The fallout of the Motion Picture Association of America's controversial decision to ban studios from sending out "screeners" of their films to Oscar voters and other film and critics groups continues with the cancellation of a major awards presentation.

Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp. plans to eliminate up to 20,000 jobs, or more than 12 percent of its work force, by March 2006 in a major restructuring, a Japanese newspaper has reported.

Strong demand for notebooks, monitors and TVs with LCD panels means price increases for the festive season. Surging demand for notebook computers, televisions and desktop PC monitors have spurred a shortage for the most popular sizes of liquid-crystal display panels.

Global demand for DVD+R/-R discs will more than double to 1.5 billion units in 2004 from an estimated 700 million units in 2003, buoyed by fast-growing sales of DVD drives and recorders, said Gordon Yeh, CEO of Ritek.

Two major scientific research centres said on Wednesday that they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, with a transmission equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds between Geneva and California.

Press Release: Verbatim have announced a new family of DigitalMovie 1x-4x speed DVD Recordable media with the unique look of a movie reel. Like Verbatim's popular Digital Vinyl CD-R discs that look like 45-rpm records, the new movie reel DVD discs bring smiles to the faces of everyone who sees them. Verbatim DigitalMovie discs are available in 3-packs with a choice of 4.7GB DVD-R or DVD+R media packaged in clear DVD Super Jewel Box cases.

Coming soon to a Windows PC near you: Apple's popular iTunes online music store, which analysts say will join an already crowded market that could mute its chances of repeating the success of the Macintosh-only version.

The global recordable DVD drive market will become volatile in the fourth quarter of 2003 as makers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are ramping up outputs aimed at grabbing a bigger share in the world market amid the improvement in the supply of pick-up heads—a major part of the optical storage drive, according to sources at Taiwanese makers in the line.

Microsoft started selling an updated version of its Plus Digital Media Edition entertainment software on Tuesday that now lets people create digital-photo slideshows on the PC and watch them on a DVD player. The software, which sells for $19.95 (£12), is designed for people using Windows XP who want more features for editing and playing media files such as digital photos, music and home movies.

U.S. consumers are planning to buy plenty of electronic gadgets this holiday season. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. households said they are likely to buy at least one consumer electronics product as a gift this holiday season, according to a survey the Consumer Electronics Association and for the third consecutive year, DVD players topped the list. Thirty-one percent of consumers who responded to the survey said they will probably purchase DVD players, the association said.

While FastTrack-based file sharing applications like KaZaA continue to dominate in North America, Europeans are evincing their own unique patterns and preferences, both in terms of their favorite peer-to-peer (P2P) clients and the types of content they choose to share. A new study by Sandvine Incorporated shows that P2P is now a multi-application reality, debunking the presumed dominance of FastTrack across the globe.

Twelve million historic photographs from British newsreel archives have been posted online for free download. The images, which date back to the turn of the 20th century, have been captured from the archives of the British Pathe newsreel, which is a cinema news service that pre-dated television.

Press Release: Offering a rainbow of colours that go beyond traditional computer color tones, Plextor, a leading developer and manufacturer of DVD and CD recording equipment, today announced that the new Spectrum DVD+/-R/RW drive is available in 12 vibrant colours.

K3b, which for many is the best GUI app for burning CDs in Linux, has now added DVD burning support. Users familiar with the Nero Burning Rom software will not be unfamiliar with how this open source software goes about backing up CDs and DVDs.

The cat and mouse game played between computer games companies and software pirates has seen a bold move by the establishment. In a new gambit, games companies will using piracy to hook users. A protection system from Macrovision and British games developer Codemasters ensures that pirated copies of games slowly degenerate to the point where they become unusable. The idea behind the technology called Fade, is to lure players into buying genuine games via the unreal thing.

Apple, a longtime supporter of the DVD-R format, confirmed Monday that it is adding support for DVD+R and DVD+RW into the Macintosh operating system with Panther, the new version of Mac OS X that ships next week. Apple is only adding support for backing up data and has not yet added support for the format into its media applications, such as iDVD and iTunes.

According to the website for IfoEdit, CopyiesAnything.com is offering a bundle of otherwise freely available freeware tools for download at the new and improved price of $49.95. The bundle has been produced without the permission of all authors of the software.

In an abrupt reversal, SunnComm Technologies said Friday that it will not sue a Princeton University graduate student who published a paper that describes how to bypass CD copy-protection technology simply by pressing the Shift key.

Hard disk-drive company Maxtor says it has reached a milestone in devising cost-effective platters for a next-generation recording technology called perpendicular recording. The company plans to announce that its subsidiary, MMC Technology, has demonstrated a method of making disk-drive media for the new technology at roughly the same cost as media used in today's disk drives. With the new media and perpendicular recording technology, Maxtor said it is possible to more than double the amount of data that can be crammed onto a typical disk, from the standard 80GB per 3.5-inch platter to 175GB.

Microsoft may have failed to occupy the stand it booked at this year's Linux Expo in London's Olympia conference centre, but some of the company's products did make a showing, even if the company might rather they had not. On the stand of a multimedia-oriented Linux distribution called dyne:bolic, operating system author and maintainer Jardmil -- the moniker he prefers to be known by -- was demonstrating a hacked Xbox that can be used to offload processing tasks from a mixed cluster of PCs and Xboxes.