Topic: News

Players and discs using a new high-def format will appear soon--but will consumers make room for yet another combatant in the HD format wars?

Sales of next-generation DVD players are not likely to see a significant boost for another 18 months according to a study by Forrester Research. The study claims that consumers are still so disorientated by the format war that they are scared of when confronted by the options.

CMC Magnetics, Ritek, Prodisc Technology and Gigastorage, Taiwan-based producers of optical discs, have seen a significant increase in OEM orders for blank DVD+R/-R discs since the beginning of September with their production capacities being fully booked for the entire fourth quarter of 2007 or until January 2008, according to the companies.

Amazon.com launched the public beta of its digital music store Tuesday, offering over 2 million DRM-free tracks.

Intel has announced that a new USB 3 standard will be released early 2008. The revelation has come from the chip-making giant at its Developer Forum, where they announced the formation of the USB 3 Promoter Group.

Apple's celebrated video-editing program for mere mortals, iMovie, is coming to Windows! Better yet, it’s the old version of iMovie, before Apple stripped out all the features in iMovie '08.

A way has been cleared for consumers to legally burn DVDs of films downloaded from the internet, after a meeting of Hollywood studios, technology companies and the group that licenses DVD software.

The group calling itself the MediaDefender-Defenders (MDD) has, as promised, struck again, this time leaking what appears to be the full, uncompiled source code to anti-piracy watchdog MediaDefender’s toolset.

Starz Media has announced two deals to expand its online presence by distributing movies and digital content through Amazon's Unbox video download service and Xbox 360 Live Marketplace.

The folks at the P2P torrent site Meganova have cyber squatted MediaDefenders' attempt at a honey trap.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has shut down six eDonkey servers in Germany through a series of injunctions from regional courts in Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, and Frankfurt.

Microsoft's implementation of HD DVD's interactivity layer will be soon promoted on Toshiba HD DVD hardware and Hollywood movies using a fancy new logo.

With Microsoft's antitrust appeal now decided, the next U.S. technology company to get a place on the European Union (EU)'s regulatory hot seat may be Apple, an antitrust expert said today.

The reason consumers hate digital rights management isn’t due to the technology itself but to how copyright owners have used it, DRM providers said at the Digital Rights Strategies conference.

RealNetworks have announced the integration of Sonic's Authorscript media formatting and disc burning engine into the new version of RealPlayer.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been told by a Judge that if it wants to sue P2P pirates in his court it will have to actually present some evidence.

A Toshiba-developed single-sided triple-layer HD DVD disc format with a total storage capacity of 51GB that was reportedly approved by the DVD Forum is just a preliminary version (version 1.9) rather than a final one, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

LG officially introduced its second-generation LG Super Blu Player (model BH200). Sporting both formats' logos, LG's new high-def player is capable of Blu-ray disc and HD DVD playback with BD-Java and HDi interactivity.

The ad-supported music store SpiralFrog made its long-awaited debut on Sunday evening opening with more than 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four record companies.

Pirate-hunting peer-2-peer poisoners Media Defender seem likely to have been trying to set up a fake torrent site with the aim of entrapping p2p users.