Twenty individuals have been sentenced to jail time averaging at about eight months each following a trial in Udine for copyright infringement. The case emerged after a raid was carried out by he local Fiscal Police (GdF) acting on a warrant issued by the public prosecutor in 2007.
It involved the sale of compilation CDs on eBay, the world's largest auction site. The GdF, assisted by the Italian industry's anti-piracy organization FPM, had collected evidence of the massive distribution of infringing CD-ROMs which contained mp3 files downloaded from file-sharing networks.
More than 600,000 music tracks were found, and personal computers and CD burners were seized by police. The individuals are also facing up to €10 million in administrative sanctions.
It has been reported that Apple Inc. is hiring new blood from the semiconductor industry in a bid to boost its chip design capabilities. The new employees will build Apple's capabilities to design its own chips which will both give Apple the ability to bring new features to its products and share fewer details about it plans with outside chip vendors.
A spokesman for Apple confirmed that it has hired both Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri. Both held the position of chief technology office of the graphics products group at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The hires were reported or rumored in a number of online outlets earlier in the week.
The company has been hiring engineers to create multifunction chips using in cell phones, but sources familiar with the matter say they don't expect internally designed chips to emerge until next year at the earliest. Apple acquired P.A. Semi last year. a designer of low-power microchips. Analysts said the move was to customize key parts for its iPhone, iPod and Macintosh products.
According to BusinessWeek, Apple and Verizon Wireless are in talks to offer iPhone-like devices to the market. The report cites two people familiar with the matter, claiming that Apple has produced prototypes of two new devices and that discussions stretching back six months included Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
One of the sources who saw the devices described one as an "iPhone lite". The other is a media device would let users listen to music, view photos, and watch high-definition videos, and could place calls using Wi-Fi. The sources go on to say that one of the devices might reach the market as early as this summer.
AT&T has been Apple's sole carrier for the iPhone. The carrier has benefited immensely from the exclusive deal, adding seven million subscribers because of it. It has reportedly been in talks with Apple to extend the agreement, which is set to expire as early as next year.
Apple working more closely with Verizon Wireless, a combination of Verizon Communications and Vodafone, might pressure AT&T into accepting terms that are biased toward Apple's interests in a new deal. It is also worth noting that Verizon could have been the sole carrier for iPhone initially, but it objected to sharing monthly service fees and Apple's desire to choose which retailers could sell the phone.
According to an upcoming report from In-Stat, the next generation of Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n, will dominate the HD market. Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI), WirelessHD, and Ultrawideband (UWB) are contenders for wireless High-definition delivery systems within the home. However, In-Stat comments that "the ubiquity of Wi-Fi technology is proving unstoppable."
"802.11n is the next generation of the immensely popular Wi-Fi family. It promises data rates above 100Mbps and is backwards compatible," reckons In-Stat analyst Brian O’Rourke. "The installed base of Wi-Fi is immense, and effectively includes all mobile PCs, many mobile phones and a wide variety of CE devices. The primary drawback to 802.11n is expense, since it requires codec technology on both ends to transmit HD video. Neither of its primary competitors, WHDI and WirelessHD, require codecs."
According to Microsoft's Senior Vice President for the Windows Business, Bill Veghte, the new Windows 7 operating system might arrive on store shelves in late 2009. Speaking to Bloomberg, he commented that a "holiday release is accomplishable." However, he would not comment on the possibility of the upcoming Windows upgrade being released before the holiday season.
Many analysts are expecting that Windows 7 will be released earlier than Veghte is expecting, with some predicting a September 2009 release. The first release candidate version of the operating system will be made available on Thursday to Technet and MSDN subscribers, and everybody else on May 5.
A creator of one of the first botnets that uses P2P technology to distribute instructions to drones has escaped a jail sentence. Jason Michael Milmont, 20, of Cheyenne, Wyoming was sentenced instead to five years of supervised probation, a year of home confinement and has been ordered to pay almost $37,000 in restitution.
"This young man has quite a bit of talent and we asked that he turn that talent toward good," said John Powell, a spokesman for the US Attorney's office in Cheyenne. "He's helped us somewhat toward that." He had been facing up to seven years in prison and a fine up to $250,000.
Milmont admitted last year to creating the Nugache Worm, which used a decentralized network to distribute commands among compromised machines, making it much harder to tackle a botnet. The worm was spread with phony AOL instant messenger and Limewire installers.
Milmont used the network to steal usernames and passwords for online accounts, as well as credit card details. He used stolen credit card information to purchase goods on the Internet, which he had delivered to vacant houses.
Matrox Video Products Group announced last week the new Matrox CompressHDH.264 accelerator card for the Mac. It is the first implementation of Matrox MAX technology. Matrox MAX technology uses a dedicated hardware processor to accelerate the creation of H.264 files for mobile devices, the web and Blu-ray discs.
Matrox CompressHD works in systems with or without a video I/O device. Ease of use is ensured through direct integration with Apple Compressor on the Mac. As an added benefit, the Matrox MAX technology allows direct export to higher-quality H.264 Blu-ray compliant files from Compressor. By using specialized hardware acceleration, jobs are finished with faster speed and system resources are liberated for other tasks.
"Final Cut Studio is the creative tool of choice for video professionals around the world," said Richard Townhill, Apple's director of Video Applications Marketing. "By adding the Matrox CompressHD accelerator to a Mac Pro, editors can spend more time creating the movie they want and less time getting it ready for distribution."
The updated handheld will remove UMD, add a sliding screen, and will come in two models, with either 8 or 16 GB of built-in flash memory.
A new report from 1UP suggests that after talking to inside sources, that the new PSP will not be called the PSP-4000 as would be assumed, but instead be called PSP Go!.
The company will unveil the handheld at the E3 event in June and will release the console in September in Japan and hit the US in early November.
Along with the release of the handheld, Sony will have over 100 classic and new titles available for download at launch. Previous reports expect a few blockbuster games will be coming later this year including Little Big Planet, MAG, Heavy Rain and Shadow of the Colossus.
According to a new report, Acer is planning on producing an Android-based smartphone as well as a "other devices" by this fall, each using the open-source operating system.
"The entire industry is looking at Android," said Acer president and CEO Gianfranco Lanci said. "I think it's too early to say if we're going to see Android on a netbook in the near future," he concluded however, not committing to any particular device.
Sony Pictures Entertainment has announced that it will begin streaming over 100 full-length feature films on its video site Crackle.com including Spider-Man 2, Stripes and Godzilla.
Sony notes that Crackle users only spent 5 minutes on average on the site for the month of March, and Sony is hoping to keep users around longer, especially if they are viewing more ads.
Although the site is no competition against YouTube, Hulu and TV.com, the site posted an 84 percent gain in streams to users, year on year, for the Q1.
"Our movie lineup is unmatched online,"adds Sony Pictures Television senior VP of digital networks Eric Berger.
Rumors have been flaring today that the new, upcoming iTunes 8.2 will include Blu-ray support. The evidence, say the reports, is in the new "About iTunes" splash screen.
Currently, Macs do not support BD, and users with external Blu-ray drives need to boot to Windows to use it. If iTunes is allowing ripping and burning of BD however, it could signal that Macs will finally have integrated Blu-ray support and possibly internal drives.
Paramount Home Entertainment has announced that it has become the second major Hollywood studio to license Macrovision’s BD+ copy-protection for Blu-ray Discs, following Fox as the only studios to use the extra layer of protection.
The deal also includes licenses for ACP and RipGuard, technologies used for copy-protection in DVDs and video streams.
“We are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Macrovision to preserve Paramount Home Entertainment’s high-quality products,” Paramount worldwide president for Paramount Home Entertainment Kelley Avery added. “Macrovision’s technologies cover a variety of distribution channels, providing necessary safeguards, which benefit both the studio and the consumer.”
The company did not say if only certain Blu-ray titles would be given the added layer of protection or whether all new movies would use it.
Beta testers have revealed that Apple Inc.'s QuickTime media playback and editing software is getting several video-sharing options, including the ability to upload videos directly to YouTube. The software will convert and upload any support multimedia file to Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site, as long as the user has his/her account details.
This is just the latest in a line of Apple products that have come with built-in support for YouTube at some level. Both the iPhone and iPod Touch play YouTube videos directly, and the company's Apple TV device also has built-in support. Recent releases of iMovie also have incorporated support for YouTube.
In addition to the video-sharing functions bring brought to QuickTime, it will also get support for converting and exporting your video files to work on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. The files will automatically be imported to iTunes before being synced to the devices.
After being rejected by the French National Assembly earlier this month, the controversial "three strikes" Internet piracy bill backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy has returned to Parliament for debate. The legislation proposes cutting Internet service for users caught downloading movies and other content illegally three times.
A state agency would be formed to warn the user the first two times and then make the moves to get the connection suspended. It was expected to pass earlier this month, but a low turnout and two members of Sarkozy's party joining the opposition turned the tide. IFPI chairman John Kennedy said the vote was "disappointing".
"President Sarkozy has been a true champion of intellectual property rights and the proposed law is an effective and proportionate way of tackling online copyright infringement and migrating users to the wide variety of legal music services in France," Kennedy said.
The two dissenting votes were in objection to a requirement that would have forced users suspended from Internet access to keep paying their bill. An amended version is before the Assembly and Senate for debate, where opponents and supporters can add further changes.
Police in Hungary have raided and shut down several BitTorrent and Warez sites in actions against growing Internet piracy in the country. Hungary was kept on the piracy "watch list" for many reasons, one being the existence of several "pay to leech" websites.
"It is difficult to energize police and customs officials to investigate Internet cases because Hungarian court decisions are not a deterrent," an International Intellectual Property Alliance report stated.
Ever since the report authorities have moved against piracy on several occasions, and earlier this month, Hungarian police carried out raids on four BitTorrent trackers including Bitlove, BitMusic and Indep, as well as other warez and spam sites. The police arrested up to ten individuals, eventually detaining six for further questioning.
The police targeted these websites specifically because they were not free. Members were expected to pay for access to the websites through premium SMS.
NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Hulu online video service took the No. 3 spot last year for Internet video. It was launched about 13 months ago, and has grown considerably in that time. During March, over 380 million videos were viewed on Hulu, a 14 percent rise from February, according to ComScore.
The site gathered 41.6 million unique viewers last month, with a growth rate that outpaced YouTube and the overall online video industry. The growth of Hulu shows the migration of viewers toward long-form videos on the Internet. The average Hulu video was almost twice as long as the overall average online video, according to ComScore.
It's not a surprise at all that Google Inc.'s YouTube was the dominant video site in March, accounting for 49 percent of all video views and 59 percent of viewers. The company is looking to fight for Hulu's new found audience having recently announced agreements with content companies that would bring full length movies and TV shows to the website.
RealNetworks Chief Executive Officer, Rob Glaser, told a court on Tuesday that Real's recently released DVD copying software is for legitimate users and not intended to be used for piracy. "We were both designing our product and marketing our product for legitimate use," he said. "If they didn't want to be legitimate users, there were so many other alternatives they could go to and our product would be an inferior product."
The software had a short life on the market so far, after being pulled days after release by court order in September 2008. This puts the tech industry and Hollywood into a battle of control over digital media again. The studios argue that RealDVD can be used to make copies of rented DVDs as well as personally owned DVDs.
Glaser argued that scofflaws are unlikely to use RealDVD, which costs US$30 and comes with copy control features to make it difficult to disseminate any copies of a DVD. He said that if a user wanted to make a copy of a movie, all they would have to do is "Google DVD Ripper". The studios had their expert witness Robert Schumann on the stand explaining how RealNetworks had deliberately circumvented copy protection mechanisms, particularly ARccOS.
Hong Kong set a precedent in 2005 when a man was jailed for three months for downloading and sharing films using BitTorrent software, the first conviction of its kind in the world.
Customs officers announced on Wednesday that they had arrested a man for the same actions, which marks the third time it has happened.
He was arrested after investigators monitoring his Internet usage caught him sharing two films on Monday night. The suspect was later released on bail as the customs officers prepare to build the third case of its kind in the region.
Another investigation is ongoing into activities of a woman after customs officers installed a monitoring system to track the activities of BitTorrent users in the city of 7 million.
Patricia Santangelo, a mother of five, has been involved in a legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) since 2005. Originally, Patricia herself was accused of downloading and sharing songs from artists such as Michael Jackson, using the KazaaP2P client. Patricia denied it and it became pretty obvious quickly that she simply did not have the knowledge required to share music at the time.
The RIAA eventually dropped the case against her, but decided to sue two of her children, Michelle and Robert, aged 20 and 16 at the time. It said that Michelle had admitted piracy in a deposition and that Robert had been implicated by a family friend. They denied wrongdoing. However, since both are now in college and feel that the case is holding them back, they agreed to pay $7,000 in damages.
They paid half the amount April 20 and are to make six payments of $583.33 by October. "We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the Santangelos,"Cara Duckworth, spokeswoman for the RIAA. She didn't give any information on how much the RIAA spent to reach a $7,000 settlement, but did say: "We don't break out costs per case, and it's not a question of it being 'worth it' or a 'victory.'"
Creative has introduced their new entry-level ZEN MX audio player, coming in two models, 8GB or 16GB.
The players look very similar to the company's current ZEN line, but has changes to the control button layout.
The player has a 2.5-inch LCD display with 320x240 resolution and includes support for MP3, WMA (with DRM) and Audible 4. Video support includes only the Creative proprietary video-CMV format. Included with the player is the Creative Centrale software that will convert many formats to video-CMV.
The Zen MX also includes an FM radio tuner, voice recording, an SDHC card slot for extra capacity and has an estimated 30 hours of audio playback and 5 hours for video.
The player will hit Japan on May 5th and cost $102 USD for the lower capacity model and $144 for the 16GB model. There is no word on NA or EU release dates.
The agreements will bring the 90-minute environmental film Home to the site in English, French, German and Spanish and will also bring four short films from the Tribeca Film Festival this week.
YouTube remains by far the most popular video sharing site, with almost 90 million unique users in February, higher than Yahoo and Hulu combined.
Because of the site's push for longer form videos, the amount of time spent watching videos in February was boosted by 23 percent year-on-year and the average video length increased 22 percent.
For more information on the Tribeca films, view the official page here: YouTube Screening Room
According to Billboard, Taiwan has passed an amendment this week to its copyright laws that will add the controversial "three strikes" anti-piracy laws.
The three strikes laws will force ISPs to send two warning letters to alleged pirates before cutting off their Internet connections. The law, the Taiwanese government hopes, will "encourage self-correction by users" and clear up room in overburdened Taiwanese courts.
Adds Margaret Chen, deputy director general of Taiwan's Intellectual Property Office: "These people are doing something they shouldn't be doing in the first place. Besides, there are lots of ways to restrict Internet access besides cutting it off entirely."
We reported that the EU's telecom's reform efforts were under threat when questions of how to handle Internet piracy caused a spat between Parliament and states, despite the fact that the issue was never part of the reform which focused more on infrastructure. European lawmakers worried that over two years work was under threat from a last minute debate over the responsibility of Internet Service Providers (ISP) to fight Internet piracy.
However, it now appears that the European parliament and states have come to a draft deal to resolve the argument and cut the delays. "Subject to final agreement by all member states tomorrow I do think we have a package which will advance the European telecoms sector," said Malcolm Harbour, a British center-right member of the European Parliament.
He continued: "I am absolutely delighted. It has been deeply frustrating to feel this one issue which was not in any way at the center of what we were doing could derail two years of work." The Parliament agreed that the body of the reform must emphasize consumers' freedom to access the Internet, and that cutting of Internet access for crimes like copyright infringement should be done with the agreement of an impartial and independent tribunal, as outlined under the European Convention of Human Rights.
A recently reported study that suggested large numbers of young gamers exhibit signs of addition to videogames has come under scrutiny from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). The trade group sent a letter to Dr Robert Kail (editor of Psychological Science), citing a blog by ABC News' director of polling, Gary Langer, which called into question the claim that the results can be applied to the broader population.
The study, carried out by Professor Douglas Gentile, used data from Harris Interactive through an opt-in online survey. The survey itself actually reads, "because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the Harris Interactive panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated."
Gentile responded to this discovery by admitting making a mistake. "I'd assumed they had gathered the population initially as part of a random probability sample, I missed that when I was writing this up. That is an error then on my part."Michael Gallagher, CEO of The ESA, wrote in his letter to Dr Kail: "The concern arises from the fact that the sample group for the study was not randomly chosen… It was a 'convenience' sample of individuals who agreed to participate in the survey."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had teamed with OdioWorks lawyers to file a lawsuit against Apple Inc. in a federal court, claiming the company has stifling free speech by bullying OdioWorks into pulling content that shows how to use an iPod with stores other than iTunes. "I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously," said OdioWorks owner Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks.
He continued: "Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions." The problem Apple had was with the BluWiki site, which contained information on using the company's iPhone and iPod products with stores other than iTunes.
BluWiki users edited it themselevs, sharing insights on reverse engineering Apple software to "manage their media with whatever program they chose." However, late last year, the BluWiki site was shut down after Apple lawyers threatened to sue for spreading word of how to circumvent its digital rights management technology.
According to the manual for JVC's first Blu-ray player to hit the United States, the XV-PB1 supports the Matroska (MKV) multimedia container. It's manual states it supports MPEG-4/AVC content up to 1080p (from file on USB, or streamed), making the MKV container support even better. MKV is a very flexible multimedia container format that is used widely for High-definition content.
This might push the player slightly up the list of Blu-ray players currently available, even though it has been largely ignored since its unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year. It supports BD-Live and network streaming from PCs, and reportedly has a very fast booting time.
Swedish telecommunications firm Tele2 announced yesterday that it will not keep records of IP address usage to protect its customers. "We will erase the IP addresses after they have been used for our internal use, starting today,"Niclas Palmstierna, Tele2's managing director for Sweden, told AFP. The measure was introduced after Sweden's adoption of IPRED.
It is a similar policy as was introduced by Bahnof, a smaller Swedish Internet firm that also won't reveal the user's behind IP addresses. A police official has commented that such measures will make it virtually impossible to crack down on copyright infringement crimes on the Internet as had been planned.
"In certain cases, this will make an investigation impossible," said Stefan Kronkvist, the head of Swedish police's internet crime unit. Tele2 claims to have 600,000 people among its Internet clients. Internet piracy is under the spotlight in Sweden like never before since the Pirate Bay trial kicked off in February.
Mozilla has released both a new stable Firefox update addressing a couple of security and stability issues, and also a new Beta version of the popular web browser. The new version changes and download links if needed, are below...
Firefox 3.0.10 -- Changes From 3.0.9
Fixed two security issues.
Fixed a major stability issue.
See the Firefox 3.0.9 release notes for changes in previous releases.
New York-based ISP Cablevision has announced today that they will be offering all 3 million of their subscribers the option to upgrade to much speedier new DOCSIS 3.0 cable Internet, offering incredibly fast speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for only $99.95 per month.
In comparison, competitor Verizon offers their FiOS fiber optic service for $140 USD per month with upload and download speeds of only 50Mbps.
The new "Ultra" tier makes Cablevision the clear winner in the market, with other cable companies such as Comcast and Charter offering only up to 50Mbps speeds, and at higher prices.
Even more notably perhaps, is the fact that Cablevision is a staunch opponent of metered billing and bandwidth caps, and the new tier will not have an usage caps or overage fees.
Cablevision added they are spending $300 million, (about $75 per user), to deliver the faster DOCSIS 3.0 connectivity.
The tier will be made available in two weeks, and I know I myself for one will be upgrading as soon as it does.
General Electric has introduced a micro-holographic disc that can store up to 500GB of data today, aimed at the archive industry and users with massive movie and music collections.
The company knows the market for the disc is small now, but believes it can eventually be used in standalone players, just like DVDs and Blu-rays are now. DVDs can hold up to 8.5GB and BD-50 can hold up to 50GB.
Micro-holographic discs can store so much data because the store information in three dimensions, rather than just having the info written on the surface of the disc.
Brian Lawrence, head of GE's Holographic Storage team added, "Very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms."
Now that the higher reflexivity is a possibility, the technology can be used in new standalone players that are backwards compatible with DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Added GE: "The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs."
Samsung has debuted their first mobile phone using the Linux-based Android platform today, dubbed the I7500.
The smartphone has a nice 3.2-inch AMOLED touch screen and will include the new Android 1.5 firmware, which adds a virtual keyboard and video recording among the most notable features. The phone, despite being touchscreen, also has tactile keys under the screen and on the sides of the phone.
The new mobile will follow in the footsteps of the popular T-Mobile G1 and will have deep integration with Google services including Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. For Internet connectivity, users have the option to use Wi-Fi, EDGE, and 3G with up to 7.2-Mbps downlink speed.
Users can access the new Android Market from the handset as well.
"Samsung is among the earliest members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving forward to introduce the most innovative Android mobile phone," added J.K. Shin, executive VP of Samsung's mobile division.
The four men sentenced to a year in prison and fined $3.6 million after being found guilty of assisting copyright infringement should be given a new trial because the Judge was biased, a court heard on Monday. The lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, one of the four founders of the Pirate BayBitTorrenttracker, said that Judge Tomas Norstrom's affiliation with groups for copyright protection should have disqualified him.
"Tomas Norstrom was biased during the trial ... Secondly, he neglected to inform the defendants and their lawyers of the facts that constituted the bias," defense lawyer Per Samuelson said in the document, obtained by Reuters. The court of appeal now must decide whether to send the case back to District Court.
Judge Norstrom is a member of The Swedish Association for Copyright and a board member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. Peter Danowsky, A board member of The Swedish Association for Copyright, represented the film and music industries in the trial. Lundstrom's lawyer last week filed an appeal, asking the court of appeal to change the verdict and dismiss the prosecution and the claims for compensation.
ASUS today released the new ASUS Express TV Stick which features high quality digital (DVBT) and analog TV signal reception, plus a host of versatile utilities. By just inserting the ASUS Express TV Stick into the computer's USB 2.0 port, it will automatically install software to enable recording or viewing of high-quality digital and analog TV programs.
The ASUS Express TV Stick is the world's first hybrid TV stick to come equipped with free memory that incorporates the pre-installed software. Therefore, all users have to do is to plug it into their PCs or NBs, whereupon the auto-installation function will install the driver and run the UI automatically.
One of the best features of the ASUS Express TV Stick is the free 4GBs of added memory. In addition to the convenience of auto-installation, users can utilize the extra storage just like any other thumb drive for data transfers. This makes it ultra convenient for users to record and store programs onto the ASUS Express TV Stick, then share them with their family or friends.
The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the independent regulator and competition authority for the communication industries in the United Kingdom, could eventually derail the BBC's proposed new set-top box project, dubbed "iPlayer in hardware". The regulator wrote to the BBC Trust outlining several concerns it had about the new project and their consequences for competition.
"Commercially-led propositions which seek to compete with Canvas should not be unfairly prevented from accessing BBC content," it read. It also has concerns about technical standards, user interface (EPG), the BBC's partnerships with other broadcasters and program quality standards.
Project Canvas is a Linux-based box that attempts to update Freeview with PVR functionality, web access, IPTV and other features. It won't be manufactured by the BBC, but the broadcaster wants to set a specification that other broadcasters can use. It's also promised not to aggregate content for the box, or give preferential treatment to BBC content in the Canvas spec.
James Gunn, a director of Horror movies, has criticized Microsoft for its poor handling of original content on the Xbox Live service. According to Gunn, he was promised absolute freedom to create content for the Horror Goes Comedy series, but soon became subject to conservative content cuts and rejections, leading him to brand Microsoft as "the most dreadful, non-talent friendly company".
"I still love Xbox gaming, but I think their original content plans are DOA, precisely because of situations like the experience I and some of the other directors had on the Horror Goes Comedy series," Gunn wrote on his blog. To emphasize his point, he citesGrand Theft Auto IV and episodes of South Park that are available for Xbox 360.
"Microsoft wouldn't let us get close to the extremity of that material, so I don't know how in the world they planned to create their own successful original content," he explained. "People didn't want to see our shows, which were barely a half-step removed from something you'd see on the Disney Channel. It's a shame. I really think Xbox could have been its own Network, as well as a gaming console, DVR, and way to buy movies. I saw them as the future."
Microsoft has half-learned a very important lesson from users of the Windows Vista operating systems; enough with the damn User Account Control prompts already! While Windows 7 still has some UAC prompts on by default (surely can be disabled like with Vista) they will be cut down by about 29 percent, which still leaves a whole lot of annoying prompts.
"From our beta and internal testing, we expect a 29% decrease in UAC prompts compared to Windows Vista,"Paul Cooke, Microsoft Corp.'s director of Windows 7 client enterprise security, said last week. The UAC prompts are intended to prevent malware infections by asking the user to confirm program executions before they can take place.
Unfortunately, with Windows Vista even the most patient user was suffering from "click fatigue," according to an internal Microsoft study. While scaling back is always welcome, it's probably fair to say that users who can, will disable the prompts altogether for the good of their mental health.
In other Windows 7 news, Windows Media Player 12 ships with the Release Candidate of the operating system, and will include codec support for many popular formats out of the box. Users reportedly won't have to install an XviD codec to decode XviDvideo, and won't need a separate splitter installed for MP4content. AppleQuickTime files also reportedly play with the software without any additional installations.
Microsoft's virtual festival, Xtival '09 runs from May 1 to 4 (this weekend) and during that time frame, Xbox Live Gold Membership will be free to all Xbox Live users (at least in the UK).
"We don't think anyone should miss out on the treats we've got lined-up this year, which is why we're giving everyone Xbox Live Gold membership FREE for the entire weekend," the Xtival page reads.
"There are even bigger competitions and tournaments to rock, and loads of exclusive HD movies, music and game downloads to check out - so round up all your friends and get ready for what is set to be the best Xtival yet!," it continues.
Xtival '08 offered up early release of a high-definition music video from The Prodigy's Invaders Must Die album, plus exclusive Franz Ferdinand, Watchmen and Oasis content.
Qualcomm and Broadcom have come to an agreement that will end years of litigation that spanned across three continents. Over a four year period, Qualcomm will pay a whopping $891 million to mobile chip rival Broadcom, after losing several patent infringement cases against the company. It will make a first payment of $200 million by the end of June this year.
Qualcomm rescheduled its quarterly earnings call after announcing that it was in advanced settlement talks with Broadcom, whom it has been fighting a legal battle with since 2005. "It's clearly costing Qualcomm a lot but it's best for both companies to move on." said Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder. "It's a win for Broadcom."
Analysts expect Qualcomm will report quarterly revenue of $2.35 billion today. The settlement will lead to the dismissal of all litigation between the companies, including patent infringement claims Broadcom brought against Qualcomm at the International Trade Commission.
Broadcom said it will also withdraw its complaints against Qualcomm to the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission as part of the deal.
EDGE has made available this week a very interesting article on the origins of the original Sony PlayStation console which is a good read for fans of gaming, Sony, or history in general.
"This is a story that isn’t just about the design of an object made from silicon, plastic and metal. Nor is it just the story of the corporate politics that allowed the project to commence. It’s also the story of sales forces and distribution systems, of marketing strategies and product evangelists, of a confluence of social, economic and technological circumstances that allowed it to thrive. It’s about the vision behind the piece of hardware that pushed videogames into 3D and a veteran yet wide-eyed technology corporation into an industry that it would transform.
And it’s a vision that rose out from the rubble of a very public disaster. At the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, Sony revealed to the world a videogame console on which it had jointly worked with Nintendo. This SNES with a built-in CD-ROM drive was a project driven by Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who had come out of its hardware engineering division. It was to be Nintendo’s route into a brave new world of multimedia, and a way for Kutaragi to show his company how important the videogame industry could be. But the very day after Sony’s announcement, Nintendo declared that it would be breaking its deal with Sony by partnering with Philips instead..."
According to a Digitimes report, flat-panel TVs such as LCD and Plasma displays will drop in price by over 20 percent in 2009.
The price gap between mid-sized and large-sized TVs will also decrease, says the report.
The average price for a 37-inch LCD HDTV will drop to $500 USD by the end of the year, from $670 USD at the end of 2008. Lower end 32-inch models will drop in average price to under $400.
Entry-level 42-inch models will see their prices frop to $580 USD by the end of the year, and sources say the steep price declines for the model will turn the 42-inch segment into the market mainstream by 2012.
According to a thorough Computerworld report,the first Netbook to use Google's Android as an operating system will be available in July and will cost about $250 USD.
Dubbed the Alpha 680, the laptop is in its final stages at the testing facilities of Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies.
The Netbook has a 533MHz ARM 11 processor, has a 7-inch LCD screen with unknown resolution, and built-in Wi-Fi. Other specs are not known, but it is known that the netbook will only include a 2-cell battery, with meager 3 hour battery life while surfing the Internet.
Recently, market research firm Ovum predicted that Netbooks running Android platforms will emerge in 2009, as manufacturers try to bring the price Netbooks to under $200 USD. Android is open source and therefore does not require expensive licenses, such as those needed for netbooks running Windows operating systems such as Vista or XP.
The popular T-Mobile G1 Android handset, which recently sold its one millionth handset, will be updated to Android version 1.5 in the next coming weeks, including the addition of an on-screen keyboard, more widgets, video recording and finally, stereo Bluetooth.
For now, the update is only promised for T-Mobile Germany but it is very unlikely that other regions, most notably North America, will be left out in the cold.
The most anticipated addition is the the on-screen keyboard. Users will be able to enter text while the phone is in portrait mode instead of having to rotate to landscape mode and open the keyboard.
The new update will also add more Home Screen widgets including a widgets for the user's calendar, a music player, and a picture frame.
The addition of video recording, as well as the addition of video playback support for MPEG-4 and 3GP, is a welcome addition for many whose biggest complaint is the lack of video recording using the built-in camera.
Panasonic has announced the launch of its CN-HX900D and CY-BB1000D two-part in-car Blu-ray system, the first of its kind.
The system uses a Windows-powered dash-mountable device which includes a 7-inch 720p display. It also includes a CD/DVD player, GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, a 40GB HDD and iPhone/iPod compatibility.
The Blu-ray player itself is not BD-Live compatible.
The entertainment system is expected to it Japanese stores by September with no word on North American or European releases.
Netflix has added a lot of subscribers in the past couple of years, posting surprising results and fending off competition from much larger corporations such as Blockbuster. However, the company has acknowledged itself that competition is coming now from other directions, particularly with kiosks.
"In exit surveys of canceling Netflix subscribers, kiosk is more and more frequently named as where they will go now for movies," Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said. "By the end of the year, kiosks will likely be our number one competitor as video stores fall inversely," he said, adding the "long-term effects of ubiquitous $1 new release DVD rental are not positive for us or the industry as a whole."
He is not alone in that belief either, as Hollywood studios have also raised concerns about the low prices that kiosks charge, saying it is hurting DVD retailers. When asked how Netflix plans to compete with this threat to its business, Hastings said, "We have to focus on our differentiators, such as selection, convenience and the value of unlimited streaming. We'll focus on our benefits and they'll focus on theirs."
In an effort to convince businesses to migrate to Windows 7, Microsoft will offer an add-on for the upcoming operating system that will allow users to run applications designed for Windows XP in a virtual machine. This represents the first time Microsoft has relied on virtualization for backwards compatibility.
The add-on, called "Windows XP Mode" creates an XP virtual environment running under Virtual PC within Windows 7. "All you need to do is to install suitable applications directly in Windows XP Mode," said Scott Woodgate, the director of Windows enterprise and virtualization strategy. "The applications will be published to the Windows 7 desktop and then you can run them directly from Windows 7."
Windows XP Mode (XPM) will be available as a free download for users of Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise, whereas presumably more cut-down versions of the operating system will require a fee to add the functionality. A fully licensed copy of Windows XP Professional SP3 will be included with the add-on.
The details were first revealed by Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, two prominent bloggers who are also collaborating on a book called Windows 7 Secrets. "XPM does not require you to run the virtual environment as a separate Windows desktop," Rivera said. "Instead, as you install applications inside the virtual XP environment, they are published to the host (Windows 7) OS as well. That way, users can run Windows XP-based applications, like IE6, alongside Windows 7 applications under a single desktop."
Tiga, a trade group representing the video games industry in the UK, has criticized Alistair Darling's budget for not including a requested tax break for game developers. Tiga's Chief Executive Officer, Richard Wilson, remarked that it is "disappointing that while Alistair Darling plans to spend £671bn over the coming financial year, he could not find the £150m over five years to invest in the tax break for games production."
Wilson had called on the government in the weeks leading up to Wednesday's budget to include a 20 percent tax break for games developers to help spur growth in the games industry in the UK. He said that games development is a "growing sector" and that the UK had a world-beating sector developing as it is.
The games industry might receive some help from the budget however, as it includes a £750m Strategic Investment Fund. About £50 million of this will go to the Technology Strategy Board (TIB) and a further £10 million will be given to the UK Trade and Investment (UKT&I) body. TIB helps promote "technology-enabled innovation" across the UK and UKT&I assists firms to compete in international markets.
Sony executives have acknowledge BD-Live's numerous roll-out problems but claim that the demand for, and interest in BD-Live is growing among consumers. The execs vowed to continue pushing improvements to the service, which adds more interactivity and content to Blu-ray Disc titles for customers.
David Bishop, President of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, acknowledged several obstacles with BD-Live, including consumers difficulty getting it to work. It requires that a compatible Blu-ray player be connected to a broadband connection, but in many BD-enabled homes, the source for the connection is not located in the living room.
BD-Live enhanced titles have also been criticized for not offering good enough content. "We're just in the Pong stage of BD Live," said Bishop, likening the Blu-ray feature to the primitive computer game. "The launch has posed many challenges for both Sony and the industry. There was the need for consumers to introduce their broadband connection to their entertainment system, which was generally located elsewhere in the home. It also has taken some time to grasp BD Live's capabilities. Many of our initial features were regarded as a bit underwhelming."
A caller named Alberto told an incredible story to HLN money expert Clark Howard on CNN which emphasizes once again, the need to read fine print. Recently vacationing in Mexico, Alberto used his data card to download Wall-E for his nephew. When he returned home, he was shocked to receive a bill for $62,000 from his wireless carrier. The carrier lowered the cost to $17,000 when he contested it, saying that is what it cost to deliver the movie to him.
While that cost for downloading a movie is totally ridiculous whatever way you look at it, Alberto did make a huge mistake by not checking and activating roaming options for voice and data plans before he went traveling. Unfortunately, this is quite a common problem. There is another class action case brewing over a $2,000 bill received by an iPhone owner after using the service in Mexico.
The carriers insist that the roaming charges in other countries are extravagant and that they have to pass on the fees to the customers. So, again, remember to check your carrier's website or any information you got when you joined for roaming options before you leave.
Gamefly, a Netflix-like rent-by-mail service specifically for video games, has filed a complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission which accuses the United States Postal Service (USPS) of improper sorting, resulting in goods being damaged in transit. The service is useful for those who don't want to pay top dollar for new game titles. Like Netflix, subscribers choose a number of games to rent each month, keep them for as long as they like and then mail them back.
Gamefly calculated that it sends out 590,000 games and receives 510,000 games back from subscribers a month. It estimated that between 1% and 2% of the discs end up broken. "Testing by GameFly and Postal Service personnel has revealed that breakage occurs during the processing of DVD mailers on Postal Service automated mail processing equipment," Gamefly states.
While some discs can expected to be broken in transit, and some stolen (19 Postal Service employees have been arrested to date for stealing games), Gamefly goes on to accuse the USPS of providing a better service to other rent-by-mail services, including Netflix and Blockbuster. "On routine visits to multiple Postal Service facilities, GameFly's employees have observed that a large percentage of mail pieces from Netflix and Blockbuster are culled from the automated letter processing stream," the complaint states.
Following a decision last year by a Danish court which forced the ISP Tele2/Telenor to block access to the Pirate BayBitTorrenttracker (at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), the ruling now seems set to be analyzed by the Supreme Court in the country, after an appeals body accepted petition from Telenor to do so.
"We are pleased that we now have the opportunity to find out whether it is Internet Service Providers responsibility to ensure the closure of a website," said Telenor’s regulatory chief Nicholai Kramer Pfeiffer. "We have always been highly skeptical when we receive subpoenas in this type of case."
He said that the Supreme Court will help to clarify the situation for those involved in site blocking cases in the future. "We seek a clarification of whether we have a responsibility to help the stuff flowing through our networks, as we have no commercial interest in the individual sites," said Pfeiffer, commenting that it makes more sense to get to the source of the problem anyway.
Wii Fit has managed to stay top of video games charts in the UK for a third consecutive week, adding up to 12 total weeks that it has hit the #1 spot. It's continued recent success could be explained by a growing interest in exercise equipment and weight loss solutions shortly before summer. Chart-Track reported it on top of the list with sales down by 30 percent.
The recently released sequel, The Godfather Part II, took the number 2 spot with its sales down 35 percent. Fifa 09 took the number 3 spot with a 17 percent drop in sales. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games saw sales slide by 35 percent, but still came in fourth, followed by Resident Evil 5 at number 5, with sales down 30 per cent.
Professor Layton, Mario Kart Wii, Wii Play, Call of Duty: World at War and Carnival: Funfair Games made up the remaining five of the top 10 in the region.
DTS Inc. has announced new audio product tools aimed at the professional and prosumer markets. The new products include DTS-HD Master Audio Suite v2.0 and SurCode's DTS-HD solutions for Apple Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio users. With the increase in Blu-ray Disc production and penetration of Blu-ray hardware, these offerings provide content producers new ways to deliver best-in-class DTS audio on their BD titles.
"At DTS, we are thrilled to announce new production tools that continue to make the Blu-ray audio production process faster, easier, and more accessible than ever," says Ronny Katz, Director of Professional Audio at DTS. Hundreds of Blu-ray titles on the market utilize DTS-HD's unique One-stream architecture that provides backwards compatibility.
The DTS-HD Master Audio Suite gets over 30 features and enhancements in the new Version 2.0 of the software. adds new Bonus View encoding features including dynamic Mono panning as well as Seamless Branching optimization for multi-story and multi-angle titles. MAS v2.0 also features the fastest BD audio encoder on the market, at 3 to 4 times faster than real-time for lossless audio encodes.
A new Internet censorship bill that has broad Government backing in Germany is intended to block access to websites hosting child pornography. Recently, the music industry decided that if child porn sites should be targeted, so should file sharing websites; a seemingly exploitative demand to make considering the seriousness of child porn relative to music piracy.
Now a representative for the German book publishers association (Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels) has come along with another stupid suggestion. Boersenverein chief counsel Christian Sprang used a media law forum in Cologne to add Rapidshare to the list of sites he'd like to see blocked.
"I don't see any other way than access controls to get to platforms like these that are based in foreign countries," said Sprang. He went on to deem one-click-hosters like Rapidshare as part of the "Internet mafia", complaining that ISPs help to fund them by buying advertising space on the sites.
Rapidshare has already cooperated with right's holders in Germany, handling takedown notices and even reportedly has helped to identify an uploader of a Metallica album.
Nintendowill target the Mother's Day holiday in North America (May 10, don't forget!) this year with the release of a new DS bundle on May 3. While the company has not officially announced the bundle, it was accidentally available for pre-order on a Canadian Best Buy website for a while on Friday, but was removed when it got attention.
According to reports, it will include a lime green-coloured DS Lite with a copy of the Personal Trainer: Cooking title. It will also include a "fashionable carrying case". The Best Buy website had listed it for CAD $159.99. Whether the bundle will continue to be shipped past Mother's Day or if it will just be available around the holiday remains to be seen.
Back in January, Nintendo announced that the Personal Trainer: Cooking title had sold 1.68 million units worldwide, following an agressive holiday season-2008 campaign.
The recent release of the movie Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete and the release of a playable Final Fantasy XIII demo, boosted sales of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) by 45,826 units within a week. The console beat the other gaming consoles on the market for the week ending April 19, with a tally of 62,527 unit sales, according to data provided by Media Create.
Sales were also helped with by a "Cloud Black" special edition of the console. Nintendo's DS platform maintained its dominance in handheld gaming hardware sales with a total of 44,725 units sold, of which the new DSi variant of the handheld accounted for 38,287 units.
Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) did not lag too far behind the DS platform, moving 40,065 units. The Nintendo Wii console was next, selling 13,221 units in the period, a world different from the top selling figures it produced up until recently. It still outsold the Xbox 360, which moved 8652 units. Japanese consumers also bought up 4230 units of the PlayStation 2 (PS2) console.
South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics has reported a sharp drop in net profit, but still beat analysts expectations. Net profit fell by 72 percent year-on-year to 620 billion Korean won over the first quarter while its revenue grew 9 percent to 18.97 trillion won. The company's mobile phone handset division led the earnings, driven by continued demand in developing nations.
"It's very difficult to gauge the demand outlook," said Robert Yi, vice president of investor relations at Samsung, remaining cautious in global economic uncertainty. The company reported stabilizing LCD panel and memory chip prices, and better profit margins for mobile handsets. However, Kim Hyungdo, a vice president in Samsung's telecommunications division warned that demand for mobile handsets in emerging market is declining.
"We will monitor whether LCD panel prices continue to rise despite sluggish economic conditions," said Cho Yeongduk, a vice president in Samsung's LCD Business. LCD panel prices increased lately, as have prices for memory chips such as DRAM and NAND flash memory. Cho Namseong, a senior vice president in Samsung's semiconductor business, however, warned that price increases will lead to production increases, which inevitably sends prices down again.
Google Inc.'s YouTube video-sharing service has come up with another new feature for its users. The new "YouTube RealTime" feature makes it possible for a user to check which videos their friends are watching, and when they add comments to videos or upload a new video.
YouTube product manager Ryan Junee wrote on the official YouTube blog about the new feature, describing YouTube Realtime as "a new way of discovering what your friends are doing on YouTube."
The service is not available to all YouTube users just yet, but Junee did say that invitations to try out RealTime will be sent to the first 100 volunteers.
"Please keep in mind that you will need to have friends on YouTube for this to work -- the more you have, the richer the experience, so be sure you accept friend invites and actively manage the list," he wrote.
The Finnish government has allocated extra frequencies to telecom firms TeliaSonera, Elisaand DNA for the new fourth generation (4G) mobile communications technology. The allocated frequencies for the 4G network are located in the 1,800 megahertz band, lower than most other European nations, but requiring less base stations and so, reducing the cost of setting up the networks.
"The decision will help to make fast wireless networks more widely available in all parts of Finland,"Suvi Linden, Finland's minister of communications, said in a statement. Linden said she hoped that telecommunications companies will now start to prepare for the 4G technology. Telecom operators are working together with handset manufacturers such as Finnish giant Nokia to develop 4G technology.
A large part of the Finnish population resides in rural areas, and the government plans to develop better Internet access across the country. The fourth generation (4G) technology will allow users to surf the internet or transfer data such as photos or videos more quickly than the current third generation (3G) technology.
In September of last year, RealNetworks began selling a new product called RealDVDfor $30. The product could copy retail DVD content onto one hard drive and up to five devices. However, only a few thousand sales or so were made before a federal Judge blocked the sale of the program at Hollywood's request. Now RealDVD is being tested in court, with lawyers for the Hollywood studios saying RealNetworks violated copyright law.
"In the end, this case will be about how RealNetworks tries to take money that is not theirs," argued Bart Williams for the movie companies. He also commented at one point that code being used by RealNetworks was sourced from Ukrainian hackers, which RealNetworks has denied exists in the product.
RealNetworks fought back however, with lawyer Len Cunningham arguing that the studios had their own products which provide for backups, called digitalcopy. "They have aggressively marketed it," he said. "The threat (to Hollywood) is for legitimate competition." U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patelinterjected: "They have the copyright."
The inventor Craig Thorner, CEO of Virtual Reality Feedback, has sued Sony, PDP/Electro Source and multiple lawyers over the "theft" of intellectual property in relation to force feedback technology that is now used in PS3 DualShock 3 controllers.
Thorner says that Sony violated his trust by "failing to defend him and his patents against lawsuits from Immersion."
Immersionsued Sony and Microsoft over patent violations and suits and countersuits raged for years.
Electronista explains that "during Immersion's original lawsuit against Sony for violating patents with the original DualShock controller, he had originally licensed his patents to Immersion. Not being aware of a joint defense agreement between Sony and PDP, which was also sued by Immersion after Sony initially lost its case, Thorner switched his patent license to PDP. He claims that Sony unfairly exploited his unawareness of the defense deal with PDP and let him offer his patents for a too-low $150,000 when he would have been entitled to more."
Activision, the publisher of the popular Guitar Hero franchise has settled out of court with instrument manufacturer Gibson, which had sued the publisher over patent infringement claims.
The settlement was reached last week and a California judge has dismissed all of Activision's claims and Gibson's counterclaims.
Gibson sued the publisher last year saying that the Guitar Hero peripherals violated its "System and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience" patent.
Gibson's claims were thrown out last month and Activision immediately countersued the company for a declaratory judgment that would say Gibson's patent was invalid and that the franchise did not violate it.
Microsoft has apparently sent out an updated build of Windows 7, and the new update, build 7100, has already been leaked to BitTorrent sites and other P2P networks.
7100 fixes over 2000 bugs from previous builds. Microsoft has noted however, that an RC will be made available to MSDN/TechNet customers on May 5th, although it is unclear whether it will be 7100 or something even newer.
Adds Long Zheng of the istartedsomething blog, "The highly anticipated release candidate (RC) build of Windows 7 has been leaked and its authenticity is entirely undisputed. First looks reveal nothing significantly new or different, but if you've been wanting to get a vibe of how far Windows 7 has come since the public beta, especially performance, this is the build to get."
Players for China's CBHD format, formerly known as CH-DVD in China and C-HD-DVD by the DVD Forum, are finally available.
The two players released yesterday are made by Chinese manufacturers TCL and Shinco, and are expected to sell for close to $300 (about 2,000 yuan). Discs will be around $7 (50 yan).
Blu-ray players and discs, which made their debut in China last year, cost around $700 and $35 respectively.
CBHD is based partly on the HD DVD format which lost out to Blu-ray as the presumed HD successor to DVD, although it uses different video and audio encoding. Much of the technology used in CBHD was developed by China's Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center under funding from the Chinese governemnt
So far Warner Brothers is the only major Hollywood studio with plans to release movies in CBHD format. They plan to release 100 CBHD titles this year.
Tony Vaughan, managing director of CAV Warner Home Entertainment, said "I believe Chinese consumers are willing to buy legitimate content as long as the price is appropriate." He added, "We hope that more Hollywood makers will embrace this standard soon."
In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay verdict a week ago, some torrent trackers have already ceased operation to protect the individuals who own and operate them. Those that haven't are apparently becoming targets for a movie industry backed anti-piracy group.
According to TorrentFreak, Antipiratbyrån, sent the following to the operators of one such tracker, SweDVDR.
"We noticed that you, through the activities with swedvdr.org, similarly engaged in copyright infringement of several works whose rights belong to our principals. You are hereby requested to immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the ongoing incursions."
Antipiratbyrån's letter went on to say they were recommending the studios they represent take legal action if this isn't done immediately. SweDVDR is closing down as a result.
Unless The Pirate Bay's appeal goes well, it doesn't look like Sweden will be a friendly place for torrent trackers.
The one billionth iPhone app was downloaded from Apple's iTunes App Store yesterday. Apple will be giving Connor Mulcahey, who downloaded the app, a MacBook Pro, 32GB iPod Touch, a $10,000 iTunes gift card, and a Time Capsule WiFi hard drive.
Along with the announcement, Apple compiled lists of the most popular commercial and free apps over the first few months of the App Store's existence.
The list of 20 All-Time Top Paid Apps include 11 $0.99 apps. Others on the list range from $1.99 to $5.99.
The All-Time Top Free Apps list features seven which are interfaces to third party online services, six which are social networking oriented, five games, and three limited versions of commercial apps.
According to PSLS, Sony will be releasing an updated PSP handheld before the holiday season this year, one that will add significant hardware changes.
The PSP-4000 revision, according to sources, will be announced at the upcoming E3 event.
Debunking past rumors, touchscreen will not be added but the proprietary UMD format is a thing of the past. With the removal of the disc drive, the PSP will add a solid state drive and will keep a removable flash memory port.
The site also wouldn't confirm that the PSP-4000 will have a sliding screen, but implied it. There will also not be the addition of dual analog sticks, which has been hotly anticipated in all rumors.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) of Canada is currently meeting with the country's members of parliament in an effort to lobby for harsher piracy laws, because the group's members "feel their intellectual property is at risk."
Canada does not allow any pirated goods to be seized without a court injunction, and punishments do not include jail time, only fines.
Danielle Parr, the executive director of the ESA of Canada, added: "At the federal level, the primary issue for us... is the protection of intellectual property."
Parr also believes there should be jail time, and the current fines for pirates are simply a "a slap on the wrist." She also singled out mod chips, saying, "in Canada, these devices are not illegal. They're illegal in virtually every other country."
Two men from Pennsylvania have set the record for most text messages sent in a month, with one man sending and receiving 217,000 total. Although both men were on an unlimited text messaging plan, one man, Nick Andes recieved a bill for $26,000 USD at the end of the month.
The bill was two inches thick.
"It came in a box that cost $27.55 to send to me," Andes said. He immediately called T-Mobile after he "panicked" over the bill and the carrier has said they have credited the account and are looking into the charges.
Andes added that he has been texting for almost a decade and wanted to become the world record holder for most in a month. The previous record was 182,000, set by Deepak Sharma of India in 2005.
The second man, Doug Klinger, and Andes, set their phones to be able to send multiple messages and found they could send up to 6000 texts per day some days.
"Most were either short phrases or one word, 'LOL' or 'Hello,' things like that, with tons and tons of repeats," added the men.
T-Mobile has now sold its 1 millionth Android-based G1 phone, a strong pace for the phone which was released last October.
The carrier remains the fourth largest in the US however, behind Verizon, AT&T and Sprint and sales of the smartphone were significantly behind those of the Apple iPhone, which sold 1.6 million from January through March 31st.
The G1 is also by far the most used 3G phone on T-Mobile, with the carrier saying there are 1.5 million 3G-capable devices on the network.
According to a new report from AdMob, the iPhone and Android platforms continue to gain mobile web surfing market share, taking away from former leaders Symbian and Windows Mobile.
The company uses metrics reports to measure what smartphones are most popular for mobile web browsing, and passes the information onto advertising firms.
The Android platform has grown 47 percent since the release last year of the T-Mobile G1. By itself, the G1 captured 6 percent of the OS market in the US, and was the fourth most popular smartphone to access the Internet, behind the Apple iPhone, and the two most popular BlackBerrys, the Curve and the Pearl.
The iPhone however, was in a league of its own, taking almost 50 percent of all market share. Globally, the iPhone is still big, with 36 percent market share.
RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, had 22 percent of the US market share and Windows Mobile followed in third at 11 percent. Palm tied with Android at 6 percent but will most likely gain share with the release of the Pre.
Subscribers of TiVowho have access to a broadband Internet connection have gotten good news today from the DVR pioneer. The company has partnered with Amazon to deliver its new HD downloads directly to TiVo subscribers.
The new service will be offered to all Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo HD XL customers with a broadband connection. As for pricing, new HD movies will cost $3.99 - $4.99 to rent, while older titles will be priced at $2.99.
This would make for one of the easiest HD video services available so far. Television episodes are also available through the service, and can be purchased for $2.99.
"Consumers are seeking affordable entertainment alternatives to an expensive trip to the movies. With HD downloads for movies and TV shows, TiVo and Amazon can transform any night into a memorable movie experience, all for a fraction of the cost of the theater,"Tara Maitra, general manager and vice president of content services and advertising sales at TiVo Inc, said.
Joost, the creation of Skypeand Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, is reportedly searching for a buyer among cable and satellite providers. Time Warner Cable has apparently expressed interest in Joost, which claims it could be a provider's online video solution. It is struggling amongst its growing competitors (Hulu, YouTube etc.), with that predicted bright future it would have nowhere to be found.
Like Skype and Kazaa, Joost was based around peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, which at the time of the launch was touted as a way to provide excellent quality video to a very large group of viewers using the software. It has been through several technology setbacks and a management shake up in the past couple of years, and it also has failed to get top TV shows and movies.
China has combined its war on pornography and it's war on piracy to single out some street pirates for heavier punishments. Recently, it has detained or sentenced dozens of individuals who sold DVD or VCD copies of pornographic content, according to China's General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). Multiple people were sentenced to 7 years in prison and fined for copyright infringement, and more importantly "selling obscene materials".
China's efforts against piracy are to keep the international community somewhat happy, and it's efforts against pornography are to tackle influences that may "pervert China's young minds." It has shut down more than 2,000 sites containing adult content and is even pursuing pornographic media on mobile phones.
The government is also pointing a finger of blame at Google and Baidu for not doing enough to stamp out adult content. The Chinese government doesn't seem to understand a basic fact, that if people have a demand for illicit or adult goods, somebody will step in to fill the void, and all "progress" made in a fight against it will only push the peddlers to conceal their actions more effectively.
Netflix has beaten its own earnings forecast after announcing a 68 percent rise in profits in the first quarter. The results are due to the company attracting many more customers than it had expected to. Netflix' net income rose 68 percent to $22.4 million, or 37c per share, from $13.3 million, or 21c, in the same period from the previous year, as sales rose 21 percent to $394.1 million and subscribers jumped 25 percent to 10.31 million.
In the last year, Netflix has brought its movie streaming service to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, LG and SamsungBlu-ray players and TiVo digital video recorders. "First-quarter results showed strong momentum driven by consumer attraction to our unlimited rental proposition," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in the statement.
Netflix estimates that subscribers for its DVD-delivery service will peak between 2013 and 2018. It has a digital inventory of over 12,000 titles so far.
Microsoft Corp. has revealed a 32 percent drop in quarterly profit, but saw its share price rise on news of Windows 7 being on track for a fiscal 2010 release, and its ongoing cost cutting measures to fight the global recession. "While we would all like to think that our recovery will be soon and painless, we unfortunately believe that it will be slow and gradual," Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said on a conference call.
The company revealed it expected weakness in the personal computer, server and hardware markets to continue for at least another quarter, in contrast to Intel's belief that the worst is already over. The company's 6 percent drop in revenue for the March quarter was the first time in its history that it marked a year-on-year decline.
It has cut operating expenses by 9 percent. "It's good to see that they are controlling their costs because that's within their sphere of control. They can't really do a lot about demand," said Kim Caughey at money manager Fort Pitt Capital Group. "They have a nice product refresh cycle coming up, which should allow them to maintain their market share."
After Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata let it slip earlier this month that a video-on-demand (VOD) service would be available soon for the Wii console in Japan, he also pointed out that it would come with a Nintendo twist.
The service will launch in Japan on May 1, but it doesn't seem like much of a VOD service. Dubbed "Wii no Ma", the channel is set around a virtual living room that can house 8 Miis.
The Miis can relax and watch programming Nintendo has come up with in conjunction with a Japanese ad agency, and supply ratings for the video material.
It also asks for personal details from the viewer, such as her/her age and blood type. It is unknown whether the service will launch outside of Japan, but it seems more like a market research experiment than anything resembling video-on-demand anyway.
Broadcom Corporation has announced that its Bluetooth combo chip technology and associated BTE software have been qualified as compliant with the ratified Bluetooth v3.0 + HS (high speed) specification. Bluetooth v3.0 + HS expands the capabilities of Bluetooth wireless technology in multimedia smartphones, netbooks and other devices by enabling the transmission of large files via Bluetooth profiles at speeds up to 24Mbps.
"The new Bluetooth v3.0 + HS specification is a welcome step in the continuing evolution of Bluetooth technology, adding industry approved techniques for leveraging the high data rates of Wi-Fi with the ease of use, low-power and utility that Bluetooth wireless technology is recognized for," said Craig Ochikubo, Vice President & General Manager of Broadcom's Wireless Personal Area Networking line of business. "The new specification makes our combo chip products even more attractive to OEMs who seek to provide their customers with the most complete wireless user experience available."
The Bluetooth products now qualified as compliant with the v3.0 + HS specification include the Broadcom BCM4325 802.11b/g combo chip solution that combines Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and FM radio functionality on a single-chip design. In addition to enabling 10 times the transmission speed over previous Bluetooth specifications, v3.0 + HS provides other useful innovations that Broadcom combo chips and BTE software can utilize as well.
The judge who found four Swedish men guilty of making files available for copyright infringement in the Pirate Bay trial is coming under fire for an alleged conflict of interest. It seems he's a member of some groups whose purpose is to strengthen intellectual property protections.
Judge Thomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association. He told Swedish public radio "I did not judge that I had any conflict of interest in this case."
He reportedly claimed his participation in these groups in order to stay abreast of the legal issues surrounding copyright. However, his status as a board member of one group, in which all three entertainent industry who participated in the prosecution are members, seems to at least give the appearance of impropriety.
The Pirate Bay’s defense attorney, Peter Althin, indicated he would seek a new trial over the matter. An appeal of the verdict was filed earlier this week, before this revelation became public.
A proposal for extending copyright protection for sound recordings in EU member states to 70 years passed the European Parliament today. The original proposal for extending copyright for these recordings to 95 years had been approved by the European Commission and Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs, but was subsequently rejected by the Council of Permanent Representatives.
It now goes to the Council of Ministers, where it can still be rejected. Given the reported opposition by at least 11 countries (including Afterdawn's home country of Finland), voted against the proposed directive.
The extension goes against the conclusions of multiple studies which have been done on the effects of copyright term extension. Those studies overwhelmingly indicate term extension will have a neglible impact on the lives of the performers it purports to help.
On the other hand, they indicate a significant profit fot record labels, who continue to enjoy exclusive rights over decades old recordings.
If this directive is approved the next target is copyright terms for audiovisual works.
Warner Brothers has confirmed that it is infact working on a new Rock Band game that will feature Lego characters. The deal is already in place with Harmonix, MTV and the Lego Group, and the game will be available on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and the DS handheld.
"Lego Rock Band combines two compelling properties and creates an experience that family members of all ages will enjoy playing together as a group," said Tom Stone, managing director of TT Games (part of Warner).
"Harmonix and MTV Games are the world experts in music gameplay, and we're genuinely thrilled to bring the unique and humour-filled Lego experience to their Rock Band universe."
Bob Picunko, of MTV, added: "Harmonix and MTV Games are big fans of the Lego game franchise and excited to work with TT Games to develop a new take on Rock Band that focuses on great music and Lego humour that's fun for the whole family."
Sony America senior VP of marketing Peter Dille, has spoken out today about the rampant piracy attached to the PSP handheld, saying that over 50 million units have been "compromised."
"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille said. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly.
"It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."
DivX, Inc. and LG Electronics, Inc. jointly announced today that LG's new line of digital TVs is the world's first device series capable of playing back full DivXHD1080p videos. The digital TVs will enable consumers to easily playback DivX HD videos from the PC or the Internet through the USB slot. Using DivX technology, users can fit approximately two hours of high-quality DivX HD video on an 8GB media card.
"Being first to market with digital TVs capable of playing back DivX HD 1080p video is a big win for LG as well as our customers," said Simon Kang, Chief Executive Officer and President of LG Home Entertainment TVs Company. "As people expand their DivX HD video collections they are looking for more convenient ways to watch them on their TVs. We've given them the ultimate convenience by building support for DivX HD playback into our digital TVs. This is another feature we've integrated beautifully inside of our TVs and we look forward to working with DivX in the future to offer even more innovative solutions that effortlessly bring HD video into people's living rooms."
Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Darrell Issa, ranking member of the committee, and Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, sent a letter this week to government officials and to the head of Limewire, expressing their concerns about the potential risk to privacy and security caused by use of P2P networks.
Mark Gorton, chairman of The Lime Group, appeared before the committee almost two years ago. At the time he admitted he was shocked to learn about the sheer amount of confidential and private information that was accidentally (or intentionally) shared using the Limewire software, and vowed to make changes to the software to help prevent accidental sharing of information.
We're not just talking about curriculum vitae word documents or other personal files common to most users, but some notable accidental P2P leaks are blueprints of Marine One, Social Security numbers, tax returns, and private medical records. "It appears that nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem," they wrote to Gorton.
Dell has shipped its first Desktops that contain QflixDVD drives. Sonic Solutions and Pioneer Corporation develop and license Qflix, which is a technology that allows for the burning of CSS (and DRM) protected DVD-Video to blank DVD-R media, which can be played on a standard DVD player. Sonic hopes to establish Qflix as a standard for recordable CSS and charge royalties for its use.
Dell will include the Qflix drives in ts Studio XPS Desktop, Studio XPS 435, Studio Desktop and Studio Slim Desktop, after last year becoming the first company sell external Qflix drives, shortly before Pioneer did. It is unclear exactly what demand download-to-burn technology can hope for amongst consumers, and right now, only CinemaNow offers downloads that can be burned to disc.
Nokia's Comes With Music mobile music download service has gotten a very slow and disappointing start in the UK. While Nokia did not reveal official statistics itself, Music Ally claimed yesterday that Comes With Music has only gained 23,000 British subscribers since launching last year. Paul Brindley from Music Ally revealed the information at an Association of Independent Music conference in London.
"If anything I was rather kind in not saying it was a complete catastrophe. It's a big disappointment because very rarely, if ever, have we seen a digital music service that's been so widely promoted in the mainstream media," Brindley said. Tim Grimsditch, head of product marketing for Nokia Music was there to give his response too.
"We didn't release those numbers so we can't confirm them," he explained. "It's a very new business model, we're live in five markets and the numbers only mention one. We're going to continue to develop the model and fine tune how we market it."
Grimsditch added that he is confident the company will have significant successes to report within six months time. A customer who buys a Nokia Comes With Music handset gets unlimited music downloads to their mobile phone for 12 to 18 months. The downloads are DRMprotected, so they can't be used with other devices. Brindley criticized this fact.
Market research firm iSuppli has done one of its popular teardown analysis' on Amazon's Kindle 2 eBook reader, and come to the conclusion that it costs twice as much to buy as it does to manufacture. The Kindle 2 retails for $359 but only costs $185.49 to build. Around 300,000 units have shipped since the device was launched, indicating that Amazon as taken in more than $100 million from sales.
All the parts that make up the Kindle 2 come to about $176.83, and $8.66 is added for components, including battery and the manufacturing costs. The analysis did not guess figures for IP costs, royalties, shipping costs or marketing costs however. There are more than 230,000 books, magazines and other material available to buy for the Kindle 2, up dramatically from its predecessor.
A single charge will allow a user to read for up to 4 days with the wireless feature switched on, or up to two weeks with it switched off. "The new version of the E Ink display in the Kindle 2 supports 16-level grayscale images, rather than the four-level version used in previous-generation hardware,"Andrew Rassweiler, a director and analyst at iSuppli said.
"In terms of pricing –- we perform pricing analysis at the manufacturing level," said Wayne Lam, senior analyst for iSuppli's teardown services. "That is to say, our analysis reflects the economics of the supply chain far removed from the consumer or retail level."
AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has announced that it plans to produce a server chip with 16 cores, quite a step up from the quad-core server chips currently being marketed. The project is codenamed "Interlagos" and is expected to producer a final product by 2011. Interlagos will follow "Magny-Cours", a 12-core chip AMD expects to bring to release in the first quarter of 2010.
Adding more cores helps to squeeze more performance from servers, helping to cut hardware acquisition and energy costs, said Pat Patla, server platform unit VP. The chip will be part of the Opteron 6000 series of chips, which the company said will likely be used in data-center servers. The 16-core chips could be used in servers with two to four sockets.
"Given the consumer environment and those workloads, it will be a while before 16 cores is mainstream,"Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, said. AMD in its future chips will integrate advanced power management features and instruction sets at the chip level to better execute tasks in virtualized environments, users will be able to manually cap the power drawn by cores or simply shut off idle cores.
Apple COO Tim Cook revealed during a second quarter earnings call on Tuesday that sales of the company's iPhone and iPod Touch devices have passed 37 million units. He said that sales of the touch-screen handhelds had more than doubled year over year. The sales figures combined make it an enormous platform for developers, particularly with games, which have been the most popular downloads from the App Store since it launched 9 months ago.
Apple and its development partners will soon "unleash a whole new level of innovation that keeps Apple years ahead of everyone else," according to Cook. The company said the success of the iPod Touch is clearly driven by the App Store. "All genres [on the App Store] are very popular," said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, "but games are quite popular. That's one of the reasons the iPod touch has been such a success."
In his preamble, Oppenheimer said the App Store now totals more than 35,000 applications. The company expects to pass 1 billion App downloads sometime on Thursday, April 23. It has also held its position on top of the portable media player market, with NPD recently confirming that Apple still holds 70 percent of the market in the U.S., and gains more ground each year worldwide.
The recent Pirate Bay guilty verdict has stirred up a long standing debate over the role of file sharers in the shrinking market for recorded music. Yet another study, this time from the BI Norwegian School of Management, is showing that individuals who download illegally also buy far more music legitimately than the rest of the population.
Also like previous studies, this one is being dismissed out of hand by the recording industry. A statement from an EMI representative seems to sum it up nicely.
Bjørn Rogstad said"There is one thing we are not going away, and it is the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines. It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music."
If that's the actual thought process of label executives its easy to understand why they have done so poorly in the online marketplace. It has looked for a long time like their positions have been decided before looking at any evidence.
If you already "know" what the facts are, what are the chances you will pay attention to evidence that doesn't confirm your initial conclusion?
The new Bluetooth 3.0 specification has been released. The biggest change from Bluetooth 2.0 appears to be the addition of high speed capabilities borrowed from WiFi networking.
Bluetooth 3.0 devices will be designed to use a low speed connection, like that used by v2.0 devices, except when added speed can be utilized. At that point the connection will switch to use 802.11 (wireless ethernet) until its no longer than needed.
The additional speed could be used for streaming media or file transfers.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which is responsible for developing the standard, would like to see the technology's role expand beyond mobile phone/headset or mobile phone/headphone connections to be more of a standard computer/peripheral connection - sort of like a wireless USB.
"The Bluetooth SIG is taking a logical step by applying Bluetooth protocols over an existing 802.11 radio to achieve efficient transfers of high data throughput applications," said Flint Pulskamp, wireless and mobile analyst at IDC. "Since Bluetooth and 802.11 already have significant traction in mobile devices, this coupled solution could prove to be an efficient interim solution, as the Bluetooth SIG continues to develop UWB for the future."
A 2 CD album offered exclusively to U2's paid website subscribers has been spotted on internet torrent trackers for download via BitTorrent. This follows the leak of their latest album earlier this year.
U2 frontman Bono and Manager Paul McGuinness have been very vocal in their criticism of P2P downloaders, and even stronger criticism of ISPs, whom McGuinness referred to as "shoplifters."
McGuinness spoke out in support of France's 3 strikes plan at last January's MIDEM conference in France. Would his opinion change knowing it would mean cutting U2 website subscribers from buying their product?
If not, what does that say about his understanding of the economics of music and the internet?
The e-tailer Amazon has begun selling WiiWare titles on their website, allowing users to buy the games for the first time outside of the Wii Shop channel.
However, Amazon has not officially announced the store and so far the only game available is World Of Goo. The game may just be a test to see popularity, before a dedicated store is created.
Gamers who purchase through Amazon will be given a code to download the game through the Wii Shop.
Two weeks ago, Amazon opened an XBox Live Store which allowed the same thing, the ability to purchase Xbox Live games with cash, cutting out the need to purchase Microsoft Points cards.
Third parties can add apps for multiple operating systems and it will be easily accessible through the one store.
Although the exact release date isn't known, it is expected that the launch will coincide with the launch of the Chinese TD-SCDMA standard for 3G, which will allow for speeds fast enough for downloading of applications.
The application store may have been another roadblock in negotiations between Apple and China Mobile over bringing the iPhone to China. Apple wants to be the sole distributor for applications on the iPhone, but clearly China Mobile has different plans.
Making this service much different from Apple's App Store however is the freedom for developers to put out apps for all OSs, including Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
Warner Bros. has launched a new HD DVD trade-in program today, allowing owners of Warner HD DVD titles to receive the same film on Blu-ray for a small fee.
Dubbed Red2Blu, the site allows you to "upgrade" your titles to Blu-ray for $4.95 USD ($9.95 for boxsets), without needing to trade in your actual discs, just the cover art (with UPC code) from the red HD DVD cases.
Shipping costs a flat rate $6.95 USD for up to 25 films, and Warner has all 128 titles available for "upgrade."
The site is very simple to use and I used it this morning to trade in 5 HD DVD titles. Final cost? $33 with tax to have 5 Blu-rays while keeping the HD DVDs is not a bad deal at all. If you are a big fan of the HD DVD cover art, then make replicas but make sure to send in the originals or your claim will be rejected.
Blockbuster's hardware partner in the DVD rental kiosk business, NCR, has just purchased the second largest DVD kiosk operation in North America. The largest operator is Redbox.
TNR Holdings already has their The New Release and MovieCube kiosks in supermarkets around the US and Canada. Those machines will presumably be replaced with Blockbuster Express branded machines as soon as possible.
Blockbuster hopes to eventually offer not just DVD rentals, but also downloads to portable media players from their kiosks. CEO Jim Keyes has made it clear he sees the company's future tied in part to a successful transition from brick and mortar stores to kiosks.
The company's other major emphasis right now is on making sure their online service, Total Access, is profitable. That was a change last year from the previous CEO's strategy of competing with Netflix for the most online customers.
The Blockbuster kiosks face an uphill battle competing with the number one player, Redbox, whose kiosks are already in prime locations like McDonalds restaurants, Wal-Marts, and several supermarket chains.
The transition from traditional stores to a more self-serviceand online operation played a part in last year's $374 million loss. NCR's investment in the new technology is key to avoiding a similar performance this year.
The site also says for the first 500 million downloads, Apple was only averaging 2.98 million downloads per day, so it is blatantly obvious that the content has grown more popular in the past six months. The most popular apps are currently, and will always be, the free ones, but data shows the average cost of paid apps is $2.20.
BET (Black Entertainment Television) has announced that they have begun using Motorola's MPEG-4AVC encoding system to deliver their broadcasts in HD.
The programming will be distributed via satellite using Motorola's SE-5100 HD video encoder. The network decided to use MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 as it would save satellite bandwidth.
All affiliates will receive the content using Motorola's DSR-6050, which can transcode MPEG-4 HD content in MPEG-2 for cable subscribers that do not have HD set top boxes.
"We have enjoyed excellent video quality and reliability using Motorola DigiCipher II over many years,"added BET senior vice president of technology and operations Deidre Jackson. "Being able to merge this easily with Motorola's new MPEG-4 HD equipment has made this transition to HD transmission seamless for us."
Amazon has announced that fans of the company's Video on Demand service will now be able to rent and purchase high definition movies and TV shows to playback on their PCs, or devices from Roku, TiVo, Sony and others.
New release HD movies will cost $3.99 to S4.99 USD to rent, and HDTV shows can be purchased for $2.99 USD.
As of writing, over 500 HD TV episodes and movies are available from major studios and broadcasters.
"Our customers have been asking us for two things: HD and the ability to watch movies and TV shows instantly on their television,"added Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of music and video.
Users can playback the titles on the Roku digital video player, TiVo Series3, HD and HD XL digital video recorders; Sony Bravia Internet Video Link; and Panasonic VIERA CAST-enabled HDTVs as well as PCs.
According to an IDG News Service report, the world's largest mobile phone carrier, China Mobile, is planning to start its own application store, dubbed the Mobile Market.
The store will be open to professional developers and independent developers, although it is unsure what operating systems will be supported by the store or the applications.
The report says the application store may have been another roadblock in negotiations between Apple and China Mobile over bringing the iPhone to China. Apple wants to be the sole distributor for applications on the iPhone, but clearly China Mobile has different plans.
Apple is now allegedly negotiating with China Unicom instead.
The Sony PlayStation 2 video game Hanuman: Boy Warrior has come under criticism from the American Hindu leader Rajan Zed, who has asked the company the withdraw the game from stores.
Zed adds that the game "trivializes" Lord Hanuman, a highly revered deity in the Hindi religion.
Sony responded to the claim saying it will not withdraw the game from the market, and has no plans to.
In the video game, players get to control the destiny of Lord Hanuman, while in the real world, religious believers put their own destinies in the hands of the deity. "Controlling and manipulating Lord Hanuman with a joystick, button, keyboard, or mouse is denigration", added Zed.
The game is only available in India, and Sony says that "prominent Indian scholars were consulted at every step" of developing the game. The game was created to "encourage young Indians to celebrate the stories of Lord Hanuman and to help bring the key lessons to life" adds the company.
Microsoft has announced that the Xbox 360 console has finally passed the 1 million sales mark in Japan. The announcement was made at a media conference held in Japan today. To celebrate the milestone in the Xbox 360's harshest market, Microsoft said it will say "thank you" by giving away 1 million Microsoft Points to Japanese Xbox Live users.
The announcement was made by Microsoft Japan president Takashi Sensui along with announcements of new games set to retail for the console, as well as downloadable content. Namco Bandai's Yoshihisa Kanesaka announced the company would bring fantasy role-playing game Magna Carta 2 to the console on August 6.
Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi confirmed Lost Planet 2 will feature four-player co-op support, while Dead Rising 2 producer Keiji Inafune shows off a trailer showing the game's protagonist attacking zombies in a casino using objects as weapons.
Tri-Ace's Takayuki Suguro Sega discussed the new RPG title End of Eternity, which is scheduled for release in winter 2009. Microsoft Xbox marketing spokesman Joji Sakaguchi used the latter of the media briefing to announce some upcoming Xbox and XBLA titles, including BlazBlu: Calamity Trigger which is due out June 26, and a new 3D Samurai Shodown title. Lode Runner is due to land on the service tomorrow, April 22, while Banjo-Kazooie sequel Banjo-Tooie and Virtual On will both be available from April 29.
BT Broadband users who try to access the notorious Pirate Baytracker are met with a "Content Blocked" message, claiming it has been blocked in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code". "This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have 'over 18' status," the warning states.
On the list of things blocked it has adult/sexually explicit content, information on "criminal skills" and hacking. It does not state the reason for the Pirate Bay block specifically, but the tracker does host links to torrents for pornography. The block can be lifted however if a user calls up customer services and requests it, the warning states.
The self-regulations scheme includes all five of the major mobile networks too. "The Code covers new types of content, including visual content, online gambling, mobile gaming, chat rooms and internet access," the code of practice at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) site states. However, it then goes on to state that "the Code does not cover peer-to-peer communications but it does give assurances to customers that the mobile operators are taking action to combat illegal, bulk and nuisance communications."
Despite the fact that it had nothing to do with EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding's telecoms reforms, arguments over how to tackle illegal downloading has stalled the entire process. There is broad agreement over the reform package without the anti-piracy measures (covers infrastructure and not content), but it is now causing a last minute stand-off between states and parliament, pushing back final adoption to May at earliest.
There is agreement too that Internet service providers should be able to cut access to pirates with approval from "a competent legal authority." The industry committee votes on the draft deal on Tuesday evening, setting up a clash with EU states over what some see as a purely political issue rather than one of substance.
"This is the major sticking point. It is clear member states won't agree to this going into the body of the text," an EU diplomat said. "It would be a shame if the whole reform was held back just because of something which was not in the original proposal."
A GPS system for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console has been around for some time, but now GPS is new to the Nintendo DS handheld thanks to a product called Ranger, from Fab Chain of China. The product uses Google Maps, can do fake 3D map rendering and uses a U-Blox GPS receiver. It can also connect to other devices such as a laptop or a PDA as well.
It comes with it's own rechargeable battery that is charged via USB. It's website, ds-gps.com is mostly incomplete, and has no information on pricing or available yet.
Use of mobile phones is continuing to grow substantially in China, and with it, usage of premium music download services and multimedia messaging is setting new records. There are about 648 million mobile users in the country, after 26.7 million subscribed to the three main state-owned carriers in the first quarter. Users sent over 174 billion text messages on China Mobile's network alone.
More China Mobile subscribers are also using their phones to download songs and send messages via MMS. The carrier counted over 384 million users of its wireless music service, where paid downloads of songs by Chinese and Taiwanese pop stars are particularly popular. However, average revenue per year fell for China Mobile as it added more low-end users and launched promotional deals in a marketing move.
China Mobile is offering "more economical" packages and plans for users. "We've kind of reached saturation of what I would call the high-end to the medium-end market in China," said David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based technology consultancy. China Mobile also has another obvious problem with it's lack of attractive handsets compared to its rivals.
Since speculation started mounting about a 'DS Phone', attention turned toward the possibility of being able to use Skypewith the more online-friendly DSihandheld console. Skype is already available for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console, and recently was brought to the iPhone and iPod Touch via the Apple App Store (for use with Wi-Fi).
"We have no plans to release a Skype application for Nintendo DS or DSi," a Nintendo rep told CVG. However, a spokesman for Skype said that the company's objective for the service was "extending the Skype infrastructure and platform to bring Skype functionality wherever, whenever, and on whatever device or site people choose to use it."
Microsoft will be shipping a limited edition Xbox 360 bundle that will include an Xbox 360 Elite console, and two popular titles, Halo 3 and Fable II, starting in May. It's $400 price tag is the normal price of an Xbox 360 Elite console on its own. A previous bundle included Lego Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda, two family-friendly games that could boost sales during the holiday season.
Now with two M rated games, it would appear Microsoft is trying to build in an area where it is already strong, with what is arguably a better deal. The box also bears the Netflix logo, as Microsoft has managed to keep the movie streaming service exclusive to the Xbox 360 console, while the PlayStation 3 (PS3) supports Blu-ray Disc.
The bundle might give Microsoft the edge with some gamers looking to choose between a PS3 or an Xbox 360, as it includes two popular games whereas the $400 PlayStation 3 (PS3) does not. For a PS3 with a bundled game, you have to jump to $500 which will get you a 160GB Hard Disk Drive and a copy of Uncharted. Sony is rumored to be planning price cuts in time for E3, however.
Despite its operators being found guilty of making 33 files available for illegal download, infamous Bittorrent tracker website The Pirate Bay is still operating pending appeal. But there have been other casualties in the form of private tracker communities, many of which have closed down in the aftermath of the Pirate Bay trial.
One tracker based in Sweden, NordicBits, replaced their website with a simple page explaining "We have to shut down the site now due all circumstances. We don.t have time to do anything to the code, we don.t have interest to it, we don.t have any more money and the biggest reason is The Pirate Bay info."
TorrentFreak is reporting a dozen or more trackers will be shutting down soon.
No doubt the entertainment industry will spin this as a victory for copyright holders, like the verdict itself. Considering the history of file sharing, it's hard not to find that a little naive.
Even before the Pirate Bay trial began, there were signs people were moving to other services like MegaUpload, and even to Usenet thanks to providers like Giganews and UseNeXT. There's no evidence to suggest taking down some search engines and punishing a handful of people is going to make file sharing go away.
Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls "Pirate Bay for textbooks".
Bookabooka doesn't host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional "snailmail" (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn't handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.
Despite these "small" differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.
The AT&T Wireless website has begun selling refurbished 16GB Apple iPhone 3G devices for $149 USD, a full 50 percent discount of the $300 USD retail price.
Of course you will have to sign a two-year contract to get the phone at that price, and being refurbished it may not be in pristine condition, but the price drop is still somewhat of a surprise.
The price drop has many believing that Apple is once again clearing out all excess inventory to make way for a third generation of the device, coming as soon as June, Apple's standard launch month.
Refurb iPhones have been available for some time now, with AT&T selling smaller capacity 8GB models for $99 and Best Buy selling the larger model for $249 USD, but never at "firesale" prices like this.
According to the latest official PlayStation Blog , the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld will be updated to firmware version 5.50 soon.
The most notable update will be the addition of an Information Board to the XMB interface. As owners of the PS3 might know, the IB displays current news, weather and other updates for Sony products in a scrolling ticker.
* Memory Stick improvements – You’ll be able to create and access sub-folders on your Memory Stick PRO Duo for music, videos and photos. Separately, the available space required to download a file from PlayStation Store to your Memory Stick has been reduced significantly.
* Internet search for games directly from the XMB – You’ll be able to easily search the Internet for information about your PSP games. Select the icon for the game, hit the Triangle button, and then select [Internet Search] from the options menu to get search results based on the game title. This feature was added to PS3 with the recent 2.70 update.
* Trend Micro trial – PSP’s Internet browser is a great tool for checking out your favorite Web sites on the go, and we’re teaming up with the Internet security experts at Trend Micro to make the Web browsing experience safer and more secure. With the 5.50 update, you’ll have the option to access a free trial of two Trend Micro services:
Trend Micro Web Security uses Web reputation technology to block PSP owners from accidentally visiting a Web site that may contain malicious content designed to steal personal information and confidential data.
Trend Micro Kids’ Safety uses URL filtering technology to prevent children from accessing Web sites that feature inappropriate content.
"This decision confirms that the harm being inflicted on creators of digital works by BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay will not be tolerated, and that such actions are subject to criminal sanctions," ESA CEO Michael D Gallagher said.
"Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy. It's a job killer in an economy that needs millions more jobs, not less."
As reported, the admins and founders of the site, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and each received one year in prison and fines totaling $3,620,000 USD.
According to an anonymous developer, the rumored WiiWare 'threshold' is real, but the press has misinterpreted the facts.
The so-called 'threshold' means that indie developers who create titles to sell via WiiWare have to sell a significant amount of the game to receive any revenue from Nintendo.
"I'm concerned this recent threshold news is generating an artificially negative wave of press. The spirit of the threshold was never to screw the developer - it was, as far as I can tell, a quality control mechanism to prevent the service from getting overrun with a bunch of crappy games," says the source.
"Once the threshold is crossed, the developer is retroactively paid for every single unit sold below the threshold. I know there has been confusion on that point in the past.
"From the stats I've seen and heard developers report, the threshold is easily surpassed within the first day, or at least the first week, for many games."
"I hear rumours within the dev community that Nintendo recognises a problem here, where occasionally an entirely legitimate game just doesn't make it, and is looking for a way to make exceptions, to ensure small devs are paid even if the threshold is not reached. Just rumours though, so who knows.
Nintendohas come out to defend the sales figures for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, released recently for the Nintendo DS portable platform. The sales figures for March were met with disappointment from analysts and many in the industry who expected the game to be incredibly successful like everything else in the GTA series. Nintendo has responded however, saying that the sales are "in line" with other AAA DS titles.
Steve Singer, vice president of licensing for Nintendo of America, said that the 89,000 units sold of the game was about standard for a successful third-party title on the platform, referring to Call of Duty 4's DS version which sold 36,000 units in its first month. GTA: Chinatown Wars was predicted initially by analysts to sell 2 million units this year.
Investment firm Cowan and Company said that the March sales for the title were a disappointment, and has cut its projections to 500,000 units for 2009.
Owners of new Apple iMacs, equipped with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card, are reporting problems with freeze ups during normal usage, forcing them to reboot the machine. The problem doesn't appear to be caused by software running at the time of the freeze in Mac OS X, and some users have noted that the problem persists using Windows in a Boot Camppartition where drivers or Mac software wouldn't be an issue.
Threads have popped up on Apple's support forums about the issue and the company is aware of it. Some users report being told that a fix is expected to be rolled out with the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update while others have been offered replacement systems when a troubleshooting session has been unsuccessful.
This isn't the first experience of this kind of problem for Apple systems. In March, some users of MacBook Pro machines reported graphics issues during use, related to the NVIDIA 9600M and 9400M GPUs. Back in 2007, when the aluminum iMac machines launched, another freeze issue surfaced. That time, it allowed some programs to continue running, whereas the latest issue freezes up the entire system.
The four founders of The Pirate Bay torrenttracker, Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, have filed an official appeal against a ruling that found them guilty of assisting copyright infringement, sentenced to one-year in prison and fined $3.6 million. The four always had planned to appeal a guilty verdict from day one of the trial, which kicked off in February 2009.
The case will now be referred to the Swedish Supreme Court, which may take a number of years to deliver a final decision on the case. Since the verdict was announced, there have been a number of DDoS attacks against the IFPI, demonstrations in Swedish cities and outside the country and a boost in membership for the country's Pirate Party, which hopes to win a seat in the European Parliament.
The reaction from the entertainment industry was exactly what you would expect, as we reported earlier. Also, Paul McCartney is one celebrity who decided to comment on the decision, calling it "fair". "If you get on a bus you've got to pay. And I think it's fair you should pay your ticket," he said.
Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, has announced the sale of its enterprise mobile TV unit to Wipro, an India-based corporation that operates in the areas of information technology, consumer care, lighting, engineering and healthcare.
The Mobile Broadcast Solutions unit employed around 40 professionals who developed software and hardware to enable mobile TV technology to locate and access data from a broadcasting network.
"We wanted to focus on the consumer side of things, the mobile TV client in the devices, rather than on the business-to-business side,"said a Nokia spokesman. While a few years ago it seemed that mobile television and on-demand video would be the holy grail for mobile phones, the technology has since arrived with very little interest from the public.
Oracle is jumping straight into the computer hardware market with an announced purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.06 billion. The announcement spurred surprise and shock in the industry, as many wonder if Oracle can boost profitability at Sun's hardware unit in fierce competition with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Delletc.
"It's an out-of-the-box, left-field type of a deal because Oracle is buying a predominantly hardware business," said Jefferies & Co analyst Ross MacMillan. "The push-pull of the deal is the uncertainty of the hardware business with the earnings accretion of the software business."
Sun had previously rejected a bid from IBM, which was offering $9.40 a share. Oracle will pay $9.50 a share, valuing the company at about $7.06 billion. The news pushed shares of Sun Microsystems by 35.7 percent in morning trading. Safra Catz, Oracle President, said on a conference call that the company does intend to make Sun's hardware division profitable.
A study by the Iowa State University (ISU) and the National Institute on Media and the Family has revealed that one in ten players of video games exhibits some symptoms of addiction. Researchers found that some show at least six symptoms of "gambling addiction" which includes lying to their families and friends about how much they actually play, using games to escape problems and becoming irritable when they have stopped playing.
Since the study focused on children and teenagers, it also noted a very negative effect on homework and overall performance in school among the gamers showing addiction signs. "While the medical community currently does not recognize video game addiction as a mental disorder, hopefully this study will be one of many that allow us to have an educated conversation on the positive and negative effects of video games,"Dr Douglas Gentile, an assistant professor of psychology at ISU, said in a statement.
1,178 children and teenagers aged between 8 - 18 years old were included in the study. Six of the eleven symptoms of pathological gambling as defined by the American Psychiatric Association were identified in a portion of the gamers (about ten percent). The technically "addicted" gamers generally spent 24 hours or more per week playing games, twice as much as casual gamers in the study.
The official website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) was knocked offline at times, and made to perform sluggishly on Monday as a result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Discussions among 250 "hactivists" at irc.anonnet.org talked of retaliation on the IFPI and the lawyers involved in the Pirate Bay trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict.
"They want to get the message across that the IFPI can not mess with the internet and that the internet is serious business,"coldblood, an admin at anonnet.org told The Register. "This is very much like the Scientology thing started more than a year ago now." The overall effort is being called "Operation Baylout", and also reportedly involved the defacing of the Swedish IFPI website.
While there are attacks against the IFPI and others over the Pirate Bay trial, there has also been attacks against Torrent trackers in recent weeks. Free-torrents.org, for example, has been the victim of a DDoS attack for about a month now by a Black Energy botnet run out of China.
Arbitron has released the results of their annual digital radio survey. It features market analysis of AM/FM based streams, online, satellite, and HD radio, and even Podcasting. They found 17% of respondents said they listened to internet radio during the previous week, nearly a third more than last year's 13%.
According to Arbitron, availability of different music and a measure of control over what they hear are the primary reasons for nearly 40% of consumers to choose online radio.
And how are those listeners finding their favorite online radio service? Nearly a third of listeners say they first heard about it on traditional over the air radio broadcast.
Those traditional broadcasters can at least feel secure in their dominance of in-car listening. Fewer than a third of respondents indicated any real interest in using a mobile (in-car) internet connection to listen to internet radio.
But it's easy to see how that could changes as more advanced phones become more common and more consumers are exposed to mobile internet.
Also according to Arbitron, 71% of 12-17 year olds own a portable music player, which is 2% less than last year, but stil 7% more than the percentage of 18-24 year olds who own them. From that age upward the ownership rate continues to decline.
At 10:30 AM Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is scheduled to appear as part of the keynote presentation at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) tradeshow in Las Vegas. Earlier this morning his company announced a new initiative he will be talking about today and throughout the coming week - the Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home.
This new platform is intended to bring Flash video to consumers using TVs, settop boxes, and Blu-ray players.
In the second half of 2009 NXP Semiconductors is planning to have the first Flash enabled chip ready to ship to OEMs. Intel, Sigma Designs, and Broadcom are also developing their own chips and Comcast is working to have it used as part of tru2way, the successor to CableCARD technology for TVs, settop boxes, and computers.
The most significant partner in this venture is probably Netflix. Bill Holmes, vice president of Business Development at Netflix, was quoted in Adobe's press release saying "Adobe’s Flash Platform for the Digital Home offers great promise as Netflix continues its expansion directly to the television with our consumer electronics partners."
The Netflix Watch Instantly streaming video service has led their continued growth over the last few months. The availability of settop boxes, blu-ray players, and game consoles with Netflix clients has been a key ingredient to that success.
Broadcasters are set to announce later today that Washington D.C. will be the first city in the United States to receive free digital TV (DTV) broadcasts for their mobile phones, laptops and in-car entertainment systems.
The broadcasts using "mobile DTV" technology will hit the city in July or August and will come from the local affiliates of CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX and Ion.
At launch, the broadcasts will be identical to those seen on standard TV sets, including commercials.
The big question that looms however is what devices users will need to receive the signals. Mobile phones are prime candidates but the largest wireless carriers have their own TV services which cost money and have been very reluctant to sign up for the free broadcasts.
Among the large companies supporting the technology are Dell, Samsung, LG and Kenwood. Dell is expected to release a netbook with a built-in mobile DTV receiver later this year, and Kenwood is currently developing car-based receivers.
Ludle International says the smartphone is already in volume production and the company provided an "example unit" and a packaging slip.
A few of the early impressions of the phone are that it "feels smaller than an iPhone, the design's screen is less scratch-proof but is compensated for by a tougher (though fingerprint-prone) back."
According to sources at Taiwan handset component suppliers, Nokiais moving to replace the resistive touch panel used in the popular 5800 handset with a capacitive touch panel. The change is being made in order to compete more effectively with the products from Apple, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics on the market.
The initial orders from Nokia are enough for two million 5800 handsets, and shipments of the new version are expected to begin in May-June this year. Nokia's design and pricing strategy for the 5800 handset have been very successful, leading to sales of over three million units so far since the device was launched in November 2008.
Availability for the Nokia N97 handset is expected in the second quarter, while Nokia is also expected to roll out more models with capacitive touch panels, QWERTY keyboards and with ultra-thin designs during the third quarter.
Microsoft's partner program site temporarily revealed an expected date for the first Windows 7 release candidate to be made available. "Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now," the page read Saturday afternoon. "Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009." The link however led the user to a TechNet download page that didn't have any Windows 7 RC in sight.
This is the second such incident in about three weeks to do with the release candidate details. In late March, a page was added to a Microsoft site indicating that the RC will be available sometime in May, but when it started to get attention, Microsoft quickly removed it.
The latest information leak did not mention a public roll-out date, but generally speaking Microsoft makes previews available to MSDN and TechNet several days before the public. For example, in January MSDN subscribers could download a Windows 7 beta on January 7, while the public started to download on January 9.
Subscribers of Netflix' online DVD/Blu-ray rental service have been complaining about receiving damaged or cracked discs from the company. "Over the last two months, we've had probably four to six Blu-ray discs in a row arrive with small cracks at the edge of the disc that render it unplayable," says Pete Brown, whose wife has been a Netflix subscriber for three years.
Blu-ray is structured significantly different to DVD in that DVD is comprised of two 0.6mm thick polycarbonate discs with the data recorded to a thin metal substrate in between, while Blu-ray is a single 1.1mm polycarbonate disc with the data recorded at the top, and protected by a 0.1mm coating. The Blu-ray discs circulated by Netflix may be more affected by the process than DVDs, and you have to remember Blu-ray is still a very young format.
"The coating is supposed to protect the discs but it could also be making them more brittle," says Adrienne Downey, senior analyst at research firm Semico. "Ultimately Blu-ray is a new technology and they are still working the kinks out of it." The problem can't just come down to the discs however, as BlockBuster customers don't complain about damaged Blu-ray titles as much.
On Friday, Sony Ericsson posted a large loss of $382.4 million USD, adding that phone shipments fell 35 percent year-on-year, to 14.5 million units between January and March.
Additionally, the company will cut 2000 more jobs on top of the 2000 already cut in the past year.
Officials estimated that due to the global economic recession, the entire mobile phone market will shrink 10 percent in 2009, with just about 1.2 billion phones shipped for the year.
Perhaps more critical for the future of the company is the fact that they have lost 2 percent market share in the past year, dropping to 6 percent, and being surpassed by LG, Samsung and possibly Motorola. Notably, Sony Ericsson has lost giant amount of market share in the high-end market.
Beginning next week, BluFocus and NetBlender will launch a mobile phone app for smartphones that will allow Blu-ray Disc owners to transfer extra features from the disc directly to their phones.
The app, dubbed BD Touch 2.0, will be shown off next week at the NAB conference, added CEO Paulette E. Pantoja.
BD Touch 2.0 will be free in the App Store and other application stores and will work on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, the Palm Pre, Google's Android platform and BlackBerry phones.
With the app installed, users can "transfer downloadable content and interactive features from their Blu-ray Disc to their phone. The phones also can be used as a remote control for a compatible Blu-ray player."
Pantoja adds that BD Touch capability will be a very easy for Blu-ray developers to add to discs in the future. “It’s just one line of code they have to put in,” Pantoja notes. “We made it extremely, extremely simple.”
Last month we reported that 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment had announced it would be creating two classes of DVDs for now on, a "premium" version with extras and digital copies and a "rental" version which removes all extras and will be available for rental only.
The first movie to be "split" was Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire which hit stores and rental outlets on March 31st. It appears the studio is now reconsidering that policy, and rental outlets will now be allowed to order 'premium' sell-through versions as well.
This is according to library media distributor Midwest Tape which has informed all its accounts that Fox has reversed course on the policy, due to a large number of complaints from retailers and consumers.
On the other hand however, Fox has denied the report saying it has not made a final decision on the policy.
"Fox is currently reviewing its policy as it pertains to the library channel,"added a spokeswoman. "No changes have been made at this time."
Fox did issue a notice however, on how the studio continues to receive complaints over the policy. “Over the past week, many of our customers have advocated via e-mail and on list-serves for a reversal of Fox’s rental policy,” says the notice. “We are very pleased to announce that in response to this vocal and persuasive outcry from the library community, Fox has decided to amend their policy.”
According to a report by Blu-ray.com, cheaper Blu-ray players will hit store shelves in the United States a lot sooner than one would think. At the moment the average selling price of Blu-ray players is around $199, but the report expects it to fall to $99 fairly soon. The expected drop is due to the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) licensing in China, which led Samsungmarketing director Mark Leathan to predict $99 players.
It's a bit early to speculate about holiday prices, as usually it takes to about mid-summer before accurate predictions are made, but NPD Group industry analyst Stephen Baker isn't discarding possibilities. "Black Friday, maybe. It's entirely possible you could see a few players down at that price level,"he said.
MySpace Music is only about half a year old, and at the moment it is simply just another location among many where users can listen to music for free. Recent announcements, such as the new Vevo site being developed by Universal and YouTube, show the continued trend of services hooking up with record labels to provide free music streaming.
After MySpace launched back in 2004, Courtney Holt, then of Interscope Geffen A&M, saw the potential it could have for music promotion and encouraged artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Weezer and The Black Eyed Peas to use MySpace to their advantage to connect with fans. "The artists loved it and it created a Pied Piper effect for the fans," Holt said.
Holt took charge of the recently revamped MySpace Music service, and is striving to build upon it to transform it into something unique, and not just another music service. MySpace Music is vital to fending off Facebook, which has overtaken MySpace in terms of global users, but not as the biggest social networking site in the U.S. just yet, and definitely not in revenues.
Samsung Mobile Display, a joint venture between Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDI, has revealed on Sunday that it expects the global smartphone market to balloon from 170 million in 2009 to 500 million units in 2012. Feature-packed phones such as Apple's iPhone and Blackberry handsets have seen sales continue to pick up while the mobile phone market overall has seen drops in handset sales.
According to the Samsung Mobile Display statement, smartphones will make up 29 percent of the industry by 2012, compared to 14 percent in 2009. The display maker also expected touch-screens to increase in popularity and be used with mobile phones, digital cameras, navigation devices and digital media players, predicting that 50% of the devices produced in the areas in 2013 would use touch-screen technology.
Sales of Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays will take off over the coming years as they are thinner and provide better picture quality, but currently with a trade-off of a shorter life-span and high cost of production, compared to its alternatives. Samsung Mobile Display predicts OLED will be used with 50 percent of all mobile phones over the next five years.
Popular actor Ashton Kutcher has become the first person to achieve 1 million followers on Twitter this week, beating out CNN as the first to the milestone.
"We have shown the world that the new wave is here," Kutcher said of the milestone. "It is present and it is ready to explode. You guys are all of it because I can't follow me."
CNN was long the leader in the race, but Kutcher pulled off a rally in the last week that brought massive media attention to CNN, Kutcher and Twitter in general.
The breaking news page has since past the 1 million follower mark, and Britney Spears is within hours of passing the mark as I write this article.
Kutcher adds that Twitter is "removing filters between celebrities and fans, big media companies and their customers."
Now that the "race" is over however, all eyes are on Oprah Winfrey, who recently joined the site and gained 130,000 followers in under 24 hours.
According to a Microsoft Developer Network post, Microsoft is planning to "launch" Windows Mobile 6.5 next month at the Tech Ed 2009 event.
The event runs from May 11th to May 15th, but it is unknown what the company means by "launch."
The operating system was debuted in February at the Mobile World Congress but Microsoft did admit the system was not in its final version.
There is also a chance there will be some sort of device launched alongside the final version of the operating system but there is no concrete evidence yet of such a phone.
The BBC has explained the limitations that will be enforced by digital rights management (DRM) with regard to recording from its High-definition broadcasts. The information follows the launch of the Panasonic Freesat Blu-ray recorders. The DRM will allow users to make one personal copy of HD content (after recording to the PVR) to a Blu-ray disc, but copies of that disc cannot be made afterward.
"It will now be possible to make a single HD Blu-ray copy of one of our programmes, although not copies of copies. An HD connection to a protected home network will also be possible, although an HD connection to the Internet or portable devices will not work..." said Danielle Nagler, head of BBC HD, in a blog post.
He continued: "...Partial unlocking of some paths should also enable the high quality standard definitionRGB outputs from some set top boxes". In the future, it will be possible to make a copy of the content to a compatible portable device too.
According to research, about 10% of all electric power used within the average home is used by televisions and their accessories. California is looking at this as a possible target for efforts to reduce energy usage in the state, and is proposing stricter efficiency standards for television sets. Ideally, the standards would aim to cut the average power consumption of a television by 50 percent.
The target date for the plan to kick in is 2013, but if the standards could be drawn up as early as this summer, then it could apply to televisions produced in 2011. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is resisting such restrictions, and points out that energy can already be saved without making new rules. It points out that simple acts such as lowering the brightness and contrast levels can cut energy usage by up to 25% alone.
Of course, there is a long way to go before something like this plan could be drawn up. It would have to take into account the differences in technology used in the televisions of today; there is a large difference in energy consumption of Plasma and LCD, for example.
The BBC has announced that the iPlayer service will soon be loaded with High-definition content that can be accessed by web browser. There are plans to also roll out HD on iPlayer through the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console and a Virgin set-top box. For many users in the UK, this will probably be their first experience with high-definition video. The iPlayer has been a runaway success, with more than 387 million requests to stream or download since it launched on Christmas Day 2007.
"Introducing HD streams enables users to enjoy BBC programmes in HD without a set-top box," BBC's head of digital media technology, Anthony Rose said. The new version of the iPlayer will also include a diagnostic tool that will analyze the user's Internet connection and automatically adjust the steam quality settings to get the best result.
"The new adaptive bitrate technology and speed diagnostics page help optimise the viewing experience, while the resizable window gives users flexibility to switch between different quality streams, hopefully leading to a more satisfying experience overall," said Mr Rose.
The popular Amazon Kindle 2 is a hit, says sources talking to the Washington Post. The e-book reader has sold 300,000 units since its release in late February, a rate almost double that of the first generation of the device.
Because the device sells for $359 USD, it can be deduced that Amazon has made over $100 million USD in revenue from the device in just under 2 months.
Although Amazon never gave exact figures, it is believed the original Kindle device only sold 400,000-500,000 units over its entire lifespan but the e-tailer expects to sell 800,000 of the new devices in 2009.
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, who follows the Kindle, says he expects over 1 million Kindle 2s to sell this year, and believes Amazon may have to increase production to satisfy any unexpected surge in demand.
Despite gaining a good reputation for an anti-DRM stance and a "just ignore it" attitude to piracy, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has experienced first hand what piracy can mean for your games. He had said that pirates will do what they will do, and should be ignored, but DRM should not be used as it punishes the legitimate customer. However, with the launch of Demigod, piracy showed how it can have adverse effects on game titles.
Firstly, there was a major problem with online play, as the servers were overwhelmed with 120,000 connections to deal with, well beyond the number that had been anticipated in advance. Of the 120,000 connections, about 18,000 were from validated users. As you may have guessed, the system quickly went down, which disrupted gameplay for legitimate customers.
To make matters worse, the problems occurred as reviewers were assessing the new title, and was marked as a reason for GameSpot's 6.5 rating. "Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic... So during the day today, people couldn't even log on, and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down," Wardell wrote.
Following Friday's guilty verdict announced by a Stockholm court for the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the country's Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) gained 3,000 new members in just 7 hours. As a result, it is now larger in numbers than 3 of the 7 political parties that make up the Swedish parliament.
"The ruling means that our political work must now be stepped up. We want to ensure that the Pirate Bay activities — to link people and information — is clearly lawful. And we want to do it for all people in Sweden, Europe and the world," said Rick Falk Vinge. "We want it to be open for ordinary people to disseminate and receive information without fear of imprisonment or astronomical damages."
He commented that the party needs its members, saying that unlike any other political party in the country, it is a true grass-roots organization that aims to affect real change to the countries laws regarding copyright, patents and so on.
AMG TV is a modestly sized network that feeds syndicated programs to some 200 terrestrial station affiliates. It is being bought out by Signet Intl. Holdings, a publicly traded company led by former NBC and PBS exec Tom Donaldson and boxing promoter Ernie Letiziano. Signet has also simultaneously joined with Kerner Broadcast Corp. for exclusive use of its 3-D TV technology.
"We fully plan to have, as soon as we can acquire the library, the first full-time 3-D network in the country," Donaldson told Daily Variety. Set-top boxes for cable and satellite aren't currently equipped for 3D content, but a lot of televisions currently being sold are technically 3D-ready.
Kerner plans to introduce two solutions in the form of an add-on box for cable and satellite subscribers and an "enhancement" that will turn any HD television into a 3D TV for about $50, which includes glasses. Kerner Broadcasting CEO Yuska Siuicki admitted that he'd give the 3D quality about a 5/10 rating, but it would make ED TV affordable and widely available for the first time.
According to a Variety report, Best Buy is preparing to start its own online movie store, with a connection through CinemaNow and "other online movie services."
Although specifics are unavailable, and Best Buy has not confirmed or denied the report, it is believed the retailer will receive a cut of the revenues for each movie viewed and will promote the service through new media hubs with the movie services built-in.
The retailer also has a current listing searching for a Digital Movies Product Manager, which supports the report but could also mean nothing.
The deal would help Best Buy continue its strong sales in electronics while also accounting for the gradual slow of DVD sale growth.
CEO Jon Karlung, a long time opponent of the laws that went into effect on April 1st, has said the company is making it top priority to protect their clients.
The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) laws make it much easier for content rights holders to get the personal details of alleged unauthorized file sharers. The laws say the ISPs can retain the IP addresses of file sharers or they are free to destroy the info.
"It's about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details. We're not acting in breach of IPRED; we're following the law and choosing to destroy the details," Karlung added.
Bahnhof also added that his actions make the law completely ineffective and if all other Swedish ISPs followed, then the law would no longer have any effect.
"Yes, that would make the new law completely ineffective. And then the legislators will have to step up and say they want to have data storage, not to catch terrorists but to help record companies and the movie industry in the hunt for file sharers," he concluded.
Sweden's Pirate Party was setup to attempt to reform laws in the country around copyright and patents in the digital era. Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party had some strong words to utter today when the four founders of the Pirate Bay were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay a $4.5 million fine. Falkvinge dismissed the trial, and called the verdict "a gross injustice".
"This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure. There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it," Falkvinge said.
He continued: "Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament." Of course, the four defendants plan already to appeal the decision, confident that in the end they will be found not guilty of all charges under Swedish laws.
Solid-State Drives (SSD) continue to advance to new heights of performance, and every self-respecting tech enthusiast is following the progress to see data storage develop in line with other computer components and not be stuck as a bottleneck for performance. Up until now, some security concerns came out of the fact that while full drive encryption solutions are available for traditional, mechanical HDDs, SSDs were lacking in that department.
In steps Samsungand Dellwith their own solutions to this problem. Samsung Electronics said on Thursday that it will bundle SSD data encryption software with every SSD it ships. The software, from Wave Systems' Embassy management software, will be bundled with all SSDs with a storage capacity between 64GB and 256GB, and will be available from PC markers, the company said.
Dell has also stepped in to fill the void, announcing at the same time that it would include self-encrypting SSDs with its Latitude line of laptops during the year. SSDs have enormous potential in performance, energy consumption and heat radiation, making them suitable for modern computers and notebooks. However, to replace the traditional HDD, it has to cross some bridges with capacity limits, longevity, performance and of course, data security too.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has been involved in two anti-piracy operations in the UK. The trade group cooperated with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency to raid the private address of an individual who sold hundreds of hard drives preloaded with music using the Internet. Each hard drive sold for £100 and contained up to 5000 albums, 200 of which the purchaser could request to be included.
In the property, police seized a large quantity of hard drives and other storage devices, including hard drives containing a master library of more than 500,000 albums. They also seized eight burners and more than 5,000 discs. Meanwhile, in a joint operation with Leicestershire Police and Trading Standards Departments, BPI anti-piracy investigators raided two private addresses that were being used as counterfeiting factories.
The addresses supplied the north of England with counterfeit Bollywood movie and music repertoire. Two gang leaders were arrested and 84 burners, 21 printers and in excess of 100,000 counterfeit discs were seized. The police are seeking to not only prosecute the gang leaders but also strip them of their assets, which to date, have funded a luxurious lifestyle.
According to a report issued by Forrester on Friday, Apple's customer satisfaction is remarkably high in several categories, while Dell's is notably low. A market research report was compiled from 4,500 surveys to measure consumers' overall satisfaction with computer manufacturers in different areas. The results clearly put Apple on top, with an 80 percent consumer satisfaction rating.
Gateway came in second place with 66 percent, showing the considerable lead Apple somehow has attained over its rivals. Hewlett-Packard and Compaq weren't two far behind in third and fourth place, achieving a 64 percent and 63 percent consumer satisfaction rating, respectively. Coming in dead last, with 58 percent consumer satisfaction rating, is none-other than Dell.
The ratings were made up from three categories; Useful, Easy to Use, and Enjoyable. While Apple scored well in all three - with 82 percent approving in the Useful category, 86 percent approving in the Ease of Use and 72 percent approving in the Enjoyable category - Dell set the low mark as being the only manufacturer to receive below 50 percent, when it got 47 percent in the Enjoyable category.
Silicon Alley Insider cites a "plugged-in industry executive" in reporting that the popular web video site Hulu is developing an application for Apple's iPhone. It wouldn't be the first of it's kind, as TV.com, i.TV and Joost are all on the market as it is, but because it's Hulu, the rumor is getting considerable attention.
Hulu providing an iPhone application is obviously a good idea - that is if AT&T doesn't object to it and force Apple's hand to ban it from the iPhone store. Such a service would obviously be heavy on traffic if not only used when Wi-Fi is available for it. The data problems also would create demand for an ability to save and watch videos later.
Hulu has gotten a very good following online since it was launched, taunting YouTube with its catalog of premium content, and being mimicked by many others as a good model to copy from. The question is with just around 3% of mobile phone users watching any video at all with their phones, will Hulu be able to set some precedents here too?
As you would imagine, music industry bodies have been lining up in Sweden and Internationally to give their take on the guilty verdict for the founders of the Pirate Bay website. Here is a pick of some of the comments that have been officially made about the verdict.
"The trial of the operators of The Pirate Bay was about defending the rights of creators, confirming the illegality of the service and creating a fair environment for legal music services that respect the rights of the creative community. Today's verdict is the right outcome on all three counts. The court has also handed down a strong deterrent sentence that reflects the seriousness of the crimes committed. This is good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will protected by law." - John Kennedy, Chairman & Chief Executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)
"Song writers and publishers all over the world are dependent on having their rights protected by law. We are pleased to see an appropriate judgment making it clear that it is not acceptable to run a business based on the violation of the rights and livelihood of creators." - Ger Hatton, Secretary General of the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP)
Nintendo has noted that the new DSi handheld sold very well in the US, moving 435,000 units in its first week of sales, the week ended April 12th.
The numbers were almost double that of its predecessor, the DS Lite, which sold 226,000 in its first week.
"These numbers demonstrate that the Nintendo DS brand remains strong, and that consumers continue to look for the best new experiences on their portable video game systems," said Nintendo of America executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway.
Dunaway also noted that DS Lite sales remained high as well, with the company selling 563,000 in March.
"Nintendo systems accounted for 58.4 per cent of the video game hardware sold in March, more than all other systems combined," Dunaway added. "Consumers continue to be attracted to the wide range of software available and the great value of Nintendo systems."
One of The Pirate Bay's confiscated servers has been sold this week, and will now be prominently exhibited in the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology.
The Museum bought the server for 2,000 kronor ($243 USD). It will be exhibited in a section that shows off "inventions that impact people's lives."
A spokesperson for the museum said the bypassing of copyright-protected material is nothing new and added that music tapes were also very controversial in the 70s.
According to the latest figures from the NPD Group, overall U.S. video game sales fell sharply in March, with hardware sales dropping 18 percent and software sales falling 17 percent.
Overall, industry sales fell 17 percent to $1.43 billion USD, a somewhat surprising number in an industry that has so far seen sales increases despite the global recession.
Hardware sales fell to $455.6 million USD while software sales fell to $792.8 million USD.
The Nintendo Wii was once again the best selling console, moving 601,000 units for the month, but sales fell 20 percent from February. The Microsoft Xbox 360 came in second selling 330,000 units, but sales fell 15 percent from last month. The Sony PlayStation 3 lagged behind again, selling 218,000 units, but sales only fell 7 percent from February.
"While it's not unusual for March hardware sales to be lower than February, I thought we'd see higher unit sales on most platforms,"added NPD's Anita Frazier. "The Xbox 360 was the only platform to achieve a year-over-year unit sales increase."
Warner Home Video has given Blu-ray fans a new reason to be excited this week, showing off early specs and box art for the hotly anticipated The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Many retailers, including Amazon, now have the box set available for pre-order, with an average price of $69.99 USD.
The set will have seven discs and will include the theatrical versions of each film. Although there is still no exact release date known, fans of the series will be able to purchase the box set before the end of 2009.
We will keep you updated on any developments for the upcoming 'The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy.'
RIAA lawyers won a victory in the Joel Tenenbaum file sharing lawsuit yesterday when a Federal Appeals Court overturned a lower court decision to allow a hearing to be webcast.
In her earlier ruling, Federal District Court Judge Nancy Gertner had determined that court rules allowed her the discretion to permit the webcast. In overturning her ruling, appellate judges said Judge Gertner was "palpably incorrect."
They noted the same rule included a list of specific circumstances where broadcasting court proceedings would be appropriate, which wouldn't be necessary if the decision were left in the judge's hands.
Regardless of the court's opinion on the procedural question, what remains to be explained by the RIAA is why they are opposed to the public seeing what goes on in the courtroom. Their lawyers argue it would cause their clients irreparable harm because it could be edited in such a way as to make them look bad.
Although he's sympathetic to the RIAA's concerns, as he told Afterdawn earlier this year, Tenenbaum's lawyer feels the wording of Judge Gertner's ruling addresses the issues. The RIAA would have been given equal access to the original, unedited footage, allowing them to use it for their own "educational" purposes.
A Stockholm court has found the four founders of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal sharing through the site. The four were found guilty of assisting distribution of illegal content and were sentenced to a year in jail. They also must pay a fine of $3.6 million to 17 different music and media companies including Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Warner, MGM and 20th Century Fox.
The case was brought against TPB, which claimed 22 million concurrent users in February, by an International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)-led consortium of media companies. All four defendants have pledged to appeal the decision. "Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so ever. This is just a theatre for the media," said Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
He continued: "Really, it's a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release." On the other side the reaction was a mixture of relief and delight. "We're very pleased at the verdict of what was a very important case for us," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of IFPI. "It would have been very difficult to put on a brave face if we had lost, but this verdict sends a strong educational and deterrent message."
A new draft proposal for ACTA, the treaty that's being secrectly negotiated between a number of different countries with input from entertainment industry lobbyists, has been posted on the Wikileaks website.
Although still far from complete, this version of the proposal, being written jointly by representatives of the US and Japan, would require some significant changes to intellectual property law, and not for the better.
Perhaps the most disturbing part has to do with how damages are determined. In one section it suggests each copyrighted work distributed should count as a lost sale, with damages based on that assumption.
Even more disconcerting is the suggestion that the copyright holder should be responsible for determining the value, and simply present their figures to the court. Anyone who has spent any time examining the amount of money the entertainment industry claims to lose annually from infringement can see how problematic this is.
Ironically, the proposal suggests that non-governmental intellectual property experts should be consulted on the treaty's language. It recommends "seeking input from non-governmental persons or groups, particularly with respect to best practices in the field of intellectual property enforcement."
Apple has announced that they will finally begin selling and renting feature films in the German iTunes Store
German users can now watch films from Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM, Disney, Sony and German indies Universum Film and Shorts Intl.
Notably missing however is Universal. Apple spokespeople declined to comment on the missing Universal content.
A few of the notable titles available are "The Dark Knight," "Quantum of Solace," "Pineapple Express," "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," "Eagle Eye" and German films such as "The Counterfeiters" and "Keinohrhasen" (Rabbit Without Ears).
More local indies are expected to join soon, but Apple would not let on who or when.
In the first week after Apple rolled out their variable pricing model for songs from iTunes the results are mixed. The good news is that revenue is up slightly. Unfortunately it comes at the expense of track sales at the highest price point.
Total track sales were actually up for the week, as were sales of $0.99 songs. But the 33 tracks which were increased from $0.99 to $1.29 sold 12.5% few units than the previous week.
As a result, sales of songs in the top 100 rose significantly less than total sales.
If this trend continues, the obvious question is whether it's more useful to make more money per track or get your music on the hands of more consumers. This is where things get much more interesting.
Artists almost certainly benefit more from increasing the number of listeners. The labels, are probably best served by a higher profit margin per track, at least in the short term. And label executives don't exactly have a history of long term planning.
Time Warner has put plans to expand their metered internet service plans to New York and North Carolina on hold. It seems they underestimated how much attention it would generate and now they are in damage control mode.
Despite apparently clear evidence that their customers may just not be interested in paying an additional amount for the unlimited service they get now, Time Warner Cable executives are spinning it as an education problem. In a statement, CEO Glenn Britt said "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing."
Of course it's possible that the real catalyst for Time Warner's decision was New York Senator Charles Schumer's public opposition to the plan.
Britt added, "We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable."
According to new data from Adams Media Research, Blu-ray Disc sales grew almost 88 percent year-on-year in the US for the Q1, despite the global economic recession.
There were 9 million units sold for the period ended March 31st, up from 4.8 million units sold in the comparable quarter.
The report also adds that there are now 10.5 million Blu-ray "households," meaning any home with a Blu-ray set top player or a Sony PlayStation 3.
Blu-ray revenue for the period also grew to $196.6 million USD, up from $117.2 million in 2008.
“We are delighted to see continuing, significant growth of the Blu-ray Disc format in the midst of one of the worst economic downturns in recent memory,”added Andy Parsons, U.S. chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Assn. Promotions Committee. “I think the numbers are a clear indicator that consumers really do understand the value of packaged media, and that even when times are very tough, [consumers] continue to seek out and enjoy the best possible high-definition content.”
The British publishing company Kraken Opus has announced it will be selling 950 special edition purple iPod Touch devices, each preloaded with 40 minutes of Prince's “21 Nights” 2007 tour in London as well as the live soundtrack from his “Indigo Nights” album.
Also coming with the Touch is the “Prince 21 Nights Opus" photography book which chronicles "21 Nights" and includes lyrics and poetry from Prince. The book is 200 pages and weighs an "epic 17 kg.” It is leather bound and has a velvet-covered case. What will this limited edition media player cost you? $2100 USD.
Kraken Opus CEO and founder Karl Fowler says that 300 of the players have already been sold.
“I’m ecstatic about that,” he said. “Without being overly confident or too arrogant about it, we always knew that we would get to a sellout position within a few months.” He added that the quick sales were surprising however.
Fowler also noted that he believes the price is justified by all the exclusives you receive. “Even in this current climate, there was a thirst, a strong appetite, for people who were willing to part with a premium, because they are getting something that has never been given to them before,” he concluded.
Google Inc.'s YouTube video-sharing service announced on Thursday that it will stream full length movies and TV show content to its users for free. The movies and TV series will be provided by several top-brand major studios, and will be available to viewers within the United States.
The partnerships stuck by Google's video giant include Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz and the BBC.
Instead of asking viewers to pay for viewing content like some Internet services, YouTube will share advertising revenue with the studios.
In an effort to boost revenue, which has become a major concern for YouTube while it continues to grow get more expensive to maintain, YouTube will use video ads more broadly, including mid-stream ads shown in breaks on longer content.
Sony Pictures has signed up to support a theater-chain upgrade that will digitally convert over 20,000 cinemas in the United States and Canada. This makes Sony the sixth major studio to back the initiative, which is expected to cost around $1 billion. The studios are backing the upgrade program with the Digital Cinema Implementation Partners (DCIP), a group of theater chains comprising Regal Entertainment Group, Cinemark Holdings Inc and AMC Entertainment Inc.
Walt Disney Co, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Lions Gate Entertainment have backed the plan along with Sony Pictures. The DCIP reported in October that it could complete the plan within three and half years starting with an early date in 2009, but some of the conversions have gotten delayed due to economic conditions.
Once outfitted with digital projectors, the theaters can easily be made ready for 3D movies. Hollywood studios have a growing interest in 3D movies, expecting that more consumers will be willing to go and see 3D movies at a higher price.
According to reports, SlingPlayer has become the latest service to have its iPhone application banned from the Apple App Store at the request of AT&T. SlingPlayer for iPhone was first introduced at MacWorld this year, and conformed to Apple's guidelines for user interface. However, just as it did with the Skype iPhone app, AT&T used possible excessive traffic on its network as an excuse to oppose its use on the iPhone.
Sling Media hasn't gotten any word from Apple yet on what the decision is for the application, and the website still states they've "submitted the first release of our application to the iPhone App Store." However, reported surfaced today that Apple made an executive decision this morning to reject the apps entry to the App Store.
If AT&T did in fact ask Apple not to add the SlingPlayer App due to network data traffic concerns, then Sling may have to do the same thing as Skype and limit the application to Wi-Fi only. However, there is also speculation recently that AT&T is working on its own mobile video technology, and it has silently changed its terms of services basically prohibiting the use of services like SlingPlayer on its network.
Netflix has squashed a recent rumor that it will become available on the PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles. Netflix is already available on the Xbox 360 console and has been very successful, with Microsoft boasting that over 1 million users have watched 1.5 billion minutes of video through the service since it became available in November 2008.
"For now, Netflix streaming on game consoles is exclusively on the Xbox 360 - and it's a terrific hit," Netflix vice president of corporate communications Steve Swasey told GamesIndustry.biz. He did not rule out possibly moving to other consoles in the future however. "Netflix is always looking for ways to grow the service," he said.
Rumors began circulating earlier this week, due to a job listing made by Netflix seeking an engineering leader for gaming platforms. It asked that the candidate have, "years of experience both building and leading the development of games on the current generation gaming consoles," to, "expect to help build a small technology team to rapidly prototype and iterate on a variety of platforms."
GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo has called for price cuts for the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) console and the Nintendo Wii console, and also dismissed Sony's PS2price cut as basically too little, too late. The video games industry is weathering the recession particularly well compared to others in the tech business, but according to DeMatteo, price cuts will be essential to keep the momentum going.
The first point he made to CNBC was the price of the PS3 console, which is the most expensive console on the market at $399. "That price point is clearly an issue in this economy," he said. Sony has repeatedly denied plans to cut the price of the PS3, but is expected to make a price cut before E3. The debate going on is about how much needs to be cut.
"I don't know that $50 gets you that much," DeMatteo said. He poured cold water on the recent PS2 price cut announced by Sony. "To be honest, it really wasn't worth doing," he said. "If they'd done it earlier, publishers probably would have kept making games for the PS2, but once they've stopped, they've stopped."
Senior director of corporate communications Patrick Seybold added that the release is a "one time test case as we continue to explore consumer preference for digital content."
Seybold was also quick to note that the company remains committed to UMD, the proprietary disc format. "We remain focused on providing superior games and entertainment experiences in both the UMD and digital formats and are working closely with our partners to deliver the best PSP line up in our history."
Two small pieces of news today for the world of Nintendo Wii. Firstly, ahead of NPD's sales figures for gaming consoles, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian has reported that sales of the Wii system in the United States remained steady in March, despite the large drop in sales in Japan. "Our checks in the US still indicate fairly steady sell-through, albeit within the context of some seasonal sluggishness overall in hardware," Sebastian said.
He attributes its continued success to it's easy availability on store shelves because of, "production increases put in place last summer as well as a more normalised mid-cycle selling pattern."Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted that the Wii is in its worst condition yet in the Japanese market last week, but ruled out price cuts as a response.
Nokia, the world's largest phone maker, has reported a 90 percent drop in its Q1 profits year-on-year, citing the ongoing global recession as the reason for falling demand.
For the quarter ended March 31st, profits were EUR 122 million compared to EUR 1.22 billion in the same quarter last year.
Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was optimistic however, adding that demand for mobile phones is stabilizing, after dropping drastically over the past 16 months.
"Regarding the health of the overall mobile device market, the inventory already in the sales channels decreased substantially during Q1 due to extensive destocking by operators and distributors. This adversely impacted our sales volumes in the quarter,"noted Kallasvuo. "However, it has also resulted in the demand picture becoming more predictable as we enter the second quarter."
For the upcoming quarter, the company believes sales volume to pick up or at least remain the same, from 93.2 million units during the quarter.
Consumer Focus has said that the copyright laws of the United Kingdom needlessly criminalize music fans and badly need to be updated. The comments come as the UK was ranked last in a survey of 16 countries' copyright laws. Currently, UK law technically makes it illegal to copy a CD that you "own" onto a computer or a portable player like an iPod, despite the fact that manufacturers like Apple provide software to do exactly that.
"UK copyright law is the oldest, but also the most out of date," said Ed Mayo, chief executive of Consumer Focus. "The current system puts unrealistic limits on our listening and viewing habits and is rapidly losing credibility among consumers. A broad 'fair use' exception would bring us in line with consumer expectations, technology and the rest of the world."
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the United States were all surveyed. It ranked countries based on a balance between the interests of rights holders and the interests of consumers.
The plan received significant backlash from Rep. Eric Massa of New York, who promised to draft a bill completely eliminate "unfair" tiered pricing structures from ISPs. Massa added at the time: "I am taking a leadership position on this issue because of all the phone calls, e-mails and faxes I've received from my district and all over the country. Time Warner has announced an ill-conceived plan to charge residential and business broadband fees based on the amount of data they download. They have yet to explain how increased Internet usage increases their costs."
That criticism continues to come from all areas now however, notably in the areas where the tests are set to start soon, Rochester, N.Y.; Greensboro, S.C.; and San Antonio and Austin, Texas.
In Rochester, the city's largest newspaper has publicly called on Time Warner to explain its actions, and company executives recently met harsh criticism at any open public forum. The new website, StopTheCap.com is currently running as a way for users to protest the caps.
According to a Gamasutra report, indie developers who create titles to sell via WiiWare have to sell a significant amount of the game to receive any revenue from Nintendo.
The minimum number of sales is said to be in the "high four figure number for the US and low four figure number for individual EU territories," and if those numbers are not hit then the developer will not make one cent.
It is being speculated that the threshold was set so high to stop waves of shovelware titles from hitting the service, but it is believed that many titles, even hit titles, are selling far below initial expectations.
Nintendo dismissed the report saying the sales threshold report is "rumour and speculation. The terms, conditions and contracts between Nintendo and developers are a private and confidential matter."
According to Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, both Sony and Nintendo are beginning to get "freaked out" by the raging success of the Apple iPhone as a gaming platform.
"The iPhone for us was a spectacularly pleasant surprise," says Hawkins speaking of his success through the App store with his new gaming company. "We had no idea it was going to be as good for us as it turned out to be...
"It's by far our most effective platform. We make as much money with these games on one device as we do putting a game on 100 different cell phone platforms."
Continuing, Hawkins adds: "Between the iPod Touch and the iPhone, I think the platform is freaking out Sony and Nintendo. Apple has sold 30 million units so far and it has created tremendous awareness. It has taken ground all over the world. But it has only penetrated one half of one percent of its total market."
The device is touchscreen and can be considered more of music player than a phone. Its dual speakers face outwards and there is a 3.5mm headphone jack, two features not found on many phones. Also included are 81 MB of on-board memory and a large 8GB microSD card as well as a guitar pick stylus.
The sales data is from GC Capital's Tero Kuittinen which explains that Nokia was only expecting to sell 1 million of the phone but has handily beaten their conservative estimates.
Kuittinen adds that sales are being pushed thanks to the phone's decently low price as well as expansion into regions like Australia and Asia.
Sony has announced the retirement of Sony Europe president and CEO David Reeves, and the promotion of Andrew House to the position. Reeves will leave the position on April 30th.
"David’s contribution in firmly establishing the PlayStation brand and expanding the business in Europe/PAL territories in his 14 year tenure at SCEE is immeasurable," said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment.
"I would like to express my sincere gratitude to David for the many accomplishments he made to the to the PlayStation business and wish him the best luck in his future endeavours."
Reeves joined the company in 1995 and has been president since 2003. House joined the company in 1990 and has worked for Sony Japan and Sony America in marketing positions, eventually becoming CMO 4 years ago.
"I’m confident that the skills and expertise Andy has gained over the years working as Sony’s CMO will contribute enormously in leading the PlayStation business in Europe/PAL countries and regions and to bring new initiatives in managing the business in the coming networked era,"concluded Hirai.
Just days ago, we reported that the French National Assembly had rejected the proposed "three strikes" legislation in a defeat for the ruling UMP party. Following the vote, French President Nicolas Sarkozy revealed he was determined to get it passed to protect creative diversity. The film and music industries have lobbied the French government vigorously for a tougher approve to Internet piracy.
The parliament will vote again on the legislation on April 29. Under the proposed law, a user would be warned twice when caught downloading and sharing pirate content, and would be disconnected for a year the third time. Opposition parties regarded it as inefficient and consumer advocates were worried that it could end up hitting the wrong people.
There is always a risk of hijacked connections being used for piracy, which is a very real danger when unprotected or badly protected wireless networks are used. The bill was defeated in a vote of the National Assembly despite already being approved by the Senate. Two members of President Sarkozy's majority government joined the opposition to the bill.
The MySpace Music project is only 6 months old, and it's 75 million or so users are streaming literally billions of songs per month. Under any normal regular deal with the record labels, a price would be set per stream that would have to be paid to the label. This is what you would think is in place at MySpace Music, because it certainly is at many other online audio services.
However, sources have told TechCrunch that Warner Music Group has been making some noise about the deal they struck with MySpace Music. It would appear that the deal does not have any pay-per-stream agreement setup. Instead, WMG gets a share of the advertising that is displayed when a user streams its songs.
That advertising revenue is not turning out to be as good as was initially expected, and now WMG is getting angry about the widespread use of its content on the site and the low revenue it is receiving for it. It has indicated that when the current deal is up, it will seek a new agreement with MySpace Music or pull its music from the service completely.
Just over a day ago Dave Matthews Band fans found out they could get a song from the upcoming album,
Big Whiskey & The Groogrux King
for free. What makes it particularly interesting is their decision to announce it on Twitter.
Dave Matthews has over 400,000 followers on Twitter so it only makes sense to use that network to spread the word about a new promotion. It's exactly the sort of thing that's making Twitter more popular for artists looking to keep in touch with their fanbase.
No one is likely to suggest Twitter is the complete answer to any musician's promotional needs. But it does illustrate how many of the responsibilities traditionally handled by a label can now be taken care of without them now - in a more personal and arguably more effective manner.
You can download the Dave Matthews Band song "Funny The Way It Is" on their label's website.
New details of Microsoft's upcoming "Zune HD" portable media player (PMP) have emerged. WMpoweruser.com received some new pictures and tech details in its e-mail Inbox. The Zune HD will sport a multi-touch Organic Light-emitting Diode (OLED) display with a 16:9 aspect ratio. It features TV-OUT support, with what appears to be a HDMI slot on the side of the device.
It will support HD multimedia playback (no information on maximum resolution) and HD content will become available from the Zune Marketplace. Another interesting note is that the Zune will support "3D Xbox games", but it's unclear how exactly this functionality will work, what will be its limits and what content will be initially available.
However, the information provided states that the new Zune will be available in 16GB and 32GB models, which is disappointing for a player that will be advertised as HD-capable. It supports wireless sync and comes loaded with a multi-touch ready browser too.
AT&T is rumored to be negotiating with Apple to extend their agreement to be the US iPhone provider. The carrier's exclusive contract is currently set to expire in 2010. According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is hoping to extend it another year.
Although the plan to work with just a single mobile phone provider per country was scrapped by Apple with last year's iPhone 3G launch, that doesn't mean they aren't still interested in such exclusive arrangements.
This appears to be part of AT&T's strategy to concentrate on mobile customers, rather than their traditional landline business. In a recent interview, Stephenson noted"We have 77 million wireless customers and 30 million consumer phone lines," asking "which customer base would you rather work from?"
Plex media center software for the Mac OS X platform now can add support for Netflix movie streaming service. The add-on was developed in response to continuous requests from users, and as shown in the pictures below, it looks very beautiful and will fit a HTPCenvironment perfectly. Plex is a port of XBox Media Center for the Mac OS X platform. Originally an XBox media player, Plex has grown to be a sleek looking and feature rich Media Center application.
It plays pretty much every media file you can throw at it. Plex is designed to run in fullscreen on the living room TV, but works well in windowed mode on your computer display too.
Pioneerand Sharphave announced that they will create a new venture that will operate in the optical disc business area. The new venture will make effective use of the management resources of both Pioneer and Sharp in the optical disc area, and intents to claim a leadership position particularly in the Blu-ray Disc market which is expected to see significant growth in the coming years.
The new company is expected to begin operating on October 1, 2009. It will engage in the design, development, manufacturing and sale of optical disc equipment, focusing on drivers, recorders and players. Both companies are negotiating in good faith and expect to official sign the joint venture agreement by June 25.
The two companies will combine their technological expertise in the field, built from decades of experience developing and marketing products based on optical disc technology, dramatically enhancing both of their market competitiveness in the area.
The founders of the infamous Pirate BayBitTorrenttracker remain confident that they will be victorious in the court battle over alleged copyright theft, which has gotten significant media coverage around the world since it kicked off. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde founded The Pirate Bay in 2003. "We are quite confident we are going to win," Peter Sunde said.
In February 2009, the Pirate Bay recorded 22 million simultaneous users of the service. The site hosts no copyright infringing content whatsoever, but instead let's users download torrent files which can be used to download and share films, TV shows, albums, video games and everything else in between from other users.
Representatives for the movie, music and games industry are seeking about 115 million kronor (€10.6 million) in damages. A charge of "assisting copyright infringement" was dropped on day 2 of the trial, and instead the founders are charged with "assisting making available copyright material", which would be considered a lesser offense.
Gerardo Arellano and his wife, Maribel Fernandez, both 32, were arrested after being caught by police officers recording the Hannah Montana film at a cinema in South Barrington. A subsequent search of the couple's home turned up 44,000 CDs and DVDs containing pirated movies, as well as DVD duplicating equipment, Assistant State's Atty. Adam Klugman said at the bail hearing.
"Apparently, he wasn't taping this for his own personal use," Klugman said. Arellano is a restaurant worker who lives with his wife, three kids and his mother. He denied that he was involved in any piracy scheme, claiming that the mountain of discs found at his home were owned by his mother.
"My mother saved all of the DVDs, CDs and videos," Arellano said. "She saves those." Authorities also found that Arellano's computer had a link to a Web site in France that sells pirated films. Cam copies of movies are the main source for pirate copies of new movies showing in theaters, according to Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
For many people Qtrax is probably still remembered as the free music service that didn't launch as promised last January because they didn't have the rights to offer any music. But with the demise of SpiralFrog last month it became the biggest name in label approved free music.
Yesterday they passed a major milestone by finally introducing the first full release version of their client software. Despite already having deals in place to offer music from all the major labels, their download client (based on the open source Songbird project) has remained in beta status. Today that changed as version 1.0 was released.
The new client doesn't offer any ground breaking new features. Like SpiralFrog did, it gives you access to music from the major labels that's free, but contains Microsoft DRM. You must be connected to the internet and using a Windows computer to play them.
Microsoft has acknowledged the now infamous E74 error for their Xbox 360 console, and added the error to its warranty extension that was meant to cover RROD (Red Ring of Death) system failures.
The software giant now considers both failures equal and users affected can have their system replaced or fixed under the 3-year warranty extension. Anyone who has encountered the error and paid to have it fixed will be issued a full refund.
The error surfaced late last year when users upgraded to the New Xbox Experience (NXE). The E74 error is brought on by overheating problems for the GPU.
The full Microsoft posting reads as follows:
"While the majority of Xbox 360 owners continue to have a great experience with their console, we are aware that a very small percentage of our customers have reported receiving an error that displays “E74” on their screen. After investigating the issue, we have determined that the E74 error message can indicate the general hardware failure that is associated with three flashing red lights error on the console. As a result, we have decided to cover repairs related to the E74 error message under our three-year warranty program for certain general hardware failures that was announced in July 2007. We have already made improvements to the console that will reduce the likelihood of an occurrence of this issue. Detailed information related to the Xbox 360 warranty and resources for those who require repair can be found at www.xbox.com/support (www.xbox.com/support) .
Pioneer has announced the release of its latest Blu-ray writer, the BDR-2203, which promises fast dual-layer burning speeds of 8x.
Using the maximum means users can fill a BD-25 in 15 minutes and about 30 for a dual layer BD-50.
DVD-R can be burnt at up to 16x, and CD-Rs can be written at 32x making the drive very useful overall.
The source adds that "included software includes CyberLink PowerDirector, PowerDVD, and Power2Go, which allows Windows users to edit the videos recorded on their HD camcorders and insert photos, other home videos or songs, as well as integrated dialogue and chapter bookmarks."
The BDR-2203 is currently available and has an MSRP of $250 USD.
Portable media player maker iRiver has announced that through a joint venture with Speedo, the companies have created an underwater media player, dubbed the LZR Racer Aquabeat.
The device is IPX5/IPX7 certified, meaning it can "operate safely" while submerged in up to 10 feet of water. The player has 1GB of internal memory, but no display. The only buttons on the player are play/pause, volume up/down and next/previous.
The Aquabeat will play MP3 and WMA audio formats and has an estimated 9 hour battery life. If the player is ever removed from your head while swimming, it will float as an added safety precaution. The player will work on any PC with Windows ME through Vista, and all Macs with OS 9.x and higher.
The player cost $145 USD and is available in lime, black and pink colorways.
Sony has announced the price of its first ever touchscreen Walkman media players, part of the NX-X1000 series.
The NW-X1050, which will hit Japan on April 25th, will sell for $400 USD and has 16GB of built-in flash memory while its higher capacity brother, the NW-X1060, will sell for $500 USD and will include 32GB of memory.
Each player supports Wi-Fi and will allow playback of YouTube videos and the downloading of podcasts. Also of note, the players have integrated FM and 1Seg TV tuners and will allow recording of content if broadcasters support it.
The media players have nice OLED touchscreens and for audio support AAC, MP3 and WMA. For video files, MPEG-4, H.264 and WMV are supported.
The 90-strong international orchestra built through the YouTube video-sharing site will make its debut at New York's Carnegie Hall tomorrow evening. The video will be available on YouTube on Thursday. All 90 musicians auditioned for their place in the orchestra through YouTube, and also went on to practice for their concert at home while getting advice and lessons from some of the world's top musicians over the Internet.
The orchestra has had three days to rehearse together, and will be playing pieces from Gabrieli, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Villa Lobos and John Cage. "Everyone in the orchestra clearly has had a lot of experience playing their instrument," said Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra's Grammy Award-winning conductor and music director for the San Francisco Symphony.
Thomas added: "Some of them are vastly experienced ensemble players in chamber music and orchestral music, some have much less experience," he said. "Some have other professions, including being physicians, poker players and financial analysts." More than 3,000 auditions were submitted through YouTube in December and January.
The Xbox Live-exclusive downloadable content (DLC) title "The Lost and Damned" has reportedly been downloaded over one million times from the online service. At around $20 a pop, it's very decent revenue for a single DLC title.
However, it's worth remembering that Microsoft paid Rockstar $50 million to produce two new chapters for the blockbuster "Grand Theft Auto 4", released in April 2008.
The Lost and Damned broke day one sales records on Xbox Live, and according to analyst Michael Pachter, it will have been downloaded 2 million times from Xbox Live by the end of the year.
The Business Software Alliance has decided to hijack the "real" cases of piracy that have been highlighted in the mainstream media in the past week for use with its own anti-piracy campaigns. To anybody with half a brain, it is obvious that the same word is used for two totally different things, but it's not so obvious to the BSA apparently.
We've all been following the events of the past week of the pirates off the Horn of Africa. Piracy takes many forms, some more violent than others. I wanted to let you know that the Business Software Alliance is launching a new campaign today "Faces of Internet Piracy" that shows the real-life impact of software piracy...
Those words are from an e-mail sent to Illuminata principal IT advisor Gordon Haff from the BSA. It is quite simply too easy to ridicule, but you can't help but wonder if it is the product of desperation in an extremely tough uphill battle, or just plain ol' stupidity. It could of course just be a joke, but we have heard piracy being put up there with serious crimes in the past, because of the economic damage it could inflict.
Nintendohas announced the release of the new Wii MotionPlus accessory is scheduled for June 8 in the United States. The accessory will push the motion-sensing controls of the popular Wii system to new levels of precision and performance, the company claims. Nintendo points out that it will be available on July 26th, when the Wii Sports Resort game launches.
Wii Sports comes packed with the Wii console. It grew into a worldwide phenomenon and continues to attract millions of new players to the world of video games. Each Wii Sports Resort game comes packed with a single Wii MotionPlus accessory. When used with specially designed games, Wii MotionPlus tracks players' movements in finer detail and with greater accuracy.
Even the slightest twist of the wrist or turn of the body is replicated exactly on the TV screen, allowing users to become even more immersed in Wii game play. Designed for easy attachment to the Wii Remote controller, the Wii MotionPlus accessory will be offered at an MSRP of $19.99.
eBay commented on the future of the SkypeVoIP service on Tuesday, indicating that it intends to spin-off the subsidiary through an initial public offering. The emergence of this news casts doubt on any potential sale back to the original founders, who reportedly were keen to get their hands on the service once again. eBay had made some indications in recent times that it might sell Skype.
Shareholders will be pleased with the news, as they have been pushing for a sale of Skype or a spin-off. "We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential," eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said in a statement. He added that there were few synergies with the larger company.
eBay acquired Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion from Niklas Zennstrom, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. When eBAy signaled it may be ready to unload the company for the right price, Zennstrom and Friis reportedly began seeking to raise a billion dollars from private equity firms. The auction giant was reported to be expecting no less than $1.7 billion for the company.
Calls made using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology generally cost the caller less than traditional phone calls. For this reason, many of the major carriers within the European Union have outright banned VoIP use on their networks, viewing it as a potentially devastating threat to their revenues.
However, there are some signals from the European Union that they will be forced to change their stance. As things currently stand, individual EU member states regulate blocked Internet services, but EU telecom commissioner Viviane Reding recently commented that action must be taken against carriers that use their large marker share to "block innovative services."
A report published in Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper claims that the European Union has already prepared draft legislation that would open all smartphones used within the bloc to VoIP services.
The PC retailer Systemax, which recently purchased Tiger Direct and CompUSA, is planning to buy the Circuit City name and brand, and is willing to pay up to $6.5 million USD for it. With the acquisition, Systemax also gets to run the Circuit City website.
Systemax has recently restarted 30 CompUSA retail outlets, with promises that demo units will be less restricted than retail rivals such as Best Buy, including free Internet on all display units.
The company is hoping to gain retail position while taking advantage of the bad management of other companies, which has been elevated by the ongoing global economic recession.
Thanks to a recent job listing posted on Netflix's website, rumors have flared across the Internet that the company will finally be bringing its streamingWatch Instantly library to theWii and PS3.
The listing is searching for an "Engineering Leader -- Gaming Platforms," an engineer with "deep experience developing and testing media rich applications on current generation gaming consoles."
"Expect to help build a small technology team to rapidly prototype and iterate on a variety of platforms," the post adds.
There is no guarantees that this listing will lead to Netflix streaming service on either console, but it appears that the company is at least trying to expand their presence in the console market.
According to a study of Ohio State University students, students who actively use social networking site Facebook reported GPAs of between 3.0 and 3.5 while those who did not averaged 3.5-4.0.
Although the study was only of 219 students and cannot be considered definitive, it has suggested the clear link between the site and overall academic performance.
Also noted in the study was the fact that Facebook users studied only one to five hours a week while non-users studied 11 or more.
Ohio State doctoral student Aryn Karpinski, who conducted the research with another graduate student, did add however that the study was too narrow to make any "set in stone" conclusions.
"It cannot be stated (that) Facebook use causes a student to study less or get lower grades," says Aryn. "I'm just saying that they're related somehow, and we need to look into it further." 68 percent of those studied said they use Facebook and 65 percent of those said they access the site daily or even multiple times daily.
Some students did say the site helps them form study groups with other students and overall 79 percent said the site did not hinder their academic performance.
If sources talking to Arstechnica are correct, then Sony is preparing to release the upcoming music game Patapon 2 as a downloadable game only, removing the proprietary UMD format from the equation.
For those that want to purchase a retail copy with case, those will be available as well, but will only include a sheet with a coupon code to download the game online. The game will cost $15 USD online compared to $20 in-store however.
The move would be radical for the company, which has continually pushed UMD as the format of choice for the PSP, despite its obvious lack of portability compared to digital downloads placed on a Memory Stick. The move would mark the first time a major release would be only downloadable.
Sony has made it clear this year that they will be making a push towards downloadable games for the PSP handheld, releasing most digital versions on the same date as it's UMD physical counterpart. However, Sony has never said it will be dropping UMD completely.
A free firmware update to HP's MediaSmart Server has brought some nice improvements, providing remote video streaming and video conversion of unprotected content. The update enables the server to automatically convert videos (including unprotected DVDs) into two resolutions; the original, high-resolution file to stream to devices on a home network including PCs, Macs and gaming systems, and the mobile resolution file devices such as iPod touch, iPhone and PlayStation Portable (PSP).
The video converter will transcode most popular video formats into both high and mobile quality MPEG-4 (H.264) versions. "This new feature will help eliminate the frustration people experience when attempting to stream their videos to connected devices in the home or remotely to their mobile devices," said Jason Zajac, vice president and general manager, Worldwide Attach Group, HP.
According to an analyst, Dell is currently in discussions with China Mobile over the possibility of the company offering a smartphone based on China Mobile's operating system. The move would put Dell right in the middle of a very competitive and huge market in China. Dell has already hinted in the past that it will offer a smartphone or mobile Internet device, but didn't any more details than that.
Zhang Jun, an analyst at research firm Wedge MKI, said Dell is currently waiting for China Mobile to pick one or two models from smartphones it has offered, and that both phones may have a deal around August this year. If so, a Dell smartphone could hit the Chinese market by the end of the year.
The China Mobile operating system is based on Google's Android, but includes China Mobile's own applications. The Open Mobile System (OMS) operating system supports the network's Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) network standard, which has so far had a slow take-up in the region due to the dull smartphone offerings.
The operator of FootyTweets, a website that uses Twitter to provide updates for football teams in the UK, has gotten a cease and desist threat from a firm representing the Premier League and Football Leagues copyright online. FootyTweets listed fixtures for games and also provided live updates, via Twitters, of scores and other details from football games.
From the operators blog...
If you follow me on Twitter (@ollieparsley) then you will have found out last night (2nd April) that I received a Cease and Desist notice from a company that looks after the Premier League and Football Leagues copyright online. Of course I checked that the company was legitimate and I am unhappy to say that they are legitimate.
This essentially comes from the Football DataCo (that is owned by the Premier League and Football League) via a company that looks after their online copyright.
What did it say?
The email I first received said FootyTweets was “using the UK Club Crests and League logos without permission from the Clubs or the UK Leagues“. The e-mails that then went back and forth went on to add the fact that I need a licence to display fixtures (I looked on their site and it would be £52,000!). Further to this I was told I need another licence to display match updates. I currently get this from an outside source and then send them to Twitter.
As Apple's Inc.'s App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touchapproaches one billion downloads, heads are turning within the games industry. On any given day, six to eight of the top ten apps downloaded for the iPhone or iPod Touch are games. Some of them are free, but others are priced between 99c and $10, with Apple taking a 30 percent cut.
Some elements within the games industry are taking time out from creating blockbuster titles with cutting edge graphics and gameplay features, developed for consoles and PC, and starting to focus on developing for the iPhone/iPod platform, and more importantly, studying the thousands of games that exist already in the App Store to see what "works" on the platform.
The transition of the iPhone/iPod Touch into handheld gaming devices was more-or-less unexpected when they launched, at least to the level they have achieved. "The iPhone has changed everything," said Neil Young, a game developer who left Electronic Arts to found Ngmoco, a San Francisco maker of iPhone games.
According to data provided by Nielsen Online, viewers of Internet videos in the United States now watch an average of three hours of the material each month. Online video viewing hasn't ceased expanding, with the average time spent viewing the videos in U.S. being 169 minutes in February, then rising to 191 minutes in March, an increase of 13 percent.
The total number of video streams being viewed grew by 9 percent to 9.7 billion, from 8.9 billion, and the total number of videos per user rose 7 percent to 74, from 70.
The sharper rise in the minutes spent viewing video than the number of videos being viewed tells Nielsen that more users are switching to longer videos, with the average growing from 2.4 minutes in February to 2.7 minutes in March.
There's almost no need to say it - but YouTube remained the number 1 video site with 5.5 billion videos and over 89 million people using the site in the United States. Hulu came in second with 384 million videos and 9 million users.
Google Inc.'s YouTube service has technically complied with the new Cyber Defamation Law in South Korea, by taking actions which seem to purposely be ineffective. The Cyber Defamation Law requires that all users who upload videos on a site that gets more than 100,000 visitors a day, provide their real name and national ID card number.
YouTube decided that instead of creating a new submission and registration system that would cater to the Korean government, it would simply block all uploads and comments from users in South Korea. Of course, if a user in South Korea simply changed their preference setting to a country other than South Korea, uploading and commenting won't be a problem.
"We have a bias in favor of freedom of expression and are committed to openness," said Lucinda Barlow, a spokeswoman for YouTube in Asia. "It's very important that if users want to be anonymous that they have that chance." The decision was taken after close consultation and debate between Google Korea and its headquarters.
The Cyber Defamation Law is a government response to the suicide of Choi Jin Sil, a popular actress, in October. The case brought cyber-bullying to the limelight in a country that has a very high number of Internet users.
The site was launched in January 2005, and is currently in the top 50 for most visited sites on the entire Internet. Users download over 10 million torrents per day, and growth does not appear to be slowing.
TorrentFreak adds that growth from emerging markets such as India has been exponential, especially as more and more Indians gain broadband Internet access.
Palm Pre, the latest in a long line of "iPhone Killers", is set to be one of the most anticipated smartphones of the year.
The Pre, which has a rounded shape, a 3.1-inch touchscreen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and uses a powerful interface to "pull together information, photos and current online status data from sites such as Facebook, Gmail and Exchange to seamlessly integrate them into the address book and contacts list," has been highly anticipated since its debut at this year's CES but Palm has yet to reveal pricing or a release date.
The smartphone will be coming exclusively to Sprint and Sprint may have let some vital information slip, according to Brighthand. Sprint employees have been granted no vacation time in the month of May, and the source says the expected release date is May 17. If the smartphone misses that date, then the release date will be June 29th, right before Palm's own self-imposed deadline for release.
Following the introduction of new measures under the IPRED anti-file sharing law in Sweden last week, legal downloads of music enjoyed a 100 percent increase in the country. The information was released by digital content provider InProdicon. The company did not want to release information on the exact number of songs sold however.
"The first week after the introduction of IPRED, sales increased by 100 percent compared to the previous weeks. I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change," said managing director Klas Brännström.
This could mean good things for Swedish artists however, as about 60 percent of downloaded music in the country is from Swedish artists. "We have seen a clear sales increase compared to last year. There has been a 20-30 percent increase on an annual basis, but sales fluctuate a bit depending on which artists are launching new albums," said Brännström.
Just days ago, the Pirate Bay revealed that over 100,000 had signed up to test its IPREDATOR service, which claims to offer anonymity to users.
A Brooklyn teenager has admitted to creating two viruses that have hit the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. Why did he do it? To promote his own website, and of course, because he was "bored".
The "StalkDaily" and "Mikeyy" worms exploited unpatched holes in Twitter and spammed unwanted messages on thousands of user's pages, promoting the teen's web site as well as telling "Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy."
The teen, Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, added: "I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."
Mooney added that his site was quickly growing in popularity "because of the worm."
Twitter, for its part, has closed the hole.
"We've taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this 'worm' to spread," Twitter added in a prepared statment. "No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack."
According to a publication by Pearl Research, China's online video game market swelled to $2.8 billion in 2008, up 63 percent over 2007. "Trends to track in 2009 include the growth of social networking sites in China, with over 55 million users, and their cross-pollination with games," said Allison Luong, Managing Director of Pearl Research.
Luong continues: "One overall concern is the lack of diversification with many game operators relying on a single title for the bulk of revenues. In addition, a glut of content with more than 200 games on the market, makes releasing a breakout hit increasingly difficult."
The "Games Market in China" study goes on to predict that the market will rise to $5.5 billion by 2012. The economic downturn in China has not adversely affected revenue for gaming companies. Tencent, Changyou, The9, Netease, Shanda and Giant all brought in over $200 million in revenue during the year.
Fantasy Westward Journey took the crown for the most concurrent users, adding up to 1.8 million players. It was followed by Zhengtu Online with 1.5 million and Dungeon and Fighter at 1.2 million. World of Warcraft amassed 1 million.
The update should fix a few minor, but noticeable items.
The new 17MB download will install VoiceOver version 1.0.1 and will correct the gross mispronunciations for several artist's names. Apple did not elaborate on what other bugs were fixed.
That plan however, may lead to a federal legislation that will completely eliminate "unfair" tiered pricing structures from ISPs, such as that being made available by Time Warner. US Rep. Eric Massa of New York is already drafting the bill, which will curb all tiers, especially in places such as Manhattan or Rochester, where Time Warner has a monopoly.
On April 7th, before Time Warner hastily rewrote their plans for tiered pricing structure, Massa called the move "nothing more than a large corporation making a move to force customers into paying more money." One day later, Time Warner added an unlimited usage tier, but a price not even remotely reasonable given the slow speeds offered by the ISP. The move certainly did not appease Massa either.
"I am taking a leadership position on this issue because of all the phone calls, e-mails and faxes I've received from my district and all over the country," Massa added. "Time Warner has announced an ill-conceived plan to charge residential and business broadband fees based on the amount of data they download. They have yet to explain how increased Internet usage increases their costs."
Apple Inc. has been sued by Elan Microelectronics for allegedly infringing two of the Taiwanese company's patents which related to touch-screen technology. "We couldn't find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action," said Dennis Liu, an Elan spokesman. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco earlier this week.
It alleges that Apple products - including MacBooks, iPhone and iPod Touch - use technology that infringe on two of Elan's patents, related to their touch screen or touch pad features. Apple, as always, has not commented on the lawsuit. Touch screens are becoming much more popular in products, with iSuppli expecting the market to grow from the 2008 figure of $3.4 billion, to $6.4 billion by 2013.
Apple reported stronger-than-expected fourth quarter earnings in January, thanks to the sales of the company's MacBook, iPhone and iPod. Elan won a preliminary court injunction against Synaptics in 2006 over one of the patents involved in the Apple lawsuit. The two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement last year.
An administrator of a website that offered links to copyrighted material has been fined, and given a 6 month jail sentence in Spain. The 22 year old operated infopsp.com, which the Spanish Association of Publishers and Distributors Entertainment Software (ADESE) and the Spanish Videographic Union (UVE) both claimed was operating illegally. Non-commercial file-sharing websites are actually legal in Spain since the Sharemula case, where the operator was found innocent because he did not profit from running the site.
However, the judge in the infopsp.com case decided that since it had advertisements from Impresiones Web, Google Adsense, Canalmail and Correodirect, it could not be considered a non-commercial website because it profited from copyright infringement. The site, which had 17,300 members, did not host any illegal content itself at all, but did link to other sites where it could be gotten from.
Adrián Gómez Llorente, the administrator, was fined €4,900 and sentenced to 6 months in jail. Fortunately for him, his lack of a criminal record means it is unlikely he will serve any time at all. This is the first conviction of it's type in Spain, and neither side have announced plans to appeal the case.
While many analysts have predicted that the sale of Blu-ray set-tops will increase by double over the 2008 tally, VideoBusiness reported that concern is spreading among retail stores. New Blu-ray players include enhanced features over older players, such as being able to use Amazon Video on Demand, wireless connectivity and more, but in this global recession, some stores are questioning whether consumers will respond to the new features as hoped.
"Sales have definitely slowed in all categories," said Doug Bravin, chief operating officer at Texas electronics superstore Bjorn's. "Blu-ray players aren't setting the world on fire. But then nothing really is. We are planning on this being a tough year." Bravin expects sales of Blu-ray players from the store to be on par with 2008 and nothing more.
Even more enthusiastic stores think sales will hit 5 million units in 2009, which represents about a 5% - 10% drop from most analysts figures. Consumer electronics makers have been packing more features into their Blu-ray offerings, hoping to attract attention. Panasonic's $299 DMP-BD60 and $399 DMP-BD80 will be capable of streaming content from Amazon from June without any firmware upgrade required, and the company will also offer the $399 DMP-BD70 - a Blu-ray/VHS dual player, for example.
Foxconn, the manufacturer behind the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, may be ready to launch its own independent e-book reader, says Taiwanese sources.
According to the DigiTimes report, Foxconn has hired a few new "software technicians with e-book programming experience."
The move would be unusual however, as it would put the company in direct competition with its own client Amazon. It could however simply "pitch the design to other companies that would brand it with their own names."
The e-book reader market is slowly getting more and crowded, with the recent announcements by Barnes $ Noble and Verizon saying they too will bring readers to the public.
Microsoft has been fined over 9 million euros this week by German antitrust officials over the alleged price fixing of their massively popular Office 2007 software.
Bundeskartellamt, Germany's economic regulatory body, added that undisclosed retailers worked with the software giant to illegally set the price of Microsoft's Office Home and Student 2007 before starting a joint ad campaign.
"Not every contact between supplier and retailer regarding resale prices constitutes an illegal concerted practice," the German group added. "In the present case, this boundary has been crossed."
Microsoft said it will obviously comply with the ruling.
"We will use this case as an opportunity to review our internal commercial processes and ensure that we are in full compliance with German law," a Microsoft statement noted.
Last Tuesday, Apple's iTunes went DRM-free, but at the same time began charging more for new hit singles, $1.29 USD, up from the standard $0.99.
Two days ago, Amazon and Wal-Mart followed the move by upping the price of new tracks by 30 cents as well, to $1.29 on Amazon, and $1.24 at Wal-Mart. Apple now sells older tracks for 69 cents, 99 cents for most new tracks, and $1.29 for the biggest new hits.
It appears, in what can only be described as a "shocking" development, that the rise in prices is hurting sales of the more expensive tracks, and could eventually lead to less revenue as well. These conclusions, from Billboard are only based on two days of data however, and are obviously subject to change. So far, the higher priced songs continue to lose chart positions to lower price songs.
On average, $1.29 songs lost 5.3 places on the Top 100 sales chart, while $0.99 songs gained 2.5 spots. A few of the songs that were initially $.99 on Tuesday but changed to $1.29 on Wednesday lost an average 1.9 places, while those that remained $1.29 for both days lost a huge 7.7 average positions.
Microsoft, who ended its hostile bid for Yahoo almost one year ago, has started up discussions again with the company, this time over a possible advertising pact.
Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz has met with Microsoft CEO Stee Ballmer this week, says sources, with both sides still hesitant to set any agreement in stone. One possible deal would have Microsoft selling search ads for Yahoo while Yahoo sells display ads on all Microsoft properties in exchange.
Microsoft has been very aggressive in expanding their search engine (Live.com) and is expected to introduce another major overhaul this summer.
A large scale partnership would go a long way towards creating a strong competitor to Google in search, which currently has 81.39% market share, according to Net Applications.
Pete Waterman, the songwriter behind the infamous "Never Gonna Give You Up" (performed by Rick Astley), has spoken out about Google recently, claiming the company is "exploiting" him, adding that he received only $16 USD in royalties from the company in the last year, despite the video being viewed 154 million times on YouTube.
In his whining rant, Waterman, whose estimated wealth is over $55 million USD, compared his treatment to that of exploited workers in Dubai.
"There was I sitting at Christmas thinking, 'I must have made a few bob this year with the old Rickrolling'," Waterman said.
"I rang my publisher and they said 'You'll be all right', until I saw the royalty statement. £11.
"If 154 million plays means £11, I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube."
For those unfamiliar with "Rickrolling," the recent Internet fad revolved around users sending other Internet users a link that was really a disguised link to the Rick Astley video on YouTube.
"Panorama did a documentary on the exploitation of foreign workers in Dubai," Waterman continued.
MacProVideo, a company that is dedicated to producing and distributing training videos for Mac, is to release an application via the iPhone App Store. The application will allow users to watch MacProVideo's Mac video tutorials on an iPhone or an iPod Touch.
It also uploaded it's N.E.D. application for Mac OS X, adding a new "Devices" area to sync videos to your iPhone. The application will also remember your library state and playback position, searching has been tuned up a bit and there is the ability to ratings and notes to content.
N.E.D. 3.1 can be download free from MacProVideo's website. The application for iPhone is not available just yet, as it is waiting for approval from the App Store.
The original creators of the SkypeVoIP Internet communication network are reportedly seeking to buy the company back from eBay. Niklas Zennstrom, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark, founded Skype in 2003 and sold it to eBay just two years later for $2.6 billion. The New York Times is reporting that they are now seeking to raise a billion dollars from private equity firms to re-claim their creation.
eBay is reported to be expecting no less than $1.7 billion for the company. Skype made $145 million in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2008. It boasts 405 million users, up sharply from the 53 million registered users at the time of its sale. It is used mostly for free user-to-user calls as opposed to premium services it offers.
John Donahoe, eBay's chief executive, has "repeatedly signaled his willingness to sell Skype for the right price," according to the Times. Recently Skype launched an application for the Apple iPhone, allowing iPhone users to take advantage of the service.
Details have emerged about the secretive global negotiations to fight copyright infringement and the movement of pirated material across the world. The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received a lot of speculation due to the secretive nature of the negotiations, with some digital rights lobbyists criticizing the lack of detail. However, the Obama administration's goal to improve transparency has made some details public.
The information released shows how 37 countries are working to find a way to cut copyright infringement and counterfeiting globally. Interestingly, the summary indicates that the countries are trying to figure out how to (if at all) involve Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the fight against piracy.
ACTA also considers measures to stop the flow of copyright infringing material from moving across borders. This led to some fears that there would be checks of computers and MP3 players to find pirated content. However, the outline makes that very unlikely, as it makes it clear the interest is only with industrial-scale importing and exporting of counterfeit material.
The Associated Press made a downright weird demand recently, ordering an affiliate to remove a video embedded in a news article from YouTube. Since the video was from the Associated Press' official YouTube channel, you would assume that because the "embed" feature has not been disabled on any of the videos, that the AP intended them to be used outside of YouTube by third parties. Not the case however, as WTNQ-FM in Tennessee learned.
"I noticed you are posting our video content without a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services please contact me," AP's regional radio representative in Chicago said in an e-mail. Frank Strovel, WTNQ's operations manager, was stunned and decided to call the rep for an explanation.
"I said, 'How is it a violation of a license agreement if you are actively posting the video on YouTube - on a channel you specifically created to share content - with embed codes for people to post in their websites? Are you telling me that you put it there for people to use……but if they USE IT they're violating your rights?'," Strovel wrote. "The basic reply was, 'Well, I'll have to investigate that issue further but in the meantime you need to pull all of our videos off your site.'"
Engadget has published leaked artwork for Microsoft's next generation Zune media player. Speculation that Microsoft was going to add a new portable media player (PMP) to its line-up began arose only weeks ago. The leaked artwork shows the gadget possessing a large widescreen display, housed in a bushed aluminum enclosure and glass. The artwork also displays the title of the model as Zune HD.
The "HD" part of the name might imply that the widescreen is capable of playing higher resolution videos than rivals PMPs, or like the Samsung OmniaHD mobile phone, may be just there to generate marketing buzz. Microsoft's next Zune was expected to attack Apple's iPod Touch. It will be the first touchscreen Zune, and the leaked artwork shows that, like the iPod Touch, it has just one single button on the front below the screen.
Users of the older 2G and 3G models of Apple's iPhone have been reporting Wi-Fi problems since installing firmware v.2.2.1. Some users found that their Wi-Fi features no longer worked, and rolling back firmware to a previous version didn't even help. However, using the phone with an almost dead battery can get Wi-Fi working again. Refrigerating the phone also seems to get the Wi-Fi back temporarily - seemingly confirming the problem to be heat.
The current theory about the problem is that the Wi-Fi chip in some iPhones has been throttled back, but this restriction was lifted somehow by installing v2.2.1 firmware. Since a rollback doesn't work either, there has been speculation that a driver update included with the firmware may not be rolling back. Whatever the reason for it, there is plenty of concern that the damage may be permanent.
Some users have had their handsets replaced under warranty, with Apple suggesting to ask for a model without v2.2.1 software installed. "Just got off the phone with an Apple representative who didn't hesitate at all to make an appointment for me at my local Apple Store for a replacement iPhone with the note to NOT have the 2.2.1 OS installed," one poster commented on Apple's support forums.
In an interview with the WSJ, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has outlined his company's plans to start a video download service for the Wii, following in the steps of rivals Sony and Microsoft however doing "something different."
The Wii would be used as a download hub, with the video content easily being made portable through the DS or DSi handhelds.
"If the Wii and the DS are connected, it should be possible to download video through the Wii and take it with you on the DS,"added Iwata. "When the service begins, you'll see how we're going to do it differently in a Nintendo-like way. There are a lot of on-demand video services, so there’s no reason to do the same thing, so we’re going to do something different."
Iwata did not go into when the service might begin, or any details on pricing of the content, but did note that Japanese users would receive the service first, followed by European and North American gamers.
Today, Apple Corp. announced that the game's release would get a marketing push as the label will be releasing all 12 of The Beatles albums digitally re-mastered for the first time ever on the same date.
The game will be available on all three major consoles at launch, the Microsoft Xbox 360, the Sony Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii. As with previous Rock Band games, existing instruments will work flawlessly with the game.
The game itself will sell for $59 USD, with a version bringing a special edition guitar selling for $99 USD and finally a full special edition band kit for $250 USD.
Amazon has announced the release of a shopping application for BlackBerry smartphones that it hopes will make it very easy for users to purchase online, on the go.
The App will make Amazon.com optimized for viewing on BlackBerry phones, while also making it easier to "browse and purchase products with one click, view customer review, track packages, and access their wish list."
Of note is the the Amazon Remembers feature which also users to take a picture of any product with the BlackBerry's camera then upload it and let the app try to match it to products available for sale through the e-tailer.
"In addition to their favorite Amazon shopping features, BlackBerry users can now access the Amazon Remembers feature for a fun and easy way to build a list of photographs showing products they want to remember for later, make price comparisons across multiple merchants, and purchase,"added Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile.
The App is available for free and will work on the Curve, Pearl, and Bold. The touchscreen Storm is currently not supported.
Time Warner Cable, one day after mapping out upcoming bandwidth caps for its Internet users, has added that there will also essentially be an unlimited, uncapped tier, costing $150 USD a month.
Landel Hobbs, COO of Time Warner Cable, added: "Some recent press reports about our four consumption based billing trials planned for later this year were premature and did not tell the full story. With that said, we realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate and we apologize for any frustration we caused. We've heard the passionate feedback and we've taken action to address our customers' concerns."
"If we don't act, consumers' Internet experience will suffer," he notes. "Sitting still is not an option. That's why we're beginning the consumption based billing trials. It's important to stress that they are trials."
The initial trials of the caps will begin in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., at the end of the summer and the tiers will work as follows:
- A 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 Kbytes downstream/128 Kbytes upstream and costing $15 USD per month. Overage charges will be an extremely expensive $2 per GB per month. Hobbs said about 30 percent of all TWC users use less than 1 GB per month in total bandwidth.
According to new data from Nielson, the Nintendo Wii is the least used gaming console in the US, despite having, by far, the most sales of any "next-gen" system.
For the month of December 2008, the Wii had an average use of just 5 days, compared to 6.8 for the Sony PS3 and 7.1 for the Xbox 360.
In terms of minutes, average usage for the Wii is 58 minutes per session, while the PS3 clocks in at 64 and the 360 at 78 minutes.
The report also collected data on last generation systems such as the original Xbox, the GameCube and the PS2, and says the Wii and GameCube show similar numbers.
"Predominant users of the Wii and GameCube are likely to use these consoles at most once a week and for fewer minutes and the fewest number of sessions compared to the other two groups of consoles,"notes the report.
Apple Inc. is currently "counting up" to a major milestone of one billion applications downloaded by iPhone and iPod Touch users from the App Store. It's hard to phantom that iPod and iPhone users have actually managed to download such a large amount of applications. To celebrate, Apple is giving away prizes in a contest to users who download Apps from the store before the tally crosses the 1 billion line.
At time of writing, the App Store is showing a total of 928,603,058 downloads overall, but it has been rising fast today. When you download an App, you are automatically entered for a chance to win $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a MacBook Pro. You can enter up to 25 times per day.
Microsoft Corp. has been dealt a harsh strike by being ordered to a pay a sum of $388 million in a patent dispute. The dispute is with anti-piracy software maker Uniloc Inc, and specifically concerns Uniloc's patent on "software that generates unique identities for licensed users and prevents unauthorized use or copying of programs." The Redmond software giant said it was very disappointed with the ruling and plans to appeal.
"We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported," said a Microsoft spokesman. "We will ask the court to overturn the verdict." The verdict is the result of a long case in federal court in Rhode Island.
The lawsuit was originally filed by Uniloc in 2003, claiming patent infringement for Microsoft's use of security software to prevent unauthorized use of its Windows operating system and other products, including Office. The damages award is among the largest in history for a patent infringement case.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has said it will unveil the full details of the new Bluetooth 3.0 specification on April 21. The new version of the popular standard will allow users to transfer photos, music, videos and other information at much greater speeds. It will speed up the transfers in many ways, one of which is the ability to utilize Wi-Fi via an 802.11 Protocol Adaption Layer when it is available.
It does not require Wi-Fi to be available to work, it will simply switch back to regular Bluetooth in non-Wi-Fi areas. Enhanced Power Control will also reduce the number of disconnects that Bluetooth suffers from. Bluetooth technology is facing tough competition in a growing market for wireless data transfer solutions.
Nokiahas released a handset using near-field communication that can be tied to a credit card account, for example. Sony also has plans to push its new TransferJet technology, which it boasts can transfer data at a rate of 560 Mbps.
NintendoPresident Satoru Iwata admitted that the Wiiconsole is struggling a bit in Japan, but said the company has no plans to drop the price in response. "The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," he said. "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want. A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales."
He went on to say that he didn't believe a price cut would be a viable option for Nintendo as things stand. "A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales. As of now I really don't think that a price cut is a good option for us," he told a news conference.
In the 5 weeks to March 29th, sales for the Wii console have dropped off in Japan by 63% compared to the same period last year, representing 99,335 units according to Enterbrain Inc. By comparison, the demand for the PlayStation 3 is up sharply, with a 80% rise in sales compared to the same period last year, moving 146,948 units.
Researchers have warned that regular users of BitTorrentand maybe Skypeare risking their privacy due to what they describe as a 'guilt by association' vulnerability. Fabián Bustamante, professor of computer science at Northwestern University, revealed that they have discovered how BitTorrent users form identifiable "communities" over time. The same problem could apply to other technology based on P2P.
"This was particularly surprising because BitTorrent is designed to establish connections at random, so there is no a priori reason for such strong communities to exist," Bustamante says. In a nutshell, it means that users computers tend to connect more often to certain other users machines on P2P networks that was previously thought.
The (bad) April Fool's scare caused by the widely spread Conficker variety of malware has been followed by a spring to life by the Conficker worm, according to security firm Trend Micro. The firm has tracked Conficker updates to infected machines over the past few days, hinting that the authors are trying to cash in on their global botnet. Rather than instruct the worm to cause global chaos, it has started downloading fake anti-virus tools to nag users about phony infections and scam them into buying the "product".
It is estimated that as many as 12 million PCs worldwide are infected. The use of bogus software to extort money from uninformed users is nothing new at all, but it can be very profitable to the individuals behind the scam and a total nightmare for anyone who falls into the trap and pays for a clean-up that never happens. The spread of Conficker emphasizes just how many Windows machines are running without Automatic Updates enabled or adequate security software.
DETECTION & REMOVAL
To figure out whether you are infected with the Conficker worm is to try the usual tricks. Firstly, check the websites of common security tools like Symantec, AVG and Avira. If none of those would load, you may be infected, as Conficker blocks access to the sites. Another good test is to check the status of several services (Start -> Run -> services.msc). If Automatic Updates, Background Intelligent Transfer Service, Error Reporting Service or Windows Defender (or other security services you did not disable yourself) have been disabled without your knowledge, or cannot be started, this could be another sign of infection.
Amazon's Kindle 2 made headlines throughout the world when it was introduced. Of particular attention was the device's decent text-to-speech feature. At first, the plan was for the feature to work with any text displayed on the Kindle 2. However, the Author's Guild saw this feature as a "performance" when used and pressured Amazon to allow publishers to decide on an eBook-by-eBook basis whether to enable the feature or not.
Whether this feature really threatens audio books and other sources of revenue is unknown, but for certain groups of people, this stance is simply not acceptable. At the end of last month, twenty groups representing visually and cognitively impaired individuals formed the Reading Rights Coalition. The group exists solely to oppose the action of the Author's Guild.
Among the members of the Reading Right Coalition are the American Council of the Blind, the International Dyslexia Association, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities. "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra," says the coalition's mission statement.
According to GSMarena, the mysterious Android-based Huawei phone first showed off during the MWC 2009 event will in fact be the anticipated T-Mobile G3.
The phone itself has a large touch screen and will include no QWERTY keyboard in its slim design. The device will have 3G support as well as Wi-Fi support and an impressive 5MP camera. The only other known details are that the device will have a 3.5-mm headphone jack, Bluetooth connectivity, and obviously, the latest Android platform.
There was no word on price but expected release is the Q3 2009.
MCE Technologies has begun shipping its new 8X Blu-ray Recordable Drive for Mac Pro and Power Mac, starting at $399. It is natively compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later, although Mac OS X does not support the viewing of store-bought Blu-ray movie titles at this time. Nevertheless, the drive can burn Blu-ray discs at up to 8x speed, DVD+-R media at up to 16X and CD-R media at up to 32x.
With Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later, you can record directly from the Finder without needing additional software. Creating Blu-ray discs required third-party software such as Adobe Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro and Roxio Toast 10 Pro. MCE also offers a version specific to 2009-era Mac Pros and an external recorder equipped with USB 2.0 and external Serial ATA (eSATA) connections.
Wizards of the Coast has sued 8 alleged file sharers this week over copyright infringement for unauthorized sharing of the recently introduced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook 2.
The lawsuits say the Handbook was illegally shared on file-sharing websites and the many downloads of the unauthorized copies led to lost sales and lost revenue for the company.
“Violations of our copyrights and piracy of our products hurt not only Wizards of the Coast’s financial health but also the health of whole gaming community including retailers and players,” added Greg Leeds, President of Wizards of the Coast. “We have brought these suits to stop the illegal activities of these defendants, and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”
The suit claims the defendants purchased the digital copy of the Handbook, then stripped any protection and redistributed it to P2P networks.
Nintendo's new DSi handheld has proven to be quite popular in the West as well as its home territory of Japan. After selling over 500,000 units in its first month of availability in Japan, the company has moved over 300,000 units in both the European and US markets within its first two days of availability in each. It was released in Europe on April 3, and in the U.S. on April 5.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced the amazing sales figures at the at a Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan lunch in Tokyo, attended by NPR. "These early launch results supplant the launch sales of the previous versions of the Nintendo DS," said Iwata. "They show us that the DSi has received a warm welcome around the world."
The DSi is 12 percent thinner than its predecessor, with 17 percent larger screens. It touts two video cameras, web browsing abilities, music playing and an SD-card slot. It was announced by Nintendo as sales of the popular Nintendo DS Lite handheld started to drop off in Japan.
Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Google Inc.'s YouTube have reached a deal to create a new premium music video service. The service, which is expected to launch in the coming months, is a bid to boost revenues from YouTube's phenomenal global usage. YouTube also gained an extension on the rights to feature content from Universal's catalog including U2 and 50 Cent, within YouTube videos.
The new service will be called Vevo, and it will offer higher quality music videos, as opposed to the typically lower quality content uploaded by users. The premium service, exclusive to Universal content, may also attract more big name advertisers who have been reluctant to advertise alongside user-generated content.
A boost in advertising rates will boost revenues for the content, which will be shared among Universal and YouTube.
Just about a week after the notorious Pirate Baytracker unveiled a new feature that let's Facebook users share torrents on their profiles, Facebook has responded by blocking users from doing so. While this latest change doesn't seem to have gone down particularly well with some Facebook users (not unusual), it will keep them out the of the firing line of media companies fighting BitTorrent-driven piracy.
Indeed, the company is not hiding the reason for this move, with spokesman Barry Schnittsaying the social networking giant, "respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of 'Share on Facebook' links on sites that contain any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we've reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the 'Share on Facebook' links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook."
In Facebook's defense, most other sites with user interaction on some level would make the same move, but even a small percentage of Facebook users who would have found this useful amounts to a lot of noise in protest. This block comes as the Pirate Bay revealed 100,000 users have signed up to test their IPREDATOR service, designed to provide anonymity to file sharers.
Despite being backed by President Nikolas Sarkozy and approved by the Senate, the French National Assembly has rejected a bill which proposed that Internet pirates have their connections suspended. The legislation proposed a "three strikes" system, in which a file sharer caught breaking copyright laws would receive a warning e-mail first, followed by a letter for a second offense. On the third strike, the user would be cut off from the Internet for a year.
The bill was backed by the film and music industries. Both have been pushing for tougher laws for Internet pirates as revenues continue to sink. Consumer groups voiced concerns that such a system would inevitably end up affecting innocent users, particularly those who may have had their computer or wireless connection hijacked without their knowledge.
The warnings and subsequent connection suspension would be delivered at the demand of a new state agency setup for the task. The socialist parliamentarian Patrick Bloche said the bill was "dangerous, useless, inefficient, and very risky for us citizens." The bill was defeated in a vote of the National Assembly despite already being approved by the Senate. Two members of President Sarkozy's majority government joined the opposition to the bill.
According to a DigiTimes report, Apple has ordered 100 million 1 gigabit NAND flash chips, sparking rumors that the upcoming iPhone 3G model will have storage capacity of 32 GB. The amount of chips purchased would be enough for 6 million 16GB iPhones or 3 million 32GB models.
There is also the possibility that a larger capacity 64GB iPod Touch is on the way, however the iPhone seems more possible considering the upcoming iPhone 3.0 firmware will add video-recording functionality.
The NAND Flash chips are also used in a lot of Apple products, such as the Nano and Shuffle, but the huge order has the rumor mill working overtime.
On March 24th, the founders of the giant public torrenttrackerThe Pirate Bay rolled out a new way to browse the Internet anonymously, using a virtual private network (VPN), and began giving out beta invites.
Users could submit their email address to http://ipredator.se/ in hopes of receiving a beta invite before the service goes public this month.
Today, TPB founder Peter Sunde said over 113,000 would-be users have signed up to test the service, with about 80 percent coming from Sweden. The service would already be live, added Sunde, however the unexpected high demand has caused delays.
The service, when it does go public, will cost 5 euro a month, and will "allow the user to protect his Internet connection with encryption while “tunneling’ data in privacy through the servers of a VPN provider, usually located in another country. The user’s ISP-designated IP address remains hidden, revealing only a second IP address provided by his VPN company."
On April 1st, Sweden's controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) went live making easier for content holders to get personal details of suspected pirates. Within two days, Sweden's overall Internet traffic fell 30 percent.
Amazon has announced the launch of its Xbox Live store which will allow users to purchase Xbox Live games for cash, cutting out the need to purchase Microsoft Points cards.
There are over 100 games available currently, and Amazon is the first retailer to sell XBL games outside of Microsoft. You can however, purchase Microsoft Points cards through the Amazon store, if you are more comfortable with that method.
After making a purchase at the Amazon store, a download code will appear in your Xbox 360's "Your Games & Software Library" where you can use it to download the game.
"With the overwhelming success of our existing Xbox LIVE Marketplace, it is clear that the 17 million active and engaged members of the Xbox LIVE community enjoy digital access to entertainment content,"added Xbox Live general manager Christina DeRosa. "Now we're happy to be extending our storefront to Amazon.com, a cutting-edge online retailer who is helping make digital distribution more mainstream."
On Tuesday, Apple's iTunes went DRM-free, but at the same time began charging more for new hit singles, $1.29 USD, up from the standard $0.99.
Today, Amazon and Wal-Mart followed the move by upping the price of new tracks by 30 cents as well, to $1.29 on Amazon, and $1.24 at Wal-Mart. Apple now sells older tracks for 69 cents, 99 cents for most new tracks, and $1.29 for the biggest new hits.
Amazon's decision, in particular, seems strange especially considering the company dropped the price of the best selling MP3s in the UK version of the store just this week to rival Apple's increases.
According to NPD data, Amazon has about 16 percent market share in the legal music download market, far behind iTunes, but far ahead of all other competitors, including Wal-Mart.
Analyst Matt Rosoff adds: "I can't imagine Amazon's excited about raising prices in a recession?they're probably responding to price increases by the record labels, which were made possible by Apple's capitulation."
According to new reports, RIM is preparing to make a new updated BlackBerry Storm as soon as Septmeber that will completely refresh the phone while adding Wi-Fi.
SlashGear has added that the unnamed sources have "given their assurances that the BlackBerry Storm 2 would have WiFi, and would be an even better pro-consumer device than the first Storm."
There was not too many other details revealed, but a September release would kill off the first generation Storm in under 10 months, a clear admission of failure on RIM's part.
Sources talking to TBG, add that "a new type of screen will come with the BlackBerry Storm 2, improving the screen enormously and making typing really pleasurable." There may also be the addition of a 5 MP camera.
Microsoft marketing manager Brian Seitz has said that the software giant will be revamping its Zune media players this year, marking the first significant refresh since early 2008 when Microsoft added a firmware update and increased storage capacity.
Over the past six months, the only significant news to come out about the Zune has been negative, and Microsoft is under pressure to keep the media player relevant in a time where Apple continues to strive. In January, the company reported that Zune revenue had fallen over $100 million USD year-on-year from 2007. The number represented a 54 percent decline year-on-year, an to date only 3.2 million Zune units have been sold, compared to over 200 million Apple iPods.
The company remains committed to the media players however, and has said it is looking to port the "Zune Experience" to Windows Mobile and other "living room devices."
According to the latest figures from GfK-ChartTrack, the new Nintendo DSi sold 92,000 units in the UK in its first 48 hours of availability, making it the fourth fastest selling UK console ever. The numbers even "eclipsed" the debut figures of the original "fat" DS in the region.
The numbers say that the DSi managed to outsell all other consoles in the region, combined, for those two days.
The handheld is only a nominal update, in terms of hardware, from the DS Lite, but more prominently uses an online store to sell games and applications.
According to the latest figures by Enterbrain, the Sony PlayStation 3 has outsold the Nintendo Wii in Japan for the month of March, marking the first time in 16 months that the Wii isn't the top seller in the region.
Most analysts say the spike in sales for the PS3 can be attributed to the the games Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 and Resident Evil 5 which both sold very well for the console.
Sony sold 146,948 units for the month, compared to 99,335 Wii consoles.
Many believe the numbers will be back to "normal" next month however. "PS3 hardware sales picked up due to brisk-selling software. But I don't see any drastic change in the industry landscape,"added Okasan Securities analyst Masashi Morita.
According to a note from analysts over at Credit Suisse, manufacturing costs for the Nintendo Wii have dropped 45 percent since the console launched in late 2006.
Analyst Koya Tabata, speaking to the Financial Times, added that Nintendo could now choose to cut the price of the Wii and still make money, while at the same time stimulating new sales. Tabata also noted that the firm believes Nintendo will release lower-priced models for emerging markets such as South America.
Doing the math shows that even with the current exchange rate for Yen-Dollar, the Wii only costs about $140 USD to make. The console is sold for $250 USD in all regions it is available.
Viacom has brought more content to Netflix'sstreaming video library, bringing MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central content to the ever-growing library.
Among the content being added is Nickelodeon shows "iCarly," "Blue's Clues," "Dora the Explorer," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and others. From Comedy Central, the first nine seasons of "South Park," are being added. Seasons 9-current are available for free on SouthParkStudios.com.
According to a Cnet report, the popular online video sharing site YouTube is currently in negotiations with Sony Pictures in an effort to bring full-length videos to the site.
Although neither company has commented on the rumor, the report says YouTube is pushing for free, ad-supported versions of the movies, similar to Hulu.
The video sharing site continues to struggle to get major studios on board for full-length features, but over the year has made deals with major record labels to carry music videos. More recently, YouTube signed a deal with Disney to carry ABC, Disney and ESPN TV shows.
The source says any "formal agreement for Sony would give owners of mobile devices with full YouTube clients, like the iPhone and multiple HTC Touch series phones, access to whole movies for free or near-free as long as the movies themselves aren't deliberately excluded from non-web visitors."
On Friday, an entertainment columnist for Fox News by the name of Roger Friedman, wrote a review on the leaked film in his column, adding in the review that the leak was so accessible that “it took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer.” 20th Century Fox, the studio behind the film, immediately put out a statement calling the column “reprehensible.” Later in the day the entire review was taken down.
On Sunday, Mr. Friedman was fired for reviewing the pirated film, with a statement from News Corporation (parent company of the studio) reading: “When we advised Fox News of the facts...they promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”
News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch has said in the past that he has a "zero tolerance" policy towards movie piracy. It appears we now know he is not kidding.
Microsoft has quietly announced they have settled with game developer Jamie Durrant who had sued the software giant over alleged homophobia within the company.
Durrant was asking for GBP 45,000 in the case, in which he claimed Microsoft's HR department "blatantly disregarded" his complaints of homophobic abuse within Microsoft's Lionhead Studios.
"We are pleased to have reached an amicable resolution to this matter with Mr. Durrant,"noted a Microsoft spokesman. "The terms of the settlement are confidential, but we can confirm that Mr. Durrant will not continue his employment at Lionhead as part of the agreement."
"Microsoft has a longstanding commitment to diversity. We attract, recruit and respect diverse talent and we have included sexual orientation in our anti-discrimination policies for 20 years.
"Our efforts have been recognised by a wide range of groups, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in its 2009 Corporate Equality Index. We do not tolerate breaches of our code of business conduct and take any complaints extremely seriously.
Of note, and of criticism, is the fact that users can only use the application through Wi-Fi, not through cell 3G or EDGE networks. That restriction has been called anti-competitive, and now the Internet advocacy group Free Press has asked the FCC to investigate whether the restriction is illegal.
The public letter uses the FCC's own words in citing the Internet Policy Statement which says “consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice” in order to “preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet.”
Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s top public policy executive, spoke about the allegations, saying the company has “every right not” to promote services of a rival.
“We absolutely expect our vendors...not to facilitate the services of our competitors,” he noted.
“Skype is a competitor, just like Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile,” he added, “Skype has no obligation to market AT&T services. Why should the reverse be true?”
Momitsu has announced the release of their BDP-899 Blu-ray player, the world's first region-free BD player.
The player will play DVD and Blu-ray discs from any region and is also BD-Live compatible. Depending on what region your discs are, you can enter a six digit code using the remote control to change the player from Region A to B or C.
The player can also playback a plethora of formats: Xvid, MPEG1, MPEG2 , MPEG4(AVI), MP4HD, WMV9, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, JPEG2000 and GIF. The player also has internal HD audio decoding, including Dolby TrueHD.
Real finally has a chance to defend its product though, as a judge has set an April 24th court date, says CEO Rob Glaser.
Glaser believes the company will win the suit, as users “have the right to make a secure copy” that cannot be shared with anyone but those using the computer that made the copy. Let's see if the judge agrees.
Disney, ever the Blu-ray trend setter, has announced that they will be re-releasing the classic "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" on Blu-ray on October 6th, a full seven weeks before it returns to standard DVD on November 24th.
The only times a similar move was made was in the last month when Disney released "Bolt" and "Bedtime Stories" on Blu-ray two days before its standard DVD cousin.
However, it is important to note that the Snow White Blu-ray will include a standard DVD in the package, following the current trend.
“We are thrilled that the consumer has clearly recognized the value in our Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack releases and will have another opportunity to maximize their viewing options in October with Snow White,” Disney president Bob Chapek added. “With today’s technological breakthroughs found in Blu-ray, we are confident that this version of Snow White will easily become the reference point for high-definition home entertainment libraries and family collections all over the world.”
Swedish authorities have arrested two men in southern Sweden for alleged copyright infringement after their apartments were raided in Skövde.
Prosecutors believe the men are part of a much larger international network of pirates that have upload hundreds of films to the Internet.
At the same time, raids occurred in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain.
"The suspects are at the inner core of organized pirates within the so-called Scene, which systematically steals films and distributes them on the internet,"said Henrik Pontén, a lawyer for the Anti-Piracy Agency (Antipiratbyrån).
"The Swedes have been at the head of the ring and the most important cells of the group's infrastructure have been located in Sweden," he concluded.
Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad added: "We are dealing with a large number of films that have been made available. I am not at liberty to divulge exactly how many."
According to a company report, Samsung will deliver three new Android-based smartphones in 2009, with the first set to hit in early June.
Samsung added that the first Android device would be released in Europe, with the two subsequent handsets being released in the US. One would be CDMA-based, for Sprint, while the other would be GSM-based, for T-Mobile.
The company did not detail what the phones would look like, but did say it would have more of a Samsung-feel to it than the current G1 Android, which is deeply integrated with Google services and applications.
"Our commitment is more to the Android phone than the Google experience device,"added Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, Samsung's executive VP.
According to Sony America head marketing executive John Koller, PlayStation 3 and PSP sales will rise 15 percent over the upcoming fiscal year. The current fiscal year for Sony ended March 31st.
"We've been very bullish on PSP," Koller said in an interview. "We had our largest sales year ever last year, and we’d look to go about 10-15 per cent north of that this year.
"It's for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the entertainment packs and line-up of software that's coming. The software line-up alone should drive a lot of hardware sales.
"For PS3 I'll stay general as well, but we also had our best sales year for PS3 last year and we'll look to go north of that by a similar percentage.
"That's being driven by, in a lot of ways, our first-party software line-up, which is outstanding, but there's some third-party titles coming. The line-up's very strong."
The popular DVD rental company Netflix has proudly announced the delivery of its two billionth DVD this week, giving the lucky subscriber who received the disc a lifetime subscription.
The disc happened to be a Blu-ray copy of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and was shipped to a member in Alabama.
The much anticipated DSi handheld console has launched in Europe today, and with it comes the launch of the DSi Shop.
There are five games available and the free Opera web browser as well. The games are WarioWare: Snapped!, Pyoro, Paper Plane, Art Style: AQUITE and Art Style: CODE.
As part of the launch promotion, DSi owners will receive 1000 free DSi points after downloading an initial firmware update.
All games in the DSi store are placed in a three-tiered pricing structure, with the cheapest costing 200 points (GBP 1.80), the next tier costing 500 Points (GBP 4.50) and Premium, which is everything higher.
According to Taiwanese manufacturers, the next version of the iPhone will have a 3.2-megapixel camera, an upgrade from the current model's 2.0-megapixel camera.
The sources claim that OmniVision has received orders for 3.2-megapixel CMOS sensors that are intended for upcoming iPhones, and add that Aptina and STMicroelectronics are also competing for the orders.
The reports also claim that OmniVision has secured orders to produce 5.2-megapixel sensors for Apple, although it is unclear what device they will be used in. The sources say the end product is expected to launch in Q3 2009 however.
Apple has been rumored to be working on netbooks, new iPods, and a new iPhone, all of which could use the sensors.
The newly adopted anti-piracy law has significantly cut down Internet use in Sweden. A legislation, which is based on the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), has resulted in a 30% drop in day-to-day traffic. In the two days that the law -- which was designed to give copyright holders and authorities more possibilities to act against illegal file-sharing -- has been in use it seems to have scared off a lot of people.
Both the Swedish anti-piracy office and the Swedish Pirate Party agree that the drop was caused by the law. However, they do disagree whether that's the way the law should affect.
"This is what disturbs me the most — that the industry thrives on scaring the common citizen," told Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge to TorrentFreak.
Henrik Pontén from Swedish anti-piracy office said to Svenska Dagbladet that the drop is a good indication that the legislation is a success, "most of the Internet traffic is file-sharing and therefore the is no other reason for the drop than the new IPRED law."
Although it is trying to branch out to non-business users, it is expected the App World will be littered with business related programs more so than games.
The devices that support the App World are the Bold, Storm, Curve and Pearl. You will also need a PayPal account to purchase the apps.
Amazon has now expanded its DRM-free MP3 store to Germany, and the service has launched today with 5 million tracks.
Full albums are priced competitively, with the 2000 most popular selling for under €5. The top selling album, Stadtaffe by Peter Fox, is currently selling for €4.89. The top paid download is Lady Gaga's international hit "Poker Face," which is selling for €0.97.
"We're excited to provide our German customers with even more ways to discover and enjoy great music at the same destination where they can buy millions of CDs,"added Amazon EU retail VP Greg Greeley in a statement. "Amazon MP3 offers a vast selection of DRM-free a-la-carte music from major and independent labels, ready to enjoy in seconds with any hardware device in high-quality audio."
According to the German music industry trade body Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BMI), digital album sales exploded in 2008, moving up to 3.9 million units, a 50 percent increase.
"Amazon's emphasis on ease of use, consumer choice and satisfaction has won their brand a high level of popularity and credibility with music fans," noted Bernd Dopp, chairman and CEO Warner Music Central and Eastern Europe. "Amazon MP3 is an exciting development in the evolution of this dynamic online retail experience. The platform now offers a compelling range of digital as well as physical formats from our world class roster of artists, while ensuring that the downloads bought can be played on any device."
According to their latest official blog post, Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3firmware upgrade, version 2.70, will add a few interesting new features, most notably Text Chat that will allow users to have a chat room with up to 15 other PSN users using any keyboard peripheral or the on-screen keyboard. Sony says you can be a participant in up to three chats at one time, and even use it in-game.
Additionally, the post says the following features will be added:
Friends list on the XMB (XrossMediaBar)
* Sort your friends via their online status
* Attach larger files to the messages you send to your friends (file size will increase from 1MB to 3MB)
Video delivery service on PlayStation Store
* Video files you’ve purchased from the PlayStation Store can be backed up to an external storage device and then restored to PS3’s internal hard drive for playback – so you can clear up space on your hard drive and then restore the video anytime in the future
* Videos you’ve purchased for PSP (PlayStation Portable) system can now be transferred to PS3 for playback
As of yesterday, Google is no longer allowing German users of their popular YouTube platform to watch any official music videos, as negotiations over licensing has fallen apart.
The negotiations were between YouTube and Germany's music royalty organization GEMA, who appear to be on very opposite sides of the spectrum, and the German people will now suffer. Google says they would rather block all the official music videos rather than pay GEMA's "huge" proposed royalty rate.
Google spokesman Hennig Dorstewitz says that GEMA wants a completely ridiculous $0.16 USD every time a German user plays a song on YouTube. In comparison, imeem recently said it was struggling to pay its $0.01 per stream royalty fees.
GEMA CEO Harald Heker contradicts that assertion however, saying the group offered YouTube a temporary rate of $0.013 per song but Google declined. Google's previous deal with GEMA was set at $0.004 per stream.
"They are essentially asking us to lose money with every video playback," added YouTube spokesman Chris Dale.
"We can't pursue unsustainable economic practices, especially in this business environment. Until we can get rates sustainable for our business, we can't afford to keep (premium music video service in Germany) up."
One month before its theatrical release, a workprint version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine has been leaked online, and is seeing huge downloads as I type.
The film, being a "workprint", has some special effects missing, as well as the occasional view of wires still attached to actors during action scenes. Although unconfirmed, some are reporting that the leaked version is missing some of the director's re-shoots. We probably won't know until next month however what is missing.
The film was supposed to compete with other blockbuster fare such as Star Trek and Transformers 2 but poor reviews of the film based on the leaked version may kill that buzz.
The more important question may be, at least from 20th Century Fox's perspective, is where the leak came from. There is a small caption at the beginning of the video that says 'Rising Sun Pictures' and is dated from last month.
Rising Sun Pictures is an Australian visual effects company that worked on editing the film, and is currently working on the upcoming blockbuster Terminator Salvation. There is no evidence however to support that RSP was involved in the leak.
Given the domination of the home video and TV markets by various digital formats, connecting a PC to your home theater makes more sense than ever. With the introduction last year of LiquidTV, Nero hoped to provide another good argument to make that connection.
For the last month and a half I've been using LiquidTV, and I believe it's capable of filling a market niche that has been underserved until now. It doesn't try to be everything to all people. Instead it has a narrow focus on turning your PC into a TiVo.
When I say TiVo I don't mean it in the generic sense of a DVR. LiquidTV actually uses the TiVo interface, as well as requiring a TiVo subscription. Fortunately a one-year subscription is included with the purchase price.
If you buy the retail box, so is a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q USB capture device. Whether you opt for the retail bundle or just the software (via download), the cost is comparable to other TV recording products like BeyondTV or SageTV. The first year's TiVo service ends up being free.
Price Advantage
PC based DVRs aren't for everyone, but they do have some distinct advantages over a standalone unit. For starters consider the price.
Twenty individuals have been sentenced to jail time averaging at about eight months each following a trial in Udine for copyright infringement. The case emerged after a raid was carried out by he local Fiscal Police (GdF) acting on a warrant issued by the public prosecutor in 2007.
It has been reported that 
According to 
When I say TiVo I don't mean it in the generic sense of a DVR. LiquidTV actually uses the TiVo interface, as well as requiring a TiVo subscription. Fortunately a one-year subscription is included with the purchase price.
