"digital media" articles

Reuters has reported on this group, which will be more formally launched at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. The consortium includes media, technology, and retail companies that are calling for the interoperability of devices and Web sites, and usage rules that allow consumers to copy content onto household playback devices and to burn their content to physical media. Particpating companies include: Alcatel-Lucent Best Buy Cisco Systems Inc....

I'd written about both Comcast and Time Warner Cable's experiements with day-and-date video-on-demand in previous posts, so it was interesting to see a recent article with some more data from Time Warner. Executive Vice President and CFO John Martin said that their trials show that DVD sales aren't hurt and the VoD take-rates are significantly increased. Martin says that VoD buy rates were up more than 50 percent, while DVD sell-through increased 10 percent.

Apple unveiled its new iPod lineup yesterday. But media and Apple fans seemed to give a yawn to the event. No more “one-more-thing” hype and exuberance in San Francisco yesterday. Even the stock market slapped down Apple shares ruthlessly amidst overall market slide. One or two days before Apple’s scheduled product showcase, Microsoft announced its third-generation Zune players. Despite the fact that Zune has never reached even one-tenth of iPod sales volume, Microsoft has...

We wrapped up a very good CONNECTIONS Summit yesterday and were treated afterwards to a tour by the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute. At their IFA display, they showed their audio and video developments, including 3D television, pointer control solutions (cameras sense hand motion and allow users a way to interact with presententations and other video without a mouse), video compression and coding, digital music metadata, and other developments. It was quite interesting. I have...

AT&T announced the launch of ConnectTech last Thursday. This support service will offer the following services: Custom installation of home theater and TV equipment. Flat-panel TV wall mounting and home video installation. Wall-mount speaker installation. New PC or Apple® computer installation and the startup of a home desktop or notebook, including e-mail, security configuration and device networking. PC repair service, including parts...

It's been a banner year for networked TV introductions, and we have another manufacturer on the board. Mitsubishi has announced a Living Fit TV line that uses the Amimon WDHI solution to wirelessly link an HDTV receiver to an LCD panel. This product will be available in the Japanese market. This TV win is apparently the second for the WHDI technology, which will also be used in the Sharp X Series televisions, also available to the Japanese market. With the Mitsubishi introduction, I...

Eric Kim from Intel's Digital Home Group today unveiled an application framework called the Widget Channel. It will bring structured Internet applications and content to the television, using widgets. The solution uses Yahoo's Widget Engine and core libraries, and brings many services to the TV, including content from Blockbuster, Disney-ABC, CBS Interactive, Cinequest, Joost, and Showtime. Kim also unveiled the Intel Media Processor CE 3100 (formerly codenamed "Canmore"),...

Yesterday's announcement from Widevine that CinemaNow has chosen its content protection solution in a multi-platform distribution strategy is the first of many expected announcements through the rest of the year that show the migration of Internet video and other applications from just a pure PC/portable multimedia player market. As we wrote last week, the development trends indicate that Internet video services are going to be common on all kinds of platforms and via all kinds of...