MPAA and RIAA have often blamed China as one of the main avenues of media piracy of US entertainment. The MPAA has gone so far as to say that the film industry loses 2.3 million in revenue every year due to piracy.
For years the two groups as well as other members of the entertainment industry have been trying to get the Chinese government to take a tougher stance against US media piracy.
However, China has made steps to cut down on piracy but the main problem remains. There are many import restrictions placed on American goods such as movies, books and music and these restrictions lead to a higher demand for piracy in China as they have no alternative to getting the media they desire.
Still, with the decision to file a complaint with the WTO, a trade representative addressed a few of America's complaints and addressed the import issue.
"Piracy and counterfeiting levels in China remain unacceptably high,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwabb said. “Inadequate protection of intellectual property rights in China costs U.S. firms and workers billions of dollars each year, and in the case of many products, it also poses a serious risk of harm to consumers in China, the United States and around the world..."
We reported last week that the US was filing a piracy case against China, and after the decision was made, Nintendo of America declared very strong support for the government and their efforts to crack down on video game piracy in particular in China.
Each year, the US Trade Representatives gets reports from companies about foreign piracy and this year Nintendo gave evidence about piracy in China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Paraguay, and Brazil.
According to Nintendo's report there have been more than 7.7 million counterfeit videogame products seized from Chinese factories and retailers in the last 10 years.
In a statement, the company said China is "the leading production site and exporter for counterfeit Nintendo videogame products", and also has the largest domestic consumption - but there has only been one criminal prosecution.
"Numerous factories, where tens of thousands of counterfeit Nintendo products were seized, escaped with only trivial fines or no penalty at all. And often these production sites continue to operate after products are seized,"
Nintendo's senior director of anti-piracy praised the goverment highly for their latest efforts: "Nintendo will continue to work with the U.S. government while aggressively pursuing counterfeit Nintendo products in China.
The 20 GB model of the Sony Playstation 3 are beginning to disappear in the US. Many retailers have discountinued selling the 20 GB model in favor of the higher demanded 60 GB model. Even on Sony's offical online store SonyStyle, the lower end model is no longer available.
Speaking about the drop of the model at SonyStyle, a Sony spokesman had this to say: "The line-up [at SonyStyle] is decided based on market demand and so it's not surprising that they are not selling it on their website. But if you go to a retailer you can find it."
Besides SonyStyle, other retailers such as Best Buy, Gamestop and EB Games have stopped selling the model, but others such as Amazon continue to have in stock for the time being.
The lower end model is not currently available in Europe and a spokesperson for Sony has stated that there are no plans in the works to release it in the newar future.
"We'll continue to monitor demand for the 20GB model, from a consumer and retailer perspective, which will be factored into any future European launch plans."
The next generation of mobile phone broadband, aptly named 4th generation or 4G is shaping up to change how mobile users receive and consume their digital media. The major supporter of the fourth generation mobile broadband is Intel by way of their WiMAX technology. WiMAX is similar in capacity to Wi-Fi but has the strength simliar to cellular signal for reaching much greater distances.
Should companies choose to adopt the WiMAX standard, this would significantly lower the cost of providing digital content over the current jammed mobile broadband network. Because of the flexibility of WiMAX, labels are looking into its benefits to support their content.
"We're negotiating over a much larger number, rather than the tight margins we have today,"said Warner Music's strategic management VP Michael Nash.
A representative from MobiTV stated that the benefits of WiMAX would not just be for mobile phones. At a recent trade show, the company showed high definition content being streamed over WiMAX with little to no degradation of quality. This power would enable media to be streamed to virtually any device capable of receiving a WiMAX signal, be it a computer, phone or even future compatable televisions.
Being hailed as the first of its kind, Samsung will be releasing its SGH-F500 mobile phone in late 2007 complete with its own DivX Certification. DivX Inc. does not hand out their certifications lightly as devices are subjected to rigorous tests to ensure interoperability between other DivX enabled devices and also to ensure the quality consumers expect from DivX encoded media.
The F500 is a member of Samsung's premier line of cellular phones and features a large LCD display that sits atop a swivel for optimal viewing range. Samsung claims the device offers high quality DivX viewing in any setting. DivX material can be accessed from either the consumer's own collection, the DivX Stage 6 service or other forms of digital content services.
"The addition of DivX Certification to the Samsung F500 mobile handset opens a broad ecosystem of digital media that can be taken on the road while preserving the kind of high-quality experience that video aficionados demand," said Kevin Hell, President of DivX, Inc. "DivX is working to build a common digital media language that offers real interoperability across devices and platforms, and innovative devices like the Samsung Ultra F500 phone are an important piece of that ecosystem."
For the measily price of 49 Euros, you can get the iPod Nano's latest rival, a new group of MP4 players created by Computer Supermarket.
The new player, which is was created to look almost identical to the Nano has a 1.8-inch LCD, 4 GB of flash memmory, built-in FM radio, and more importantly, the ability to play all different sorts of audio and video codecs.
For those who want the same functionality of a Nano should look into these new MP4 players which were before only sold from places in Asia.
In the upcoming Spring dashboard update, weve reported that Microsoft will add Live messenger compatibility as well as many other tweaks.
We did not however, mention the new addtion of three new video codecs. The Media Center as well as Windows Media Connect will be able to stream Mpeg-4 up to 8 Mpbs, H.264 at up to 15Mbps, and PlaysForSure WMV.
This is a great addition that will allow users to play an increasing amount of their videos on the 360.
Korean based electronics giant, LG, known for everything from cellular phones to flat screen televisions to refrigerators is looking to branch out in yet another electronics market. While pictures of the LG FM37 personal media player have been floating around for some time, details have often been scant at the very best. Now as the player takes to the market, a few more details are available as LG hopes to take portable video to a new level.
Armed with the same processing power as their LDC televisions, the FM37 comes in a shiny aluminum chassis and touted as the best small LCD displays on the planet. Although in early reviews popping up, the media center software is being called unsightly names like "clunky", this still doesn't stop people from giving the little device a shiny review.
Crisp picture in a 2.4" display isn't all as its also got touchscreen ability to help navigate the media software. All of this adds up to great, but not the best sound, according to reviews and a battery life said to reach some 3 hours of continuous video and 20 hours of audio.
It seems the masses will not be content at letting the movie studios deny them the ability to back up their high-definition content as the DRM scheme AACS has once again been exploited. This time, the clever bunch of hackers have exposed the Volume ID any disk inserted into the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.
Any disk means just that, any disk. Even disks that have had their volume ID previously put on the hot list of the AACS LA (Licensing Authority) will not escape the scrutiny of this exploit. Couple this with the exposed processing keys and you would be able to backup your media for playback on whatever device you choose. This all comes about just one week after WinDVD released and update that was supposed to strengthen AACS efforts but instead, as many expected, became utterly useless.
Of course, this update is only good news for those out there who own an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, but its still good news for things to come.
Virgin Radio has announced that it will take its digital networks onboard with the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3. They are claiming to be the first UK based station to do just that.
Set to be released possibly as an update, each respective console will have a new feature added to the browser which will host a custom player that accesses the Virgin Radio media stream. In addition to standard radio transmission, they hope to broadcast video and special recording sessions. If that wasn't enough, they're also touting the ability to purchase and download concert tickets full albums and individual tracks of select artists.
In efforts to appeal to a younger crowd, Virgin's director of digital media, James Cridland said, "People are treating the consoles as part of their home entertainment media centre, and now Virgin Radio will be part of that experience."
Of course, the main Virgin Radio station will be widely available through the two consoles, but Virgin also says they will include such networks as the guitar heavy Virgin Radio Xtreme, Virgin Radio Classic as well as Virgin Radio Groove for the soulfully minded.
John Romero, ex-designer at id Software and Ion Storm, has warned that manufacturers of gaming consoles need to radically rethink the design of consoles to compete with powerful cheap PCs and the services they can offer in the near future. He believes that Xbox 360, PS3 and beyond need to offer the same services as home PCs, not just for gaming, but all aspects of home entertainment.
"My prediction is that the game console in the vein of the PS3 and Xbox 360 is going to either undergo a massive rethink or go away altogether," Romero said in an interview with The Adrenaline Vault. "Next-gen console is big but its future isn't too bright with the emergence of cheap PC multicore processors and the big change the PC industry will go through during the next five years to accommodate the new multicore-centric hardware designs."
He continued: "The hardcore gamers are going to either be playing on their PCs or a new PC-like platform that sits in the living room but still serves the whole house over Wi-Fi, even the video signal." While he does believe that consoles need to match the performance of PCs and offer the same services, he did have some good words for the less-powerful Wii console from Nintendo.
Cablevision Systems Corp. was dealt a serious blow last month when Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled in favor of several Hollywood studios and television networks in the case over Cablevision's plan to create a network-based digital video recorder for its customers. Cablevision confirmed on Tuesday that it will appeal the ruling.
The Remote Storage DVR, or RS-DVR, would mean 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.
"Our remote-storage DVR is the same as conventional DVRs, and merely enables consumers to exercise their well-established rights to time-shift television programming," Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said in a statement. "We continue to believe strongly that remote-storage DVR is permissible under current copyright laws."
Toshiba Corp. has taken legal action against a total of 17 companies in the United States over licensing fees for DVD technology the companies are using in their products. The company and its U.S. subsidiary filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Northern District of California. Separately, a complaint has also been filed with the US International Trade Commission over the products.
The products in question are DVD players, recorders and other such equipment that uses DVD technology. In a statement, Toshiba said it is seeking damages through its court case and hopes that the US International Trade Commission will ban the products in question from importation into the United States.
Companies that manufacture DVD players typical pay between $3 and $8 in royalties per player. Daewoo, Tonic, Starlight and Dongguan are among the 17 companies that Toshiba has targeted.
One of the most highly-anticipated titles so far for Microsoft's Xbox360 console - Halo 3 - is set to be released to the public at beta stage from 16 May. The beta will last for three weeks ending on 7 June.
Gamers will be able to experience the online multiplayer aspect of the game from which developers Bungie can gain feedback.
The Halo brand has been a huge success since its launch along with Microsoft's original Xbox console, with the games shifting in excess of 14.7m copies worldwide, & more than 800m hours of online Halo games having been played. It has also made large sums in sales of action figures, graphics novels, books and clothes
Halo 3 is expected to be released towards the end of the year, and is key to Microsoft in its battle with the rivalling Playstation 3 from Sony and Nintendo's Wii console.
Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor said the beta would contain "quirks, a couple of roughedges". "A lot of secret features are hidden in this beta. We're keeping a lot of our powder dry for Fall," he added.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which sells flat panel displays through its Panasonic brand name, is to start selling 42-inch Full HD Plasma TVs. The company will begin selling the high definition displays in Japan on April 27. Matsushita is hoping to challenge LCD makers by improving its line-up of plasma displays that offer a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels.
Matsushita is the world's largest maker of plasma TVs in the $84 billion flat TV market. It competes with the likes of Sony Corp. and Sharp and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Makers of Plasma TVs offer 50-inch+ full high-definition models, but avoid producing smaller displays due to the high cost of packing the technology into one.
The 42-inch TVs from Matsushita are expected to sell for ¥410,000 to ¥430,000 ($3,449-$3,617). It plans to manufacture 25,000 units of them a month for the domestic market, with an international launch following soon after the Japan launch. Matsushita also plans to spend $2.4 billion to build the world's largest plasma display factory.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the trade body that represents the global record industry, has issued a statement on yesterday's news that the US will file formal trade complaints against China after months of demanding a crackdown on pirated American movies, music and software.
Here is the statement from John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of IFPI....
"The international recording industry fully supports the U.S. government's decision to initiate a WTO dispute against China. China is a hugely exciting potential market for record companies, but it is also the source of the world's biggest piracy problem. Record companies are eager to invest there, to develop local artists internationally, to bring international music to Chinese audiences and to stimulate economic partnership with Chinese industries. This is impossible until China does more to improve the legal landscape on which the music industry depends to do its business.
"We recognize that China has made efforts in recent years to step up copyright enforcement. However, to achieve durable and meaningful improvement and to bring China into line with international rules, certain legal reforms and changes to enforcement practices are needed. These reforms, which affect the basis on which criminal prosecutions can be brought in China, would help remove key obstacles that currently hinder enforcement against pirate operators. We hope that the proceedings announced by the USTR today will lead to these required improvements, from which copyright-based industries internationally, including in China, stand to benefit."
According to Bloomberg News and Joystiq, Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest video game publishers, had their sales drop 25% in February compared to the same month last year. Around the industry however, sales rose 28%.
EA, just like some of its competitors such as Take Two and Activision, underestimated Nintendo Wii sales and are now paying the price. There are now over 3 million Wii owners in the U.S. and Japan and EA is finally beginning to rush games out for the console.
EA has begun redeploying their resources towards Wii games and in the long run the Wii may be their saving grace. An analyst for game publishers has stated that Wii games cost just $2-5 million to create, while games for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 can cost as much as $30 million.
We hope EA and other publishers take time to make sure these games are done right and not rushed solely for profit.
Zander Urquhart, 32, from Glasgow is one of the first fitness experts to promote the use of Nintendo's Wii console as an exercise machine. The console's innovative controller requires more active gameplay from the user compared to traditional controllers and Univeristy studies showed that gamers can burn up to 125 calories during an average 15 minute session with select titles.
Zander decided to help his clients by using a Wii after he witnessed a client's son playing one. "This five-year-old needed encouragement to do any exercise - but here he was running about for half-an-hour working up a sweat," he said. He targeted kids initially, but then realized that adults were just as keen to try it out. "It's been great for adults coming back from injury and for OAPs," Zander said.
"We're not aware of anyone else doing this but it shows what the Wii can be used for," a Nintendo spokesperson commented. A study by Liverpool John Moores University found that in an average 12.2-hour gaming week, Wii players can burn up to 1830 calories, which amounts to 27lb a year.
Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., Ltd. (TMD) has developed a 20.8-inch low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display panel to advance to the next-generation of flat-screen TV sets and monitors. The newly developed panel uses newly developed techniques for uniform coating of organic electroluminescent materials and the optimized combination of electrodes and organic materials.
TMD has been concentrating its efforts towards the development of LTPS technology and OLED technology. TMD has been developing 2.0-inch, 2.2-inch, 2.5-inch, 2.8-inch, and 3.5-inch OLED panels ideally suited for cellular phones and compact mobile equipment and has been in mass production of 3.5-inch OLED panels.
An OLED panel reproduces images from light emitted by the fine organic electroluminescent film formed on the glass substrate, thus it can provide high-contrast, clear images with ultra-fast response time for moving picture performance. In addition, the OLED panel features an ultra-wide viewing angle, a thinner profile due to the eliminated backlighting system and other peripheral elements, and energy conservation offering eco-friendly advantages.
In addition to the adoption of a top emission structure, TMD is now managing light at the nanometer level in individual pixels to improve the efficiency of distributing light produced from the color-emitting layers. This has contributed to higher brightness and lower power consumption. The newly developed panel will be exhibited in TMD's booth at the 3rd International FPD Expo (Display 2007) at Tokyo Big Sight from April 11 through April 13, 2007.
After a Judge ruled lately that Kaleidescape, a manufacturer of home media servers, did not violate its CSS license, the planned update to allow "managed copy" of HD content (and SD) may be effected. The Judge ruled against the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) on March 29th, saying that a key part of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) specification was not part of the license.
As a result, it is possible that the final specs for high-definition security systems may be delayed even further. The ability to make copies on a controlled basis is part of the awaited updates. The final AACS specs are due to be out for final member review in 60 days but that schedule could change due to the Kaleidescape ruling.
"There will absolutely be increased scrutiny of the AACS documents after this court decision, but I really hope and trust that doesn't delay our release," said Michael Ayers, a senior attorney with Toshiba America Information Systems. "The AACS group will have to take at what we are doing and make sure we don't set ourselves up for a similar problem."
The rumors about a possible SamsungHD DVD / Blu-ray hybrid player have been around for a long time and have been squashed by the company itself, then revived in more hints and clues. LG did introduce a hybrid player at CES in January, although it's lesser compatibility with HD DVD's HDi makes its high price tag much less attractive.
According to a Stor-Age.com article, Samsung plans to introduce their BD-UP5000"Duo HD Player" in July this year, to rival the player of LG. A rough translation of the article reveals that the player supports Blu-ray and HD DVD playback and fully supports their interactive content (BD-Java and HDi).
It also features HDMI 1.3, 1080/24p output for Blu-ray titles and DVD-Videoupscaling via DCDi processing. The next question would obviously be about the player's price tag, which unfortunately was not mentioned. However, a rough translation says that, "Samsung is looking at a 10 percent price differential over the single-format Blu-ray players", which would probably set the price between $799-$999.
Major retailers that account for millions of DVD sales every year are afraid of what movie downloading means for physical product sales. Music downloading has already taken a bite out of CD sales, stealing the business of "singles" from the CD format. The decline in CD sales and interest in buying CDs has had an effect at major retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, who rely on cheap CDs and DVDs to keep customers returning to stores.
Now that movie download services are evolving, Wal-mart has already jumped into the ring, Best Buy hopes to by the end of the year and Blockbuster pondered purchasing MovieLink. DVD sales rose 5% last year, which was down from a 9% increase in the previous year and NPD research suggested that growth would slip faster if it wasn't for TV show sales on the DVD format.
"They're seeing fairly rapid declines in their CD business. That's likely to happen in their DVD business," said Andrew Hargreaves, who covers electronics retailers for Pacific Crest Securities. Wal-Mart's download service sold 3,000 movies in its first month - hardly an impressive figure, but it still puts the giant in the lead when compared to its rival retail chains.
While Blu-ray seems to have the upper hand right now in the United States, European studios appear to favor the HD DVD format for high-definition video content for now. The main reason for picking the HD DVD format is saving money. "An HD DVD replication line costs about €800,000 and you can make 40,000 discs a day on it. A Blu-Ray replication line costs €1.7m or €1.8m and you can make 10,000 to 15,000 discs a day." French replication company Qol CEO Laurent Villaume told the Financial Times.
The launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in the U.S. led to a surge in Blu-ray movie sales which has continued ever since. Of all Blu-ray playing equipment sold in the U.S., Adams Media Research reports that 94% are players "built into consoles". Sony's four month delay for the European launch of the PS3 also played a big part in HD DVD's early support in the territory.
European studios are not solely committed to either format however, as it is far too early to tell which format will "win". "All the work we are doing on high definition will be useful for making Blu-Ray discs if the Blu-Ray standard wins. It will be easy to change position,"Studio Canal's Rodolphe Buet said. The figures also mean very little for now, as the vast majority of the general public is in no hurry to settle for either format - many aren't even really aware of them.
According to some retailers and video rental stores, shipments of Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies are coming in delayed and forcing the companies to pay for addded overnight costs just to be able to have the movies in stock for the street release date.
Sometimes, the movies are recieved as late as a week after the street release date.
Problems that are causing the delays seem to be stemming from the replication process. There are slim capacities already and added production problems like those for "Children of Men" are furthering the issues.
Lyne Fisher, spokeswoman at disc authoring company Cinram replied to the issues by saying "standard-definition has been around since 1997, so we have a lot of practice and the process is seamless... it's only natural that when there is a new process, it can take more time."
The company promises increased production by the end of the year and we hope all other authoring companies continue to improve as well.
In our previous article here we reported that the Spring dashboard update had been leaked by Gamespot. Due to the popularity of the clip, Microsoft has made the update official.
“Bringing the largest IM community in the world, Windows Live Messenger, to Xbox 360 makes sense, as Xbox LIVE has really become the largest social network on television," said Jerry Johnson, product unit manager of Xbox LIVE at Microsoft. "For our growing community of 6 million on Xbox LIVE, using Xbox 360 is a very social, connected experience. They are using Xbox 360 to play games, music and movies while simultaneously communicating with one another through video, voice and text chat. With this announcement we are simultaneously expanding the access of Xbox LIVE users to existing friends and family while introducing Windows Live Messenger users to the benefits of Xbox 360."
The update will be coming officially on May 7th and will offer many new updates including pop-ups notifying the gamer of the name of the achievement and the value without the need to manually check the list.
A new Xbox Live Marketplace “blade” will be set in place.
Because of a new research report from Sony, sales for next generation DVDs are finally becoming more public.
According to the report, Sony's new release "Casino Royale" smashed all previous records by shipping 100,000 units to retail and also in the report Sony has 5 of the top 10 releases for the month of March.
Also in the report, Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD an impressive 9:2 while dominating the top sellers list. The only HD-DVD movie to even make an appearence on the list was "The Departed".
The report is also the first to provide hard sales stats for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray from Nielson VideoScan, the industry leader in competitive sales data.
According to the numbers from VideoScan, since its inception there have been 844,000 Blu-ray units sold, while there have been 708,600 units sold for HD-DVD.
However, there are some notes for the numbers. The VideoScan numbers do not include Wal-mart sales and most online merchants. There are also many more Blu-Ray players in use due to the amount of PlayStation 3's that have been sold. In all we can see that next gen DVDs have a long way to go before they can share the market with current gen DVDs.
KKBOX, an online music streaming platform with over 220,000 members in Taiwan has launched its first DRM-free track, the first ever to be legally introduced in Taiwan.
Through cooperation with the record publishers of the Chinese-language group "Blue Eyes", a "Blue Eyes" song will be available DRM-free for $.60 USD or free for those who have the monthly service from KKBOX.
The move will help KKBOX to compete with ezPEER+, Taiwan's largest p2p online music platform.
In spite of the fact that maker Sony denies that it has been discontinued, the 20GB version its PlayStation 3 console is apparently becoming harder to track down, with at least three retailers no longer offering the cheaper, less featured version.
In a statement, the electronics giant announced that the 20GB version, which retails at $499 is still shipping to retailers. The general feeling among retailers is that there's a lack of demand by consumers for the 20GB model.
Sony has stressed a number of times that the 60GB PS3 is the more popular of the two, therefore some stores have opted to only sell that model.
The PS3, which debuted in Europe last month, is currently struggling up saleswise with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii console. Research figures show that Sony's sales have dropped off sharply while the Xbox 360 and Wii have shown more seasonal declines.
Japanese conglomerate, NEC which is known for production of everything from computer chips to defense systems stated that it has developed a new form of plastic. Its bioplastic is a corn based product that conducts heat faster than stainless steel. NEC aims to use this bioplastic as a source material for mobile phones and laptops beginning April 2008.
The benefit of this corn-based bioplastic is that it is lighter and would essentially run cooler than standard build practices. Laptops, for instance, wouldn't need to be burdened with the added weight of stainless steel heat releasing sheets or fans. Mobile phones would see an improvement in weight and heat generation if incorporated with this new plastic.
NEC hopes to replace most of the current plastic with its bioplastic by 2010 and has already begun using plastic made of fermented corn and kenaf fiber in phones in March of last year.
"Cost is still a bottleneck, but we hope to continue lowering bioplastic costs and add value so that other makers will also follow suit," said Shuichi Tahara, general manager of NEC's Nano Electronics Research Laboratories.
The new plastic is cheaper than other fiber-reinforced plastics as it requires less carbon fiber to produce, but it still remains more expensive than stainless steel.
Since its debut in November of 2001, Apple has released 10 variations of its market dominating portable media device, the iPod. Released in an unofficial sales figure, Apple says it has officially shipped its 100 millionth iPod and by which has reached a hefty milestone.
Shrugging off high profile competitors such as Microsoft with its Zune player as well as several third-party contenders, Apple has remained at the very top of the portable media food chain with a healthy and steady 70% market share. Their iTunes service boasts some 2.5 billion songs, 50 million television shows and over 1.3 million movies sold to further bolster their dominance.
With eager Apple fans awaiting the next product to drop from the lineup, the iPhone continues to generate media buzz. It is scheduled to be released 2 months from now with an expected price tag of $500 or $600.
A Sony affiliate born out of an agreement to direct funds to a new type of display for flat panel TVs known as Field Emmission Technologies, Inc., is currently developing FED or Field Emmission Displays for use in the corporate sector.
While no plans are currently in the works to use these displays for private home use, it does open up possibilities for more flat panel options in the future. Field emmission displays are said to be more efficient and focus their strengths on creating crisp moving images.
"Our products will be used by professional video creators and at broadcasting companies," Field Emission Technologies Chief Executive Shohei Hasegawa told a news conference. "We have a dream of eventually entering the TV market for general consumers. But we will steer clear of heavy capital investments up front
Hasegawa commented that they will be looking to sign prospective partners by mid-2008 and hope to have product for consumption by 2009.
FED was invented in the 1970s but never gained much ground due to not being commercialized, then eventually lost out to LCD and plasma displays.
Flash memory producer SanDisk released a statement saying that it has recently partnered with Yahoo in a music sharing service directly geared towards their Sansa Connect digital audio player.
Sansa Connect will not only allow users to listen to their favorite MP3s, but it also has built in WiFi which will enable users to connect to Yahoo's music service without the need to first connect to a PC. Details of the agreement are not known, but it is said that the Sansa connect will be associated with both a free service as well as a subscription based service provided by Yahoo.
Released in January and available for sale in the US, the Sansa Connect is said to be the number 2 digital audio player behind longshot front runner, the iPod. SanDisk, like many others before it, hopes to take some of the 70% market share away from Apple and the Sansa Connect player is one of a few devices showcased at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
SanDisk hopes to reclaim some of the profit drop it has felt with the decline in prices for flash memory and releases this player to the tune of $250.
Next week, the US will file formal trade complaints against China after months of demanding a crackdown on pirated American movies, music and software.
The complaints will be filed with the World Trade Organization and will most likely escalate trade tensions between the two superpowers.
The complaints come after years of building a case of intellectual-property abuses against China.
The complaints claim that China has only prosecuted a small fraction of the street bootleggers and other pirates of American media.
In interesting fact to the whole case is that Microsoft, Apple and Pfizer have refused to support the case.
Today, the YuMe Network is set to launch a new network that would allow advertisers to insert advertising within the downloadable content, eliminating the need for DRM,
“Today we are launching a game-changing capability that will take online video advertising to another level,” said Jayant Kadambi, CEO and co-founder of YuMe Networks. “We are excited to bring advertisers a solution that enables them to insert dynamic, targeted and customizable campaigns in content downloaded from online destinations such as BitTorrent to any device — PC, mobile, IPTV and more.”
The company says it will be able to measure and track user viewing and pass this information onto the companies paying for the ads so they can constantly optimize the ads they deliver based on those results.
The first ad supported videos available on the BitTorrent network will be from the game "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary".
“We have been working diligently with a range of video publishers from the largest movie studios to the creators of independent video to advocate the role advertising can play in delivering their content to the BitTorrent community,” said Ashwin Navin, President and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. “The combination of our extensive user base, worldwide content relationships and powerfully efficient distribution model, is enabling a rapid shift toward free, ad-supported content available on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.”
Nine Inch Nails, trying to promote their new album "Year Zero" have hit a roadblock. That roadblock is the RIAA.
In trying to promote their album, NIN released an internet scavenger hunt that led to a website where you can download singles from the new album. The band also dropped USB flash drives in the bathrooms of their concert venues, with each drive containing a song from the new album.
The idea was to get fans to swap the music and start talking about the new CD which is exactly what happened.
The whole plan backfired when the RIAA began to send out emails demanding the fans to remove the music from their sites and threatening to sue them for every single shared.
Why the RIAA is going against a decision that was signed off by the label they are trying to protect is anyones guess.
Just two weeks after the Apple TV began shipping, hackers have installed the Mac OSX onto the media box, turning it into the cheapest Mac ever sold.
"The breakthrough is done, OS X runs on Apple TV!" wrote "Semthex," the anonymous hacker responsible for the mod, at his website. "Now weve got (the) low-budget Mac we ever wanted."
The hack, although very difficult to perform for the casual user, has helped other hackers greatly.
"This hack seriously opens up the doors with what the Apple TV could be used for," said Tom Anthony, administrator of Apple TV Hacks, in an e-mail.
With the OS X installed, soon we should be able to see almost anything able to run on the TV, including Windows Media Center Edition or Linux.
The Apple TV has some powerful specs including a "Pentium M processor, as much RAM as Sony's PlayStation 3 and a faster graphics chip than a Nintendo Wii" and it was only a matter of time before hackers used that power to open up the TV to its full potential.
Apple so far has not made a statement openly about the hacks.
As of today, here are the hacks you can perform (and void your warranty with) on the Apple TV:
Jason Reindorp, the head of marketing for Microsoft's Zune, has made comments hinting that Microsoft is on the verge of a deal to sell EMI's music catalogue without DRM through their Zune platform.
As Mr Reindorp said: “We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content.
“This does open things up a little bit. It potentially makes the competition more of a device-to-device or service-to-service basis, and will force the various services to really innovate.”
EMI did not confirm but a spokesman did say: “Negotiations with other platforms, such as Zune, are ongoing.”
Zune is a direct competitor of the Apple iPod and EMI's announcement earlier this week to sell DRM free music on iTunes has surely prompted Microsoft to hastily try to emulate.
DVD rentals and sales have been patchy this year and John Marmaduke, CEO of Hastings Entertainment, believes that the increase in holiday sales of High-Definition televisions maybe causing consumers to stay at home and watch the growing number of HD channels -- rather than go out and rent / buy a DVD.
He reckons that instead of renting high-def DVD's to watch on their HDTV's, consumers are tuning into 24-hour HD networks such as HDNet, Discovery HD Theater and INHD because the format war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD is scaring people away. "I think the industry is being punished for no unanimity with high-def,” he said. “Anecdotally, I’m hearing a lot talking about all the high-def channels they’re discovering."
Comcast Corp. is almost finished a $400 million upgrade to its digital cable network in the Chicago area. The upgrade has been made to comply with a February 2009 deadline that requires all broadcasters to send signals in a digital format. Eric Schaefer, vice president of business development, said that Comcast will begin upgrading suburban areas after it completes city work.
Comcast customers that have basic service will need to exchange their analog set-top boxes for digital set-top boxes, but the cable company will not charge an additional fee or raise the rates for current analog customers. "The vast majority of our Chicago customers already have digital service, but for the customers with basic service, they will get a new box," he said.
The boxes can be picked up at a Comcast office or mailed to customers if requested. By removing thee analog signals from its network, Comcast will be able to increase programming choices. Two additional high definition channels will be offered in the coming months, bringing the total to 18 HD channels, but upgrade creates space for as many as 120 HD channels.
ACID, or Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection, developed by the Virage division of Autonomy, can scan for and detect illegally posted rich media in any format wherever it is posted, according to Autonomy founder and CEO Michael Lynch. The ACID technology was shown off on April 4th in a press conference. "Acid watches very large amounts of video and it can spot video that is owned by someone else in a highly automated process," Lynch said.
ACID could be used as a tool for content providers to find videos posted on YouTube and similar sites. Of course, there have been more solutions for this type of piracy shown off recently, but Lynch claims that ACID does not rely on on tagging technology or video watermarking to locate copyright-infringing media. He added that those techniques can be thwarted much easier.
ACID uses Autonomy's "meaning-based computing" technology, which allows computers to find relationships within many different types of unstructured data, including text, word processing documents, e-mails, audio and multimedia. Such a service is probably useless against P2P services or BitTorrent trackers. Hollywood has turned a lot of attention to sites like YouTube in recent months due to the overwhelming amounts of unauthorized clips uploaded.
There has been yet more research published concerning a possible link between violent video games and youth behavior and emotional state. This time, the study found that "stable" participants were unaffected by violent video games. The researchers enlisted the help of 110 boys and 15 girls with an average age of 14.6.
The participants simply played Quake II for 20 minutes after researchers got a personality profile of each. After the gaming session ended, anger levels were immediately measured again. 77 of the participants had no change in their anger levels while 22 had elevated anger levels. 8 participants had started out with a higher anger level before playing then when they finished.
The study showed that those determined to have stable personalities had emotional states that were unaffected by the gaming. Of course, there have been many studies done on this subject and many more will follow with all sorts of results. This topic is also brought up frequently by politicians, usually as a distraction from something else or during a campaign.
According to figures from iSuppli, the total number of global IPTV subscribers will rise to 103 million in 2011, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 92.5% up from 3.9 million in 2006. iSuppli reports that the growth of IPTV is leading to a competitive battle over so called "triple-play" services - bundles voices, Internet and entertainment services.
"IPTV promises to add interactivity, personalization, integration of voice and data and value-added services to television entertainment," said Frank Dickson, principal analyst for multimedia content services at iSuppli. "Because of the wide variety of services offered by the technology, companies from various industries are being drawn into the IPTV/triple-play fight, sparking intensified competition among market participants."
The growth predicted by iSuppli translates into $39.1 billion in revenues, up by a factor of more than 40 from $960.5 million in 2006.
Google Inc.'s YouTube service has been banned/blocked in Thailand after videos were posted that were considered offensive to the monarch. The videos insulted King Bhumibol Adulyadej, which is a very serious crime in the country. Thailand decided to ban the entire YouTube site after the videos were posted but YouTube would prefer that only offensive material was blocked / removed.
"I don't want to hear a lecture on free speech... I am a proponent of free speech but this is just culturally insensitive and offensive... we will not tolerate materials that offend the monarchy," Minister of Information Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said. He added that Thailand would consider lifting the ban if it had the ability to block only offending pages.
"It's up to the Thailand government to decide whether to block specific videos, but we would rather that than have them block the entire site," YouTube's head of global communications, Julie Supan, said. The ban immediately sparked outrage from media rights groups, who claim that it is an example of increasing censorship by the government.
The first video posted showed the 79-year-old King covered with graffiti and pictures of 'feet' over his face, which is incredibly offensive to Thais as they consider feet the dirtiest part of the human body. The video was removed but was followed later by two similar clips.
Fastmac today announced the first Blu-ray optical drive upgrade for Apple's PowerBook, iBook & MacBook Pro computers. The new slimline, slot loading drive uses one of the fastest & most compatible Blu-ray mechanisms to provide up to 50 Gb of storage on 1 disk, without sacrificing compatibility with standard DVD & CD recordable media.
Fastmac's new Blu-ray slot loading drive gives photographers, videographers & musicians the ability to save anything, anywhere in the field, on location, in the studio, at work or at home. System administrators and database administrators can archive and retrieve large amounts of data on 1 convenient disk. And consumers can now watch today's latest HD content in true high definition with surround sound anytime & anywhere they happen to be.
"This new optical drive gives me the freedom to save anything, anywhere I happen to be with my new MacBook Pro," said Edward Savio, President of Fastmac Performance Upgrades, Inc. "With this much storage capability, I was able to sort and backup my work on a per project basis." Fastmac's Blu-ray optical drive upgrade is scheduled to ship within 10 days and is available for pre-order from www.fastmac.com for a special introductory price of $799.95. Each drive carries a 1 year warranty and a 30 day money back guarantee.
GameSpot has accidentally posted a video of the Xbox 360's spring Dashboard update and it has made its way to YouTube.
Although no one has confirmed the update or the leak, you can watch the video here (it does not look fake):
Video
According to the video, here are a few of the updates:
-Will be offcially released May 7th
-Your contacts will integrate Windows Live Messenger, and show joinable session status
-Your live messenger contacts can see what game you're playing, and your gamertag as well
-Marketplace will "have its own blade, which will be skinned independent of your theme"
-You can watch partially downloaded movies
-Other updates include "Users will now get inline achievement updates", "Low-power download mode and auto-shutdown", "You can text chat messenger six friends playing games watching movies" and finally a few tweaks to the interface.
Corel has introduced an AACS patch for their cracked InterVideo WinDVD software and according to Corel, "failure to apply the update will result in AACS-protected HD DVD and BD playback being disabled."
That means, either update, or never watch your High Def movies again. For added inconvinience, you have to track down and install the specific patch for your specific player.
What can we expect from Corel when this newest patch is cracked?
Software giant Microsoft may be considering different distribution models for its iPod-rivalling Zune media device, with one of the propositions said to be offering the device at a next to nothing price tied to a subscription -- similar to a cellphone contract.
"Microsoft is exploring lots of ideas, and this is just one of them," confirmed a spokesperson for the company. The spokesperson said a subsidised Zune is only one of a series of "wild ideas" that Microsoft is currently considering in an attempt to compete with Apple's upcoming iPhone. The software maker has yet to announce plans to head towards the telecommunications market, though is considering such a move.
"It's a direction Zune would want to head in, but is it going to go there immediately? Probably not," the spokesperson said.
In an update to our previous article here in which Malaysian pirates put out a bounty on MPAA sniffer dogs, the dogs have gone into hiding and Malaysian pirates have begun using a chemical spray on their pirated discs to mask the smell.
Lucky and Flo, the two sniffer dogs, have been moved from safe house to safe house in an effort to spare them from Malaysian bounty hunters.
The two labradors have been trained to detect the polycarbonate chemicals used in manufacturing DVDs, but Fahmi Kassim, a Malaysian official, has said that officials received a lead that pirates are now using chemical sprays to mask the scent.
"The pirates are believed to be desperate because the dogs were so successful," Fahmi told The Associated Press.
The dogs are on loan from the MPAA so how long they will have to remain in hiding before they are shipped back to the US is still in question.
In another move to curb piracy in Asia, the MPAA has decided to distribute anti-piracy brochures to every school and library in Singapore. The brochures are meant to warn the citizens of Singapore about the wrongs of P2P and file sharing in general.
The brochures, entitled “Illegal File-Sharing: The Risks Aren’t Worth It” will be available in all 23 national Library branches as well as distributed to all of Singapore’s 164 secondary schools and 16 junior colleges.
The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) will be distributing over 200,000 copies of the brochure starting today.
The booklets note "that since many P2P applications require users to upload – often invisibly – content at the same time they are downloading, users may be exposing themselves to criminal liability as well."
The decision to distribute the brochures began after the raids in Malaysia a month ago in which a large ring of piracy was busted.
"They found computers and databases of customers from all over the world and I'm afraid to say that a lot of those customers are here in Singapore. The gangs that are involved in this are organized crime groups, unquestionably organized crime groups," revealed Michael Ellis, a senior VP for the MPAA International.
"And Singapore customers who are dialing or emailing their orders to Malaysia and asking for the products to be delivered here are involved and supporting organized crime. And I have to tell you, we know who you are and we're providing that information to the authorities in Singapore. If you think that by buying one disc or one pirated DVD, you're not involved in this, it doesn't affect you, you're wrong, it does," says Mr Ellis.
Everyday, we hear stories coming from the MPAA arguing that the illegal downloading of movies is having terrible consequences on the movie industry. In the latest report from USA Today however, we hear a very different story.
"Through Sunday, ticket sales are at $2.1 billion, a healthy 6% ahead of the same time last year and 5% ahead of 2005, according to estimates from Nielsen EDI", says Scott Bowles, one of the writers of the article.
With mega-blockbusters set to be released such as Spider Man 3, Shrek the third, and the final installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, many studio executives are pronouncing that 2007 will break all current box office records. According to the article "The record was set in 2004 with $9.54 billion in the USA, although 2002 holds the record for most tickets sold at 1.6 billion".
In the MPAA's latest rant, they claimed that illegal file sharing had cut over 2 billion dollars of revenue from box office sales in 2006. When taking the stats into account, we can plainly see that that fact is simply not true. In 2004, the domestic take was 9.54 billion, in 2005 it was 9 billion, and in 2006 the take was 9.49 billion. Where is the 2.3 billion dollar loss? I dont see it.
Plextor has announced the immediate availability of the TurboPlex PX-800A DVDSuper Multi Drive, which the company says is fully compatible with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system. The company says the new DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW drive introduces a new level of performance and features, including 12X DVD-RAM and a software bundle that includes Roxio Easy Media Creator 9.
It uses the E-IDE ATAPI interface for easy connectivity with personal computers running the Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems. It supports industry-leading 12X-speed DVD-RAM functionality for removable data storage applications.
"The PX-800A supports multiple data storage, audio and DVD playback, and optical disc recording applications, with faster performance across-the-board," said Michael Arbisi, vice president of channel sales for Plextor. "The PX-800A is one of the first drives from Plextor to support the newly released Windows Vista operating system from Microsoft. Including the latest version of Roxio Easy Media Creator really makes this drive a great value for customers."
DivX, Inc. has moved its DivX Stage6 video sharing service into beta. The service competes directly with YouTube and similar video sharing services, and even has some advantages up its sleeve. The platform lets anyone upload, download, view, share and experience everything from short clips captured on mobile phones all the way up to full-length, high-definition feature films.
It offers more freedom with quality to the content creators than YouTube. Every video available on Stage6 is compatible with over 70 million consumer electronics devices from every major manufacturer, making it easy to play back Stage6 videos on your television or portable device. Since it was launched as an experimental alpha in August 2006, the site has picked up many new users.
The company claims that its service now offers more accurate video browsing and tools for users to stay up to date with their favorite channels, content and users. A "Now" page also shows the current activity on the service.
Microsoft Corp. has gotten a backlash from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK concerning an advertisement for the Xbox 360 console that shows street car racing. The ASA believes that the Xbox 360 advertisement "gave the impression that reckless street car racing was exciting and fun".
According to the organization, nobody should glamorize the activity or condone it and said that Microsoft did both in its judgment. The organization did note however that the Xbox 360 advertisement did make it clear that the driving was staged and performed by professionals and did warn that the activities should not be copied.
Unfortunately, the ASA decided that the precautions taken by Microsoft were not enough to allow it to be shown, even though it had only been shown after 9pm, and that the ASA only received one single complaint about it.
After Aria.co.uk decided to drop £25 from the price of a PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in the UK, some more retailers have copied the move in an effort to attract more potential buyers. More than 165,000 PS3 consoles were sold in the UK quickly, making the it the fastest selling "home console" in the territory. The following week however, retailers reported an (inevitable) slump in sales and interest.
Play.com and WH Smith have followed the move made by Aria and have dropped the price of the 60GB version of the PS3 console to £399. Play.com will even throw in an HDMI cable and a copy of the Adam Sandler movie Click on Blu-ray. WH Smith's offer is limited, extending to just April 19 but Play.com has set no limit for now.
Play.com also currently sells the Xbox 360 Core for just £149.99, an offer that is set to expire on April 10th.
A music sharing site that is home to 10,000 musicians and 100,000 tracks is set to go offline next week due to incompatibilities with the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Weedshare, which has been in operation for four years now, is popular with small and independent artists. The problems with Windows Media Player 11 are due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) on certain files.
Weedshare made updates to its files to allow operators to charge consumers. Shared Media Licensing, which owns Weedshare, adds its own data to the music's tracking data, so that downloaded tracks can be played three times before charging. Unfortunately, security enhancements in WMP 11 means that the files incorrectly get identified as having been "illegally tampered with" and won't play.
"We are moving away from Microsoft because of the cost and frustration,"John Beezer, Shared Media president told The Register. The company will resurrect the site sometime during the next six months with offerings that are less reliant on Microsoft software.
Back when VHS and BetaMax were slugging it out to become 'the' standard in home entertainment, VHS got a huge boost (often cited as the biggest boost) to its cause with the backing of the porn industry. Nowadays, HD DVD and Blu-ray are in their own format war and experts agree that once again, the porn industry will have a huge effect on the success of either format.
"If the porn industry wanted to break the logjam of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, it could,"James McQuivey a principal analyst at technology research firm Forrester, said. "If they said 'We are going to go with HD-DVD' you would see a few million homes immediately go out and buy HD-DVD players. They have that power." He also credited the adult industry will paving the way for newer technologies such as video streaming over the Internet.
Canada's new Government has pledged $650,000 funding to Vancouver-based record label Nettwerk Productions.
The company's CEO famously blasted the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)'s tactic of tracing and suing music fans caught sharing music on P2P networks. "My artists would never sue a fan," said Terry McBride back in August of last year. "I want those fans to share that music. When [the original] Napster hit, we had the same knee-jerk reaction that everyone else did: 'Who are these kids, let's get them and sue them.' But after a while we realized that they were no different than I was when I was as a teenager, just looking to consume as much music as possible."
Of the cash-injection by the Government, Canada's Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Chuck Strahl said, "I am proud that our Government is supporting Nettwerk Productions' efforts to develop, promote and distribute works by talented Canadian songwriters such as Sarah McLachlan, the Be Good Tanya, the Great Lake Swimmers and many others."
Leaving nothing to the competition, Microsoft has partnered with Talismoon to bring that tilting goodness previously found only in Nintendo's Wiimote and Sony's SIXAXIS controller.
Talismoon's tiltboard is set to get a full on "mass production" makeover which will polish its control over Microsoft games and allow 360 users the ability to control their games without touching the D-pad or analog control sticks. Details are very slim right now, only a video showing off what it can do in these early stages.
A rather excited representative from Talismoon simply stated that this partnership "will be worth the wait".
Security firm Kaspersky has identified the first virus possible of infecting Apple's iPod. Although this virus is not malicious in nature and is impossible to spread on its own, it has been identified as a "proof of concept" virus. What this means, the developers of the virus have released the file to show that it is possible to infect the platform and can become a problem should the decide to release it upon the world.
In its current form, the virus known as Podloso can only "infect" the iPod with direct user involvement. As stated, being proof of concept only, it has no means of self propogating. Once launched, it scans the hard drive and attaches itself to any executable (.elf) file found. Once any application on the iPod is launched, the user will be treated to a splash screen stating, "You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus".
As evident from its message, the Podloso virus only infects those iPods running Linux as its operating system.
No details were found of its origination and as stated before, this virus poses no real threat, carries no malicious payload and can only be infected if you, the user, specifically launches the virus package. Apparently the creators just wanted word to spread that they are not safe anymore.
Basking in the glory of a highly profitable lineup of console games, Japanese game maker Nintendo has revamped their sales target for this year. Nintendo now states that it expects its official sales from the beginning of the year through March to be up from its expected 900 billion Yen ($8.1bn; £4.1bn) to an astounding 966 billion.
Credit can be given to its still wildly successful DS handheld, a successful launch of its new Wii console as well as several sleeper titles that gained massive popularity such as its Brain Teasing exercises.
Many analysts are surprised at Nintendo's success and the speed at which its units are continuously selling out even when faced with stiff competition from Sony's PS3 and the highly successful Microsoft Xbox 360.
Nintendo is expected to release its official sales figures on April 26.
Computer manufacturer Hewlett Packard has decided to give the world of video games a shot. Having recently acquired VoodooPC at the end of last year, HP unveiled plans to usher in a new line of PCs tailored to gamers.
With innovative plans in the works such as curved monitors which are said to allow gamers a more surreal experience in their gameplay. One example was a driving game that could give the gamer peripheral vision as well as the standard straight on view. Another plan unveiled with little information is a handheld unit in development to give gamers a solution on the move.
HP stated that it has no intentions at going up against the big 3 in consoles, but only to offer PC gamers an avenue for competant machines, priced a bit higher than their standard machines, but full of impressive hardware. They stated that the machines would, however cost less than the custom PCs once ordered directly from VoodooPC. HP hopes to follow its competitor Dell when it purchased custom PC maker Alienware in March 2006. The 35 billion dollar per year industry has to be tempting for just about anyone with the means of breaking into it.
According to results from a report entitled "Moving Pictures 2007" released by a Swedish broadcast statistics institute MMS, two out of five of Swedes between the age of 16 and 30 regularly watch pirated TV shows.
"This issue is very important for the future of the TV industry and we will continue to follow this development closely" said Pontus Bergdahl, CEO of MMS.
The report also said that Swedish youngsters and adults watch over an hour of pirated TV every week with Prison Break being the most popular show. 35 percent of the people who watched an episode of Prison Break in the last month indicated that they did not watch it on TV but rather on their computers after downloading the episodes via P2P.
"The Swedish youth will probably continue to download pirated TV-shows unless attractive alternatives are offered to them", says Sorosh Tavakoli the project leader.
Also included in the report were reasons for the massive piracy. The main reason was the fact that people like the liberty to watch a show whenever they please and without commercials. Another prominent reason was many downloaders did not like the delay between a US showing and the Swedish showing. They would rather download it hours after the US showing then wait days for it to be shown on Swedish TV.
Azureus has renamed their hi-def BitTorrent service from Zudeo to "Vuze" a "hip" renaming of the word "views". The company is dearly hoping that their will be high consumer demand for HD content and they don't feel that current streaming technology can deliver reliable HD video in real-time.
Vuze requires that you the use a modified Azureus application that downloads the clips in question using BitTorrent but will also process payments for protected content and help you search for new content.
There have been more than 2 million unique users a month since the service was released as a beta in late 2006, says the company.
Vuze touts HD and standard definition content from major networks such as BBC, Showtime, A&E, the History Channel, and National Geographic as well as indie producers.
Clips can be purchased or rented depending on the content and the producer. BBC TV shows, for example, run for $0.99 an episode and Showtime gives away single episodes of its dramas for free to gain viewers.
The service remains in Beta for now, although the name is final and work continues to release a finished product soon.
According to a survey by SurveyU, a group of researchers that conduct surveys of college students, although there are risks of getting in legal trouble with the RIAA, 67 percent of students on college campuses do not care and are overlooking the reprecussions of illegally downloading music.
Conducted during the weekened of March 24th, the survey asked 500 students how many songs they owned, how they acquired these songs, whether they side with the RIAA, musicians, the government, or other college students and how informed they were on the legal precedence of digital rights and illegal downloading.
The results were not all that surprising. 53 percent of the students were aware of the legal issues but only 35 percent of that group was familiar with their own legal rights.
The survey also found that only 57 percent of the student's total libraries had been purchased.
"Clearly there's a sense among college students that once a song has been digitized, it's free," said Dan Coates, Co-Founder of SurveyU. "This is a generation that has grown up around digital media and is living on the fault lines of a digital rights issue."
When asked if they felt illegal downloading was affecting musicians only 40 percent agreed while the other 60 percent gave a statement almost identical to this one: "Musicians don't suffer since their growing fan base buys concert tickets and makes other financial contributions to their success."
If you recently purchased the "Nine Inch Nails: Beside You In Time" concert disc and tried to play it in your Xbox 360 HD-DVD player you were most likely let down by the poor audio quality caused by a bug in Microsoft's audio decoding software.
The concert disc features an amazing Dolby TrueHD lossless audio track but the The Xbox 360 HD DVD player cannot output a TrueHD signal and instead downsamples the lossless stream to a lossy 640kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 mix.
However, even after being downsampled most users report that the tracks sound better than the everyday Dolby Digital track. This was not the case with the concert disc which was reported as having “static popping” and “clipping” noises, killing the experience of listening to the disc.
Fortunately for users, Microsoft has confirmed that their HD DVD team is aware of the bug and plans to address it in their next software update.
“We plan on shipping an update to the Xbox 360 HD DVD player in early to mid spring. In this update we will be adding DTS output, improved Audio, and improved title compatibility,” relayed a Microsoft employee, according to what he had heard from the Xbox team. “The variability there is that this is a software project and we are fixing/enhancing a lot of things and we want to make sure we get them right. So it is difficult to give an exact day for the update.”
Due to the increasing availability of mod chips for their Wii console, Nintendo recently began shipping a revised version of the Wii that included an altered circuit layout, one that makes system level mods more difficult to perform.
However, forums are buzzing with news that new modchips for use with the altered layout are less than a month away and when those hit, they will force Nintendo to once again upgrade their circuit layout.
Providers of Wii modification services in Taiwan have stated that they belive soon Nintendo will use more complex methods to block modifications for an extended period of time.
They believe Nintendo could possibly adopt a "ball grid array" IC packaging which, if exectuted properly, could extend the time needed by hackers to develop new modchips to at least four months.
We will see what Nintendo has in store for the Wii as hackers continue to modify the system daily.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment has struck a deal with Global Music International that would allow GMI to distribute most of the company's music videos, full track songs and ringtones, to mobile subscribers in China.
Just like in the US, Chinese subscribers will be able to buy and download songs, ringtones, and music videos right to their phones. The content available will include music and videos from Chinese and Western artists.
With over 300 million subscribers and growing, the Chinese mobile market is a very important one and interest in the market is growing as well.
Although there is huge potential for sales in China, it is an uphill battle. About 85 percent of content recordings in China are pirated. Two months ago, a lawsuit against Yahoo China was filed by 11 music companies incuding Sony BMG, claiming Yahoo China infringed copyrights by providing links to unlicensed music.
However, BMG sees their partnership as a way to get their content out to the Chinese market and hopefully slow down piracy.
"We have been impressed with Global Music International's established relationships with major telecommunications players in China, and are extremely pleased to be entering into a licensing agreement with them to offer our unique music content for mobile distribution on their partners' wireless networks," Kelvin Wadsworth, executive vice president for Sony BMG Music Entertainment in Asia, said in a statement. "We see this agreement as an important part of our overall strategy to innovate, find new ways for our artists to connect with their fans, and develop new revenue streams."
Although in its early stages, Hewlett-Packard has begun working on a gaming handheld that could let players use their surroundings as a backdrop for an interactive game.
During an unveiling for their "Mscape" prototype they showed a TV commercial that "featured a number of young hipster gamers roaming San Francisco while playing a game on Mscape that used cues from their environment as triggers to unlock new levels or bonuses."
"We want to get kids off the couch," responded Rahul Sood, chief technology officer of HP's gaming division.
Although general details were sketchy, Sood did say that the company was developing technology that would turn handhelds in gaming devices. When the technology was created they planned to license it far and wide.
Patrick Goddi, an HP company researcher, said that HP has been working on the Mscape technology for almost two years.
"It's the underlying layer that game developers could use to take advantage of sensors like GPS (global positioning system) or accelerometers like the ones in the Wii controller", he said.
It seems that a game organizer could place small sensors around a park or even a city and those sensors would trigger events in the handheld game, including bonus levels, event progression or even attacks from villains.
In figures released yesterday by Sony, it is revealed that during the first ten days of sales in Australia, over 27,000 consoles were sold. Playstation 3 games also dominated the charts, where 9 out of the top 10 titles were PS3 games. The only non-PS3 game? Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2.
The launch of the PS3 helped cause a significant spike in video game sales for the entire Australian market. "Our data revealed that in a matter of just ten days the PlayStation 3 created a spike in retail spending not previously witnessed at the launch of any other console in Australia," commented GfK's (a data tracker) Daniel Morse.
"This spending continued into the second week of trading, resulting in sales of 27,083 PlayStation 3 consoles in just ten days."
Sony Australia managing director Michael Ephraim added, "Following a great launch for the PS3 across the country, it’s very satisfying for us to see that our close planning with retail and channel partners has ensured that all consumers wanting to get their hands on a PS3."
The PlayStation 2 continued to sell well also, with almost 8000 PlayStation 2 consoles sold in the 8-day period of March 19th to the 26th.
Bands that have risen to fame heavily due to Internet promotion and free sharing of their music are turning to services like Web Sheriff to fight illegal sharing of their music. File-sharing has changed security measures around unreleased recordings dramatically. For example, for music writers to hear an advance recording to the Artic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare album must go to their London HQ to hear it.
Bloc Party, a London quartet indie band tipped to emulate Radiohead's global success, has a huge scare when a copy of their second album, A Weekend in the City, leaked three months before its scheduled release. The band's record company, V2, hired Web Sheriff to fight the spread of the illegal copy around the Internet.
"They were looking at up to one million illegal MP3 song files spreading of an album which was supposed to break the band internationally."John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff managing director, said. The company tracked down uploaders of the music through their ISPs and sent them threatening letters demanding that the sharing cease.
According to V2, as a result of the actions, illegal downloads of the album were dramatically reduced. When it was released, the album went gold and entered the US Top 20. "Working together with Web Sheriff we managed to contain the distribution of the album whilst continuing to raise exposure for the forthcoming release and maintaining excitement amongst the fans."Beth Appleton, V2 head of new media, said.
After Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter on why the music industry should completely drop digital rights management (DRM) protection schemes from music downloads, Microsoft said it would be irresponsible to drop those restrictions completely. The company pointed out how DRM would be vital in services such as subscription services and newer business models.
However, the company does plan to start selling DRM-less music from EMI and other companies through the Zune marketplace. "We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content," said Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp. He did not give any time frame to expect DRM-less music to be available.
EMI is selling DRM-less tracks at a premium through Apple's iTunes music store. Removing the DRM opens the music to many more portable players and the more tracks that are unprotected, the more level the playing field may get for all online music download stores. "This does open things up a little bit," Reindorp said. "It potentially makes the competition more on a device-to-device or service-to-service basis. It will force the various services to really innovate."
Toshiba has released the latest firmware updates for its first generation HD DVD players, HD-A1 and HD-XA1. The update adds proper support for network-delivered content in HD DVD discs, expected to be released this fall. The firmware update, Version 2.1, should be used with the HD-A1 and HD-XA1 models "only".
"This firmware update adds support for certain anticipated network delivered content in future HD DVD discs, improves certain video and audio processing capabilities, as well as addresses certain disc playback and HDMI/DVI related problems identified by Toshiba." the company's website reads.
No HD DVD titles with network-connected features have been released or even announced yet, but it is good to see Toshiba supporting its first generation hardware. Some bugs have been reported with early HD DVD hardware and recently movie releases, hopefully the company will be able to fix those issues through more updates.
Toshiba is also offering a firmware CD to registered consumers via postal mail, in case any user is unable to download the upgrade directly through their player's Ethernet port. See here for more details.
Sony will release a new iPod dock, designed for its range of BRAVIA televisions. The company says that the Digital Media Port iPod Dock spacer TDM-IP1 will allow you "to share your tunes with the whole room when you connect your iPod to your BRAVIA home theater system". Sony recently revealed its BRAVIA D3000 series TV sets.
Sony is obviously well known for its creation of the hugely successful Walkman brand. Thus far however, Sony has been unable to use its image as a former leader in portable music players to compete with Apple Inc.'s dominant iPod model in the MP3 player market. Sony's recent support for the iPod brand has left many thinking the company has lost faith in its own Walkman brand, but the company has yet to comment on the speculation.
The legitimate form of Napster should not be written off just yet. Today, Napster announced that it may beat its previous guidance for the quarter and report revenue of more than $28 million, sending the company's share price up. The company has revealed that it currently has 830,000 paying subscribers, making it the biggest music subscription service currently available worldwide.
In March, Napster added 40,000 new subscribers to its service through its own effort, but also picked up a nice 225,000 subscribers from AOL Music Now. Napster also recently struck a deal with AT&T, which will give AT&T mobile phone users access to Napster's huge catalog of music for free for one year.
Napster also offers its services to several Universities in an effort to switch students to legal downloading. Many consider Napster's music rental service (and similar) a bad way to shop for digital music. However, the latest figures show that Napster is once again rebuilding itself somewhat.
The Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA) has approved DisplayPort 1.1 as the new industry standard for display connections. VESA describes DisplayPort as "HDMI for computers". It supports High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). DisplayPort is designed to offer a common interface for internal and external digital displays, set to replace VGA and DVI.
"The benefits of version 1.1 are significant, and will encourage adoption of DisplayPort in new generations of computers and consumer electronics equipment," said VESA Director Bill Lempesis in a statement. "Our task groups and committees within VESA worked very hard to ensure that DisplayPort 1.1 satisfies the important objectives it is designed for, and as a result, this new version has widespread support among all the leading computer and consumer electronics suppliers."
VESA also plans to incorporate best practices for providing HDMI connectivity through its DisplayPort Interoperability Guidelines, which will be finalized soon.
According to the MPAA and IFPI, a police raid was conducted today in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 4 seperate locations that were used to manufacture pirated CDs and DVDs. In all, 30,000 pirated CDs and DVDs were confiscated alongside over 200 burners.
The raids were a result of an investigation into piracy rings in Sao Paulo and more arrests are expected in the coming days.
Pirated DVDs and CDs are very commonplace in third world and developing countries but many American movie studios have yet to set a long term strategy to fight it.
So far, only two studios, Warner and Fox have ever done anything to combat piracy and that is to sell retail DVDs for unbelievably cheap prices. Both companies sell their DVDs on the streets of Russia and China for under $3 USD.
Today, Plasma and LCD are the two main technologies in HDTVs but reports indicate that by this time next year, Laser TV will emerge and bring the best picture quality yet.
Novalux Inc., one of the main developers of the new technology has promised that the technology has great benefits over current technology including half the production cost, double the color range, and three-quarters less power consumption.
Laser TV technology is suited for projection (both front and rear), and will most likely replace the UHP lamp currently used in today's projection TVs.
At this year's CES, Sony displayed a Novalux-powered laser TV at its booth although the company has yet to formally announce a laser-based product.
Greg Niven, the vice president of marketing at Novalux had this to say about the event: “At CES we had a laser TV beside a plasma TV, an LCD TV and a traditional UHP lamp TV, so that’s four TVs lined up running our own produced high definition content, and I mean, it was a no brainer. The laser TV had a way, way better picture than any of the other conventional technologies.”
Novalux is currently in discussions with a few OEMs in an effort to bring the technology into living rooms within a year’s time. “We now have over four design wins in laser TVs for four different brands that are scheduled for launch in 2008,” said Niven.
On Monday we reprted that Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple had joined EMI executives to announce that EMI music would become available without DRM from the iTunes store.
Although Jobs has been a strong supporter for DRM free music he seems to have very different opinions about video DRM.
When asked about his feelings about the potential of lifting DRM from video, Jobs had this to say: "Video is pretty different from music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free. Never has. So I think they are in a pretty different situation and I wouldn't hold it to a parallel at all."
Jobs' argument is that CDs are sold without DRM and other copyright protection so it should be the same with music sold online. However, when referring to videos he mentions CSS the technology that comes with all DVD's and is intended to prevent copying. In his mind, videos were always sold with copyright protection and so therefore videos sold now are no different.
Anti-DRM activists and analysts don't buy into that explanation.
"Most people believe he's taking advantage of a technicality when he says that," said James McQuivey, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
In the latest edition of the "Eurogamer TV Show", Sony's Ray Maguire and Microsoft's Neil Thompson have been interviewed and speak out about their product's value propositions and of course criticize the competition.
One of the issues discussed was the competing online offerings. Neil Thompson, the UK Xbox boss stated, "We passionately believe that online gaming, and having an identity within the online gaming community, is what's core to what you need to offer - a service that can transcend different titles where you can communicate with your gaming friends no matter what platform you're on and what game you're playing.
"I don't see how Sony can really deliver that, and they're certainly not delivering that in a compelling way today," he continued. "I think what Sony's talking about has compelling aspects to it, but I don't think there's anything there that... We're going to be afraid of competing with, because we will certainly evolve our service as we move forward."
Xbox Live has certainly been very popular among gamers, with over 6 million subscribers signed up to date. Sony UK managing director Ray Maguire did bring up a good point by noting that there was no way to tell how many of those 6 million are paying the full annual subscription fee. He then reminded that the PlayStation 3 online service is and always will be, free.
"I look at our [service] as being an inclusive area for people to be able to communicate and play with each other," he said. "Some content will clearly be downloadable and chargeable, but it should be an environment that people can get together and explore by themselves without having someone say, 'We're going to charge you for entering this space.'"
In the latest figures released by the company Enterbrain it is revealed that in Japan the Nintendo Wii is outselling Sony's PlayStation 3 two to one.
Bloomberg news reported that approximetely 2 million Wii consoles have been sold in Japan since its launch on December 2 while only 812,000 PS3 units have been sold since it went on sale on November 11th.
Although that is a large gap, it seems that the sales gap is narrowing as time moves on. In January, the company Media Create reported that the ration of Wii sales compared to PS3 sales was 4-to-1.
Japanese sales figures for the Xbox 360 were not released but in general sales fail to top four figures according to Enterbrain.
A few months ago we reported that the web hotel PRQ and The Pirate Bay were raided in Sweden. During the raid, the police not only confiscated Pirate Bay's servers but many other servers from PRQ's server room. With this, many companies lost their livelihoods and were financially ruined. After the raid, both the police and the prosecutor in charge were charged with official misconduct, but none of the charges led to an investigation. It was concluded by the judge that during the circumstances the confiscations were justified.
Since then, the Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has been investigating if there had been any irregularities before the raid. There were ongoing rumors that the MPAA and other lobby organizations tried to steer high officials into pressuring the police to act swiftly againt The Pirate Bay.
The latest report published clearly states that the MPAA and even the American embassy had contacted the current Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and the Secretary of State Dan Eliasson hoping to get them to force the police into action.
However, the JO has come to the conclusion that neither of the two men have done anything illegal nor have they attempted to influence the police.
SlySoft acquired Game Jackal from Australian software company Jackal Consulting last month after the company was forced to take down the software due to new Australian copyright law. Now SlySoft is offering Game Jackal Pro on its website. Here is the description...
Game Jackal Pro is the ultimate "must have" killer app for the PC gamer! If you, like most gamers, find it annoying looking for and inserting the CD-ROM for your favorite game each time you play it, then Game Jackal Pro is for you.
Keeping your gaming investment safe: One major concern gamers have is the CD's life span. The CD-ROM for a popular game may be inserted and removed many hundreds of times, this of course leads to the inevitable "Unable to read" error and ultimately a trip to the trash.
Unleash your games and go gaming "cd free" in seconds: Using Game Jackal Pro eliminates the need to insert the CD-ROM before playing your favorite title, therefore allowing you to fire up your favorite game in seconds.
Easy to use: Game Jackal Provides the user with a powerful and easy to use interface to go gaming "cd free". It does this without modifying any of your game's files or installing any virtual drives on your system. Simply select the game you want to play from the Game Jackal Pro interface, or create a desktop shortcut for even faster access.
Microsoft is known for targeting sellers of pirated software. Now the company has decided to go after more criminals, this time those who sell software to Internet retailers that was intended to be given to students instead. Companies in Jordan and other countries are posing as academic resellers, and in doing so have obtained hundreds of thousands of copies of Microsoft operating systems and office software.
Instead of the software going to students as intended, it is sold to Internet retailers. Microsoft has fired back by filing nine lawsuits and issuing more than 50 cease and desist letters. The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Nevada and Montana.
According to the software-giant, these phony companies have made millions through the scheme. "To those who say software piracy is a victimless crime, I would say this case tells a different story," said Bonnie MacNaughton, senior attorney at Microsoft. "The defendants in these lawsuits and others are charged with profiting from selling clearly marked educational software to unsuspecting retail customers who were not licensed to use it — and potentially depriving students and schools of the opportunity to benefit from the latest technologies."
LG Electronics Inc. and Harris Corp. have teamed up to develop a wireless technology to offer local television programming on mobile phones and other portable devices. The new technology will compete with existing systems, like one already demonstrated by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd at the consumer electronics show (CES) in January this year.
Video content is already offered for mobile phones in the U.S. by carriers, but LG says that its system will be the first to offer TV stations the ability to broadcast local programming to mobile devices using the same airwaves as already used with regular broadcasting. It would require an upgrade to existing broadcast transmitters, costing between $100,000 and $500,000 to install per station.
John Taylor a spokesman for LG, said the company is in talks with several broadcasters to use the technology, known as Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld. The technology will be demonstrated for the first time at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas later this month.
Microsoft has once again made some changes to the Xbox 360's warranty. Back in December they boosted the console's warranty from 90 days to a full 365. However, these new changes fill in any gaps that the warranty service was lacking before.
The first of the new changes is in shipping. Microsoft will send you a prepaid postage box to return your console to the repair center whether you are in warranty or out.
Customers are still responsible for repair costs if your console is out of warranty but when Microsoft sends you back a repaired console it will come with a fresh one-year repair warranty.
Another exciting warranty addition is faster repair service. Microsoft has committed to repairing and shipping your broken console within five business days. Microsoft also plans to add more Xbox customer care representatives and is bulking up its on-site technical support facilities.
The Digital Freedom Campaign (DFC), an organization that was founded last fall by a few groups inlcuding EFF hopes to help educate students about real copyright and fair use laws( not just what the RIAA will have you believe) and also show them how to fight back against the RIAA.
This week, DFC announced a new initative entitled "Digital Freedom University" which is made specifically to counteract the MPAA and RIAA's propoganda on media and copyright issues.
According to a statement by DFC, "DFU will educate students about their fair use rights, encourage them to obtain content legally, and help them oppose efforts to restrict or violate their digital freedoms." DFC will help create student-led chapters at universities around the country in an attempt to get students to participate more in debates about file sharing, piracy and copyright laws.
To no ones surprise, the RIAA and MPAA have been strong critics of the DFC accusing them of taking a position on copyright and fair use outside of the mainstream while saying the RIAA was the real champions of fair use.
The RIAA and MPAA however, are not consistent with their words. They claim to be champions of fair use but lock their movies and music with DRM and other consumer freedom limiting restrictions. The RIAA has even gone so far as to suggest that ripping CDs may be unauthorized as well.
Over the fast few years, Hollywood executives have worried that Oscar screeners (the DVDs that are sent to industry insiders who vote on the Oscar winners) will find their way onto the internet and onto file sharing websites. Wired however, would beg to differ. After analyzing more than 150 Oscar nominees from the last 5 years they noticed that most of the rips found on torrent and p2p sites were available before the discs were ever sent to Academy members.
Wired claims that the real culprits of most leaked screeners are critics, video store operators, marketers or even the studios themselves looking for added attention for the movie.
An example is the popular movie Crash which had a DVD quality rip available on torrent sites over 100 days before screeners were sent out to Academy members.
Some HD DVD player owners are complaining about playback issues with the title "Children of Men", particularly with the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive. Some users are complaining that after trying multiple copies of the movie on several consoles it refused to play back completely. However, some other users are reporting that the title plays back just fine on the Xbox 360 add-on.
High-Def Digest decided to test it out and indeed found the same results that users had been reporting. The problems are not limited to the Xbox 360 drive either, some users are also claiming that the title does not work correctly with Toshiba's XA2, A2 and A1 standalone players.
While some did manage to get the movie to play, they reported smaller playback issues like being unable to fast forward. Of course, flipping the combo disc over and playing the standard definition DVD-Video version works, but is not an acceptable solution after buying a retail HD DVD.
Virgin Media has introduced a new small box that it hopes will bring the company to areas that standard cable TV could not reach. The VBox delivers TV channels and radio stations through a phone line. The box uses the digital terrestrial television (DTT) standard and uses a DSL connection to stream content to subscribers.
Virgin hopes that distributing the box will open the door for more services in future like broadband Internet access. As some areas do not have routed cables, it is very beneficial for some consumers. Existing subscribers of the Talk Anytime phone bundle will be able to get a VBox. A box can be purchased on its own without being a Talk Anytime subscriber for a one-time fee of £40.
It is capable of offering over 40 free-to-air TV channels and 25 digital radio stations, provides an on-screen TV guide, interactive content, customer support, plug 'n' play installation and consumes only 1/15th of the energy of a standard 60W light bulb.
Sony has decided to cut the price of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console by $30 from tomorrow, April 3rd, 2007. The PSP Core System will be marked down from $199.99 to $169.99. Lately there have been rumors of a new smaller and lighter PSP which resulted from comments made by a Sony UK executive, which were later retracted.
A price cut is still a welcome development for the handheld though. Sony has been busy packing as many new features into the PSP as possible and tying it to the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console for more features as it battles against the handheld-dominating Nintendo. The DS handheld console from Nintendo is the undisputed leader of the portable market for now.
Rogers Communications Inc. will become the first carrier in North America to offer its users the ability to make video calls with their mobile phones, the company revealed on Monday. Rogers is Canada's biggest wireless provider, touting more than 6.8 million customers. Subscribers will be able to use their mobile phones much the same was a webcam to complete a phone call.
Rogers is utilizing its new High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network to make the video calls possible and also offer some video content from web sources including YouTube's weekly top 50 video clips. Rogers and other carriers are looking to multimedia services to help fill in the gaps as revenue generated from voice calling slows down.
If you are an early adopter at heart and are tempted to spend some money now on a Blu-ray stand-alone player, you are probably better off waiting for a few months. The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) recently mandated that all Blu-ray hardware released after October 31st must support BD-Java, which is used to provide interactivity features such as picture-in-picture.
"Blu-ray player requirements and BD-Java specifications have been gradually changed over and over again, which has caused a good amount of grief for player manufacturers," said optical storage analyst Wesley Novack. "The new specification and requirements will ensure that all Blu-ray players manufactured past October will be able to support the full range of BD-Java capabilities, including picture in picture and more."
The Blu-ray specification does not require players to include an Ethernet port for updates and downloads like HD DVD players, but the inclusion of one in an early player might make it "upgradeable". Of course, users with older Blu-ray players will be able to play newer releases, but probably not all the interactive features that have been packed into the disc.
The European Commission has sent formal charges to Apple Inc. and major record companies, accusing them of restricting music sales in Europe. A spokesman said that Apple and the record labels are violating the European Union's rules against restrictive business practices.
"Consumers can only buy music from the iTunes online stores in their country of residence and are therefore restricted in their choice of where to buy music, and consequently what music is available and at what price," said Jonathan Todd, European Commission spokesman.
Apple said that it has wanted to open a store for the entire European Union, but the advice and demands of music companies has gotten in the way. "Apple has always tried to operate a single pan-European iTunes stores accessible by anyone from any member state. But we were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us," a company statement said.
The Commission's latest action stemmed from a complain made by British consumer group Which?. The group claimed that music downloaders in France pay just 99c ($1.32) per song download while users in the UK have to pay 79p ($1.56) per download.
When Samsung lowered the retail price of its Blu-ray Disc player BP-1000 to $469.99 USD last month, Toshiba immediately reduced the retail price for its entry-level HD DVD player HD-A2 to $399 USD.
Taiwanese optical disc drive makers have stated that this price competition will force all entry level Blu Ray and HD-DVD player models to be launched at $499 USD or less during the second half of this year.
The sources have indicated that $500 USD is now the market acceptance price for optical disc drives. Blu Ray and HD-DVD players were not originally expected to hit prices of $500 or lower until the 4th quarter of this year but Toshiba launched the HD-E1 at that price earlier this month. With all the added pressure from the HD-DVD camp, Blu Ray had to follow suit, and prices have been falling ever since.
We hope to see even lower prices and higher disc reading speeds in the near future.
it has been revealed that the Xbox 360 Elite will not output multi-channel PCM audio over HDMI which is no different than what occurs in Core and Premium systems.
The Elite will support the HDMI 1.2 specification. When connected to an HDTV set with HDMI input, the Xbox 360 will automatically select the appropriate video output resolution up to 1080p. Users will not be able to manually force resolutions however.
The HDMI audio output will still not be fully functional as many users hoped. The Elite will not output uncompressed multi-channel audio. HD-DVD users should look elsewhere if they hope to enjoy the lossless HD-DVD audio formats.
“If you are keen on having 5.1 PCM output, I recommend purchasing the Toshiba A2 player which after the price drop, will be much cheaper than Elite" was one such resonse to the audio functionallity of the Elite.
All Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD audio tracks will continue to be down mixed and the output would be no different than the Xbox 360 Core or Premium systems.
Nevertheless, the Xbox 360 Elite can output 2-channel PCM audio over HDMI. “The goal was to provide a digital connection for video which people wanted for some of their TVs. And of course, single cable A/V connection. So if having analog video bothered you before, you can now use digital. If you lacked component/VGA on your TV, you are in business with Xbox 360 Elite.”
Representative Ric Keller (R-FL) has proposed a new bill (HR 1689) called the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007" that will give colleges federal money to fight p2p.
The bill amends the "Higher Education Act", a bill that supplies federal money to universities and allows that money to be used for programs that reduce illegal downloading of copyrighted content.
The goal of the bill is to free up university money that would otherwise be spent on added bandwith costs and so the universities can use the extra money on keeping campuses secure from viruses that can find their way into user's computers through p2p programs. The bill notes that "computer systems at colleges and universities are intended primarily to aid in educating and increase research capability among students and faculty."
The "Higher Education Act" allows that the extra money from federal funding can be used in certain areas such as financial aid grants generally, but the new amendment to the bill would allow the money to be used for additional areas.
Although it is not guarenteed that the bill will ever make it to a vote, it should be intersting to follow its path through Congress.
Last week, the MPAA announced they supported the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act (2007)," and MPAA head Dan Glickman said that the group was set to begin working with schools and administrators to put an end to movie piracy on University campuses.
The MPAA has compiled a list of American schools that make their so called "dishonor roll" and included the amount of students identified as downloading unauthorized movies.
1. Columbia University - 1,198
2. University of Pennsylvania - 934
3. Boston University - 891
4. University of California at Los Angeles - 889
5. Purdue University - 873
6. Vanderbilt University - 860
7. Duke University - 813
8. Rochester Institute of Technology - 792
9. University of Massachusetts - 765
10. University of Michigan - 740
11. University of California at Santa Cruz - 714
12. University of Southern California - 704
13. University of Nebraska at Lincoln - 637
14. North Carolina State University - 636
15. Iowa State University - 586
16. University of Chicago - 575
17. University of Rochester - 562
18. Ohio University - 550
19. University of Tennessee - 527
20. Michigan State University - 506
21. Virginia Polytechnic Institute - 457
22. Drexel University - 455
23. University of South Florida - 447
24. Stanford University - 405
25. University of California at Berkeley - 398
In a huge announcement, Apple and EMI have announced that all of EMI's catalogue will be sold through the iTunes music store without DRM. EMI said in the announcements that all the songs will be available for $1.29 and users can upgrade their DRM locked songs to the DRM-free versions for 30 cents if they wish.
The bitrate of all of EMI's tracks will also jump from the now available 128kpbs to excellent quality 256kbps AAC files.
"We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music," said EMI CEO Eric Nicoli during this morning's press conference.
Customers can still choose to buy the DRM locked, low bitrate tracks for 99 cents.
EMI also said that they would be selling unprotected music videos and albums at the existing prices through iTunes.
We can only hope that the rest of the Big Four labels will watch this revolution closely.
The Corel Corporation has announced that they will be releasing Ulead DVD Moviefactory 6 Plus which will be the first consumer entry level product to have HD-DVD burning capability.
New features include:
Among the range of exciting new features, Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus introduces the Edit Room, allowing users to edit captured video on an intuitive timeline with overlays, titles and music tracks. For video editors that demand more from a DVD authoring application, Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus includes comprehensive menu templates, and the facility to work with HDV, DivX or AVCHD, and output in HD DVD, Blu-ray, DVD-Video or legacy VCD.
The English version of Corel Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus will retail for $80 USD from the Ulead website.
DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was asked at a Bank of America conference in New York on Wednesday, which high-definition DVD format he expected to win the format war. His answer was unusual among the top movie industry executives; "neither". "Blu-Ray and HD DVD are a niche business. They're not going to become the next platform," he said.
He continued: "I think for the general consumer, there is not a big enough delta between the standard DVD in terms of where it is today and the next generation." DreamWorks distributor Paramount does release movies in both Blu-Ray and HD DVD, but it hasn't distributed popular animated works on either format yet.
Instead, Katzenberg is more optimistic about the promise that digital distribution offers, calling it "staggering". He did admit however that move downloaders, at least, won't spark industry growth for some time.
An announcement expected from Apple Computer Inc. and EMI Group Plc. to reveal "an exciting new digital offering," at an event on Monday stirred speculation that Beatles music would be making its way to iTunes. However, a source has told Reuters that while there is in fact a deal between the two, it doesn't include the Beatles catalog. "There is no Beatles' announcement," the source said.
EMI will hold an event in London on Monday. EMI Chief Executive Eric Nicoli will be accompanied by Steve Jobs according to emails sent to reporters. JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg said a deal between the two may address a range of issues, but a Beatles distribution agreement is very unlikely.
"While the Beatles are the obvious choice, the invitation does mention a 'special live performance' and it is clear that that live performance does not cover the Beatles," Gartenberg said. "There are a lot of other possibilities." One (perhaps small) possibility may be that Apple and EMI have come to an agreement to experiment with DRM-free downloads
Cingular Wireless, which is being re-branded as AT&T, recently set a date for the release of Apple Computer Inc.'s much anticipated iPhone. The product will be released on 11th June, the carrier has confirmed. The date coincides with the start of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is set to be held in San Francisco.
There is also an ongoing debate on what network will carry the iPhone in Europe. Most bets haver been placed on Vodafone so far and industry insiders claim it is going that way. In the U.S., AT&T recently announced that it received over 1 million queries about the iPhone from eager consumers through a website set up to allow consumers to register interest.
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" brand, used by Cisco subsidiary Linksys. Apple and Cisco came to an agreement allowing each to use the brand.
Game publisher Zuxxez, known for its title Earth 2160, has decided to pursue British file sharers after discovering that downloads of Earth 2160 outstripped its retail sales 35 times. Between the release on 1 June 2005 and 18 December 2006, Zuxxez found 891,414 people attempting to download Earth 2160. The company has sold has sold 25,000 units of Earth 2160 in the UK, reaching #4 in the charts.
While monitoring sharing activity, the company found 10,000 UK uploaders. Dirk Hassinger, sales director at Zuxxez, said the firm wanted to clamp down on file sharing but was worried about the cost of pursuing 10,000 people. So, the company decided to test it out on a smaller game, Pinball 3D.
Law firm Davenport Lyons is now pursuing 500 sharers of Dream Pinball 3D on the publishers behalf in the UK. In Germany, Schutt-Waetke, another law firm, targeted 18,000 sharers Earth 2160, 8,000 of which have agreed to stop file sharing and have paid a fine. "In the UK, pirates are lucky because we get the address from the ISPs," said Hassinger, "In Germany we have to request with the police - and the state prosecutors go after them immediately."
A deal between Orange, Vodafone and 3 with the BBC will allow 3G mobile phone subscribers access to BBC content. Shows like Eastenders, The Apprentice and Doctor Who will be viewable as part of a trial which starts next month and will last up to 12 months. Users will be able to view BBC One, BBC Three and BBC News 24 and listen to Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC7 and Asian Network.
"By making a range of television channels and radio networks available to 3G mobile phone subscribers, we hope to test not only the effectiveness of 3G as a means of distribution, but also how audiences respond to the BBC's linear services on their mobiles"Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology, said.
"The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers", said Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, "The BBC constantly aims to make its content available to as many people in as many ways as possible."
After previously showing their great worth by sniffing out about $3 million worth of movie and game discs in their first major successful operation, Lucky and Flo have struck again. The two black Labradors, trained to sniff out DVD and CD discs, have assisted authorities in Malaysia once again by finding a stash of pirated discs worth about $430,000.
The dogs located the discs a secret compartment in a shop in the country's capital on Saturday. Anti-piracy officials had previously raided the premises after receiving a tip, but found nothing. "They decided to call in the canine brigade," a local newspaper reads. "Within minutes, the two Labrador retrievers sniffed out the hidden discs in a room that could only be accessed by the push of a button hidden under a plug outlet."
Pirates in the country have reported but a bounty on both dogs after the initial seizures, leading authorities to tighten security around the animals. Malaysia has stepped up its efforts against copyright infringement as it negotiates a free-trade pact with the United States.
In the past few weeks, the Dutch anti-piracy foundation BREIN has shut down 10 illegal p2p file sharing sites including the previously reported dsb-tracker.org.
Some of the sites included were the Dutch sites ambachtor.org, bubbles-torrents.nl, flowtorrents.org, and extrempowerfreaks.org. Combined, the 10 sites had over 40,000 registered users and over 5000 available torrents.
The site operator of dsb-tracker had been put on notice to stop their illegal activities but declined to. BREIN then went to the sites hosting provider and demanded they take down the site. This led to the site operator taking down the site himself. Another of his p2p sites, dsb-scene.org was also put on notice.
Although 40,000 members and 5000 torrents seems like a tiny number, over the past 15 months BREIN has taken down 131 sites for a total of 1.6 million users.
According to Digitimes and Arstechnica, the much talked about 65nm version of the Xbox 360's "Xenos" GPU will be coming out sometime this fall.
According to Semiconductor Today, Shiroishi Semiconductor Inc., a subsidary of Sony, has claimed that they will be increasing production of the blue-violet laser diodes used in all Blu-ray Disc drives to an industry-leading 1.7 million diodes per month. The company has also set plans in motion to increase production to 5 million a month soon.
The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular and well-known public torrent tracker sites has announced it will start a new music download site in which the user pays whatever they can afford to download the tracks.
