Topic: News

Disney's music label Hollywood Records is offering a new CD format with extra features to encourage compact-disc purchases in a bid to reverse declining CD sales.

Sales of HD DVD players and their accompanying movies are growing far faster than those for Blu-Ray, if statistics collected by research group NPD and pushed by HD DVD's Promo Group are to be believed.

Alltunes.com has won a court case against a Russian agent of Visa over its decision to disconnect the online music stores' payment system.

An interesting email has been sent out to potential delegates for the Home Media Expo starting this week which suggests that Toshiba is planning a special "one week only" deal on their HD-A2 HD DVD player.

Taiwan-based optical disc makers will receive significantly more OEM orders for CD-R and DVD+R/-R discs this quarter than in the second quarter of 2007, but will suffer unavoidable rises in the procurement costs of optical-grade polycarbonate and dyes due to continued hikes in the international price of crude oil, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

Most Hollywood studios remain cautious about collapsing the video-on-demand and DVD windows, despite Warner Home Video’s recent assertions that a simultaneous window helps DVD sell-through as well as VOD buy rates.

Internet broadcasters reportedly reached a temporary deal with royalty payment collectors that would put a $50,000 cap on royalty fees and delay the collection of those fees for an undetermined period of time. Congress also stepped in with the introduction of a bill that would postpone the implementation of the new fee schedule until Sept. 13.

Sony Pictures is challenging YouTube's dominance of the user-generated content market by turning its online acquisition Grouper into a mini studio.

Calls to make the BBC's on demand TV service work on all computer operating systems are to get a fresh look.

Plextor has announced the immediate availability of the PX-810UF DVD Super Multi Drive. This external drive combines the 18X DVD±R and 12X DVD-RAM performance of Plextor’s PX-810 Series drives with the convenience and portability of USB and FireWire interfaces.

AMD has debuted two new solutions that offer high-definition television (HDTV) viewing and digital video recording (DVR) capabilities on desktop and notebook PCs.

Researchers of the University of Berlin, with partners Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, have developed a holographic technology that stores 500GB of data on an HD DVD or Blu-ray disc.

It seems the people's champion - the RIAA - has ordered YouTube to remove videos of a man who offered to show people how to play the guitar for free.

The British 'HD for All' campaign, designed to promote hi-def TV, drew a withering blast from Sky yesterday.

It seems the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) has set-up a website designed to trick unsuspecting users to download illegal content. There is also a service that offers the ability to download video content using a custom client which also scans if the user has downloaded copyrighted files.

Consumers building up extensive collections of digital music and movies should ensure their downloads are protected by their home insurance policy and will be replaced if the computers keeping them are damaged or stolen. Many insurers do not cover digital possessions, it has emerged.

The HD-DVD gang is arranging a counter attack against the Blu-ray boys with disks that can take advantage of its players' built-in Internet connections.

Hordes of hackers and security researchers have been poring over Apple's iPhone in an effort to discover vulnerabilities in the handsets. Top of their list has been cracking the code that ties the phone to operator AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive network.

South Korea's LG Electronics filed suit against Taiwan's Quanta , saying the world's biggest contract maker of laptop computers infringed on its DVD technology.

The controversial Russian music download site allofmp3.com has closed.The service, which sold songs at a fraction of the cost of other sites, claimed to be the second biggest seller of music downloads after iTunes.