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Katzenberg: Home Video Sales Not Needed for 3D Films
Responding to the question whether the studios need the revenue from sales of 3D DVDs to consumers to make 3D movies profitable, DreamWorks Animations Jeffrey Katzenberg told Daily Variety, "The major releases in 3D this year made back their incremental investment of making them in 3D in the...
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‘Google Is a Vampire’
"Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google. You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies. You’ve got to realize they’re vampires, and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck." — Mark Cuban, Internet...
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LG’s LTE Modem First to Get Approval by Japan
South Korea-based LG is the first to get its LTE modem certified by Japan. LG said Japan’s cellco giant NTT DoCoMo will use the modem in its LTE tests later this year.
...
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1.3m See a Digital State of the Union
Nearly 1.3 million people streamed a live Web video feed of Obama’s State of the Union address last week. The speech was available on a variety of Web sites and blogs, including video giant YouTube. The White House has so far been unable to determine how many people...
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Revision3 Sees Big Uptick in Web Views
This week, Revision3, a small Internet video network, announced a strong showing in video growth — a good contrast to 2008’s downsizing at the firm. The company now has 1.5 billion minutes of viewer engagement annually and had its revenues grow 30% in 2009. Ad sales revenues for...
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Netflix: IPad ‘Not a Huge Priority’
When eyes first beheld Apple’s iPad, the mind conjured up all sorts of video options for the new leisure device which then turned thoughts to Hulu and Netflix — and yes, iTunes, too — for all that great video content in an intimate setting. As these dreams were...
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Pace Signs Brazilian Distributor
Set-top box maker Pace has extended its penetration into the Latin American market by signing Brazil’s Visionbyte, which will sell Pace’s MultiDweller STBs to its cable TV operator customers. ...
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‘This American Life’ App Streams Every Episode On-Demand
In the US, National Public Radio has a much beloved radio show named "This American Life," whose new iPhone app will stream every single episode of the show on-demand. The show, which has a long run in the number one spot on iTunes’ podcast chart, can be streamed...
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Qualcomm at the Super Bowl With 3 Ads
Qualcomm’s FLO TV will run three of those $2 million plus (that’s each) commercials on this Sunday’s Super Bowl. "All three spots introduce viewers to mobile TV and our FLO TV Personal Television, which are some of the many ways in which FLO TV lets people take live...
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Southwest Airlines to Offer Wi-Fi on Every Plane
Southwest Airlines says it’s purchased the equipment it needs to make Wi-Fi available on all its planes. Inflight Wi-Fi provider Row 44 got the order. It provides high-speed Internet access via the Ku band satellites. Roll-out is expected to begin this year and be completed by 2012. Southwest...
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Another Movie Rental Retailer May Bite the Dust
Movie Gallery, which owns the movie rental chain Hollywood Video, may file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and could shut down two-thirds of its 2,700 stores, according to The Wall Street Journal. Online rental services such as Netflix plus kiosks such as Redbox have changed consumers’ rental preferences. ...
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Verizon Premieres Olympics Channel
Verizon Wireless has launched a 2010 Olympics channel from NBC on its V Cast Video.
Verizon has partnered with NBC for multi-platform coverage of the Winter Olympic Games; full coverage will begin February 12 with the games’ opening ceremonies.
Verizon will offer coverage on...
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Sony PSP App to Stream Live Arsenal Football — Sort Of
Sony Computer Entertainment has announced a new app for its handheld PlayStation Portable that will provide live streaming video of the Arsenal’s English Premier League football matches, with one huge caveat: Users apparently must be in the Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. Users can see goal replays, player information and...
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ITN First With German Show Biz Channel on YouTube
ITN this week launched the first German-language show biz news channel for YouTube. It’s called Promi411, and it’s at: http://www.youtube.com/PROMI411
The site offers celebrity news from around the globe.
ITN said its English-language show biz is one of the most viewed channels on YouTube....
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Bollywood Film Hits YouTube, Theaters Same Day
The new Bollywood film "Striker" will be perhaps the first in its genre to premiere specifically on Google’s YouTube this Friday, the same day as its theatrical release. The film will be one of the new round of content YouTube tests its rental offerings with and so far...
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Hulu, CBS to Host Super Bowl Ads
Super Bowl Sunday is arguably one of the biggest money days for advertisers and often features commercials pushing the envelope. This year, Hulu and CBS Sports are giving all the ads space on their sites after they air. At Hulu.com/adzone and CBSSports.com, users will be able to see...
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Netflix Picks up More Flicks
The DVD rental and movie streaming service Netflix has announced a variety of new deals with independent film distributors to expand its instant streaming library. Deals with six new distributors will make roughly 300 new titles available for instant streaming. Some titles are already available, and others will...
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YouTube Shows off Presidential Credentials
YouTube has posted the video of its interview with President Barack Obama, taking questions submitted by YouTube users after his State of the Union address last week. The company said it received more than 11,000 questions for the President and more than 55,000 votes on which of these...
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Reuters Launches Web Video Service
The news agency Reuters has announced plans to create a new video news platform for US newspapers, magazines and radio stations, partnering with News Distribution Network (NDN) for the service. Initially, the companies said the service will deliver licensed video content from partners including CBS News and E!...
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Wikipedia Readying Video
Wikimedia, the company behind various Net-information services such as Wikipedia, said that it has installed a new server that will allow for a large increase in video being uploaded to its encyclopedia site and others.
Video for Wikipedia was believed to be showing up last year, but...
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Talk Talk to Become a Pay-TV Service
Talk Talk, the broadband service provider that’ll soon be spun out of Carphone Warehouse, is likely to offer a pay-TV service in 2011 over its broadband network, according to documents the company made public. BT already uses its broadband network to deliver its BT Vision pay-TV service.
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Ustream Lands up to $75m for More Live Web Streams
Ustream, the provider of a live video streaming service that incorporates real-time interaction with social networks, has closed its latest round of funding, which could bring in as much as $75 million. The round, led by Japan’s Softbank, will give Ustream $20 million now, and Softbank has the...
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Univision’s YouTube Offering Goes Live
Making good on their November agreement, Google and the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision have launched a new YouTube channel that offers full-length TV show episodes and clips of other content from Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision.
Content on the new channel includes some of its more popular shows like...
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Virgin Media Served Almost 300m BBC iPlayer Videos Since Launch
Virgin Media has served almost 300 million views on its BBC iPlayer service, launched in May 2008. Monthly views have increased from 10.5 million views in June 2008 to 20 million views in December 2009.
ITV
Player had 25 million views on Virgin Media...
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Thumbplay Picks up 20 New Deals, Reaches 8m Total Songs
Thumplay has signed 20 new content partners up for its cloud-based music application, reaching a total of 8 million tracks from 25,000 labels and 75,000 artists without labels. Thumbplay already has license deals with the four major labels, and its service runs $9.99 per month. It’s currently in...
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Spotify: US Launch Is Coming
Spotify, Europe’s beloved freemium streaming music service, is looking at a US launch window of 30 to 60 days.
The news comes from its CEO Daniel Ek at a music conference in Los Angeles. "We’re in the final stages of setting up. Yesterday we signed a data...
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China’s KKBox Wants US Launch
KKBox, a streaming music service operating mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has announced plans for a US launch in the third quarter of this year, looking to bring Chinese-language music to the US’ population of Chinese speakers.
KKBox is a freemium service, much like Pandora or...
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IPhone Gets SlingPlayer On-the-Go; Is IPad Next?
- An AT&T Announcement, Not Apple’s
The iPhone and perhaps the iPad just got a major boost to their mobile TV-like capabilities, thanks to an announcement from AT&T.
The mobile carrier has announced that its 3G network will now support the SlingPlayer Mobile TV application, allowing...
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Study of Mobile TV Viewers to Begin in DC
The Open Mobile Video Coalition, a mobile TV trade group of mainly local TV stations, is teaming with market research firm Harris Interactive and Rentrak, which measures multi-screen media viewing, to measure consumer viewing habits with mobile TV.
They will conduct tests in Washington, DC, that...
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ITunes Preview Gives App Access
Apple has expanded its browser-based iTunes Preview — which allowed users to see and play song clips without launching the iTunes client— to now cover software information and reviews from the App Store.
The service is an Apple-hosted Web site that provides the description, price and creator-chosen...
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DirecTV App Hits 1m Downloads
DirecTV’s DVR schedule app recently made its way to the Android and WebOS platforms, but it’s been available for the iPhone for roughly one year and has now hit 1 million users on that device. To celebrate, DirecTV said it will soon expand the app and other services...
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Nokia: $2b Profit, 1m Downloads
Nokia recently released its financial results for last quarter, notably marked with a €1.39 billion ($1.95 billion) profit and total revenues of roughly €12 billion ($16.8 billion). Revenues were up 22% from the previous quarter but down 5% from a year ago.
Nokia has just announced the...
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Hulu Has Mobile Plans
Hulu — that joint venture from News Corp, NBC Universal and Disney — might be aiming for a new mobile model, according to its chief Jason Kilar.
Kilar, speaking at a conference this week, said the company is looking into a mobile presence that will include key...
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Sprint Rumored to Have WiMAX Smartphone
Rumors and announcements about handsets for LTE have begun in recent weeks, but Sprint may soon have the first 4G handset. It’s a smartphone called Supersonic that would run on Clearwire’s WiMAX network, which Sprint is reselling.
Sprint has not confirmed the matter other than to say...
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Time Warner Cable to Start Pushing WiMAX Mobile Broadband
Comcast has been the swiftest of the three cableco backers of Clearwire to roll out Clearwire-based services, but Time Warner Cable (TWC) is turning up the heat now.
Its offering is branded Road Runner Mobile. CEO Glenn Britt said on the company’s Q4 results call. "I...
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Microsoft Touts White Space Spectrum in India
Microsoft has been one of the biggest proponents of using the "white spaces" spectrum in the US TV bands for unlicensed wireless broadband, according to a report from Wireless Watch. This has been approved by the FCC but anti-interference mechanisms and commercial devices are still to be finalized....
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Alca-Lu Exec: LTE Has Won the 4G Market Against WiMAX
The battle is over between LTE and WiMAX for supremacy in the 4G wars, Alcatel-Lucent’s COO for wireless Patrick Plas said in a CNET report. He said mobile phone operators have overwhelmingly selected LTE over WiMAX.
Plas also said his company is "not putting a lot of...
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Independent Test Shows 4G Speeds up to 47 Mbps Down
An independent test of TeliaSonera’s 4G broadband service showed downlink data speeds up to 47 Mbps and latency as low as approximately five times greater than the performance typically seen in 3G networks that have been upgraded to 3G’s fastest equipment, HSPA+.
The tests were conducted with...
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WiMAX Coming to Rural India by Year-End
The government owned BNSL plans to begin building a WiMAX broadband service in rural areas by year-end, according to Press Trust of India (PTI), which said the information came from a BSNL official. ...
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NTT DoCoMo Will Show LTE Handset This Month
Mobile phone equipment maker NEC has said NTT DoCoMo will demonstrate a prototype LTE handset this month at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.
NEC said that prototype will show the "transmission of high-resolution video through its ‘LTE-PF’ equipped communications platform and showcases...
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Netbook Sales Grew 79% to 30.2m in 2009
Netbook vendors shipped 30.2 million units worldwide during 2009, as worldwide units increased 79% annually, according to Strategy Analytics. The company called it "an important year for netbooks" and said North America and Western Europe were the biggest netbook markets.
Acer
, Asus, HP and Dell...
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Worldwide Mobile Market up 11.3%
The global mobile phone market grew 11.3% in the fourth quarter of 2009, ending five consecutive quarters of pitfalls, according to a study by IDC.
The study found that vendors shipped 325.3 million units in the quarter, up from the previous 292.4 million. The total for 2009...
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Three-Quarters of US Homes to Soon Have HDTVs
Illustrating why Internet videos must at least approach HD in quality, a study from ORC of US consumers shows that 62% have an HDTV and another 12% expect to buy one within two years. Together that would be almost three quarters of homes and would certainly include almost...
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Workplace Piracy Up 55%
ScanSafe, which provides corporate software, has released a new report saying workplace piracy and attempted piracy is up 55% over the past three months.
The report monitored corporate networks and said the rise in piracy wasn’t restricted to software and often included movies and music as well....
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Report: 99% of BitTorrent Files Infringe on Copyrights
Coming to no one’s surprise, it appears that the vast majority of files on BitTorrent networks are pirated versions of a variety of content, infringing on at least one copyright.
A new study from Princeton’s Sauhard Sahi found that 99% of the files in a recent study...
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YouTube Movie Rental Revenues Less Than $11k
The final numbers are in, and YouTube’s experiment with film rentals for five films, which were available for 10 days, received a combined 2,684 views. Movies rented for $3.99, which gives a total of $10,709.16 for the company to divvy up.
"It definitely exceeded our expectations given...
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60m Americans Use Web Radio Weekly
More than 60 million Americans listen to Internet radio weekly, and the number will expand to 77 million users by 2015, according to a new study from Bridge Ratings.
Of those 60 million, 84% are considered regular users and listen to at least five minutes of an...
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Smartphone Boom Is Underway
It looks like the best job opportunities are in smartphones, not plastics as Dustin Hoffman was advised in "The Graduate."
A $995 report from Portio Research called "Smartphone Futures 2010-2014" says that despite the recession, smartphone sales increased in 2008-2009. During the same period, worldwide handset shipments...
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Orange Voted UK’s Most Reliable Mobile Broadband Service
The UK’s most reliable mobile broadband service is France Telecom’s Orange, according to a study by YouGov, which polled 4,944 adults online, of which 2,037 used mobile broadband by means of a dongle, modem stick or data card. Orange subscribers in the study numbered 187.
Orange was...
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Nokia, RIM, Apple Lead 30% Increase in Smartphone Sales
Recessions come and recessions go, but consumer demand for mobile phones that connect to the Internet continues to increase rapidly. Strategy Analytics reports that global sales of smartphones increased 30% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier to 53 million units.
The company said Nokia (39.2%...
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Sales of MPEG Encoder/Decoder Chips to Hit 2b by 2013
Sales of MPEG chips (integrated circuits or ICs) that compress and decompress digital video will reach two billion units by 2013, according to In-Stat. The number shows the popularity of devices, especially portable ones that play video files in MPEG format.
"Compression technology continues to improve, offering...
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Italy Wants TV Rules for Web Videos
Amid concerns from the Web and its leading video sites, Italy’s government is pressing on with plans to extend its existing TV broadcasting regulations to Web sites that host videos.
The draft decree is expected to go into effect this month and would force YouTube and others...
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‘Lost’ Premiere Hits the Web Early
ABC’s "Lost" was the second-most pirated TV program of 2009, reaching more than 6 million downloads per episode and trailing the number one contender by only a few thousand downloads. ABC recently held a beach party in Hawaii for the season premiere of the show, drawing 10,000 attendees...
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Microsoft Files $43M Suit Against Lithuanian BitTorrent Tracker
In a unified move with Lithuania’s anti-piracy group LANVA, Microsoft has sued the operator of that country’s largest BitTorrent site LinkoManija, Torrent Freak is reporting.
Microsoft accuses LinkoManija operator Kestas Ermanas of distributing and assisting in the distribution of illegal copies of Office 2003 and 2007. LinkoManija...
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Grandma Gets Cleared of Piracy Charges; Net Gets Re-Connected
It’s an uncomfortable week for ISPs and copyright owners. A 53-year-old grandmother has been cleared of accusations of downloading 18 films and TV shows, which initially resulted in a suspension of her Internet service.
Cathi Paradiso of Colorado had her Internet service suspended by Qwest after 18...
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Sony Develops TV Show for PlayStation Network
Following Microsoft’s lead, Sony Computer Entertainment America has developed a TV show that will be broadcast on its game consoles through the PlayStation Network. "The Tester" is a reality series in which 11 contestants compete in challenges to win a job as a video game tester at Sony...
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Apple’s TV Is at Best a Hobby
Apple TV has been around for nearly three years but, according to an employee, the box is still very much an "experiment" in the works.
In a company meeting following its iPad announcement, CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that Apple TV was still a "hobby" and would not...
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SeeSaw in Beta Test, Amassing Content
SeeSaw, the online TV service that Arqiva acquired from the BBC, has been running a beta test for a week and making deals with content providers such as Channel 4, Five and independent producers. The deal with Channel 4 gets it "Peep Show," "The Inbetweeners," "Skins" and "Grand...
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Sony Signs With Mosaid for Wi-Fi Patent Licenses
Mosaid Technologies, a Canadian-based patent licensing firm, has signed Sony to a worldwide, non-exclusive wireless patent license agreement. The license, Mosaid said, will cover all Sony products with Wi-Fi.
Mosaid said it signed 13 wireless patent license deals in 2009 to companies operating in four markets: mobile...
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ST-Ericsson Launches Wireless HDMI Transmitter Chips for Mobile Devices
The drive toward wirelessly connecting HD devices in the home continues.
ST-Ericsson
announced a line of 1080p HDMI-compatible transmitters on a single chip — the AV7100 and the AV8100. They go in mobile devices such as handsets, gaming consoles and digital cameras and enable...
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Vecima Unveils New HD Video Encoder
Vecima’s Spectrum Signal Processing division has launched a high-definition video encoder that will enable broadband service providers "to cost-effectively deliver live, broadcast quality HD television over IP networks" like the Net. It said the Spectrum video encoding solutions can be used in a number of applications in the...
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Tories Promise 100 Mbps Broadband for Majority by 2017
In the last 10 years, broadband has gone from "what is it?" status to become politicians’ promise.
The out-of-office UK Conservative party has promised speeds of 100 Mbps to the majority of homes by 2017.
Private investors would help finance deployment in rural areas...
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Swisscom Sorts out a Plan to Run Fiber Inside Residential Buildings
Fiber-to-the-home is spreading in Switzerland, a country that has many multi-tenant residential buildings. The incumbent telco Swisscom has solved legal problems that confront many service providers when it comes to the internal wiring in a multi-tenant building: Who pays for the installation? Who owns the rights to use...
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Brazil Wants to Raise $10.7b to Build Broadband Networks
The Brazilian government has proposed a government-run investment group whose aim is to raise $10.7 billion to build broadband networks in Brazil. It’ll be named InfoBrasi.
The country’s goal is to make broadband available to about 90 million Brazilians.
Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva...
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ExoPC Is First iPad-like to Launch, Days after Apple
A small French company called ExoPC is one of the first to come out with its own iPad-like tablet computer — the ExoPC Slate — based on Windows 7.0 Pro. The company even borrowed the slate name that most analysts preferred for the iPad,
Feature for...
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Glasses-Free 3D Demo Coming to CeBIT
Singapore’s Sunny Ocean Studios aims to put its autostereoscopic (no glasses) 3D competition to bed with a new 27-inch display that offers 64 viewing angles; most glasses-free sets currently being shown offer eight to 10 viewing angles. It’s easy to not be in the right angle here, and...
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Panasonic Opens Blu-ray 3D Authoring Center
Panasonic is planting another "first" flag. Its Blu-ray 3D advanced authoring center is up and running, handling 3D Blu-ray image processing, interactive content and disc certification. "We are confident that we lead the industry with MPEG-4 MVC (Multiview Video Coding) 3D image compression technology," said Jeannine Patton, VP...
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AT&T ‘Excited’ about 3D for U-verse Pay TV
AT&T is testing 3D TV technologies in its labs, said Peter Hill, VP of video and converged services at AT&T Labs, in an interview with IPTV News. There’s no surprise there, after the overload of 3D demos at CES last month and the fact that AT&T wants to...
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Panasonic Previews Two 3D Theaters for Olympics
Panasonic this week previewed its 2020 Winter Olympic pavilion, which features two full HD 3D theaters in Vancouver’s Yaletown.
Panasonic describes it as a new era of immersive visual entertainment and promises to make it all available for consumers’ homes. The 3D experience at home, it...
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Sky’s 3D Pub Weekend Goes Over Well
While the US was suffering through a 3D song broadcast at the Grammys that used those piddly red/blue-lensed glasses, News Corp’s BSkyB was kicking off its first true 3D TV broadcast for a match between Manchester United and the Arsenal at a few pubs.
So far, reviews...
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The Flash Stand-Off
Support for Adobe’s Flash is key to any competitor’s attempt to outshine the iPhone user experience and is, of course, one of the key Web technologies that Apple continues to spurn — even on the iPad.
This epitomizes Apple’s Achilles’ heel: the belief that its own...
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Comcast Adds 247,000 Broadband Subscribers in Q4
- Launches Xfinity Brand for DOCSIS 3.0 Broadband, Digital Video & Phone Service
Comcast’s fourth quarter report shows it added a net 247,000 high-speed broadband subscribers and 243,000 digital phone subscribers in the fourth quarter.
However, competition from satellite and telco pay-TV services caused Comcast...
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Sony Reports Quarterly Profit
Sony’s cost-cutting and changes in product strategy over the last few years are paying off. It terminated 20,000 employees and closed about 18% of its manufacturing plants during the cutbacks.
For its fiscal third quarter, profits were up and Sony cut its projected annual loss. It also...
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Clicker Launches Web Video Guide for UCLA
Clicker Media, developer of a Web video program guide that currently covers 600,000 episodes on 10,000 TV shows, has announced a new expansion for its programming guide that was developed with UCLA. The new catalog for UCLA will include Clicker’s existing database as well as original videos —...
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AOL: Profits Up, Revenue Down
AOL, in its first quarterly report since separating from Time Warner, reported a profit of $1.4 million. The company reported a $1.9 billion loss in the year-ago quarter.
Revenue was down 17% compared with the year-ago quarter but was better than some analysts expected.
As...
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Rumor Mill for IPad Keeps Churning
- Carriers, Cameras, Lawsuits
Apple’s latest product was the subject of countless rumors on the Web, and the beast is not quite dead.
Apple has released its software development kit (SDK) for the iPad; sent out a specifications sheet to various press and developers; and begun...
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Technicolor Bets on 3D Movie DVDs in the Home
- Lands Movie DVD Production Deal With Warner Bros
- To Sell Grass Valley Group and Other Major Operations
As part of its financial reorganization, Thomson, now renamed to Technicolor, plans to sell off several units. Technicolor says it wants to focus on content creators. Technicolor...
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Qtv Teams With Widevine to Offer One Media Player for All ‘Three Screens’
- Works on More Devices Than Any Other Media Player
- Compatible With PS2s, 1,100 Mobile Phone Models, PCs, Internet-Connected TVs and Blu-ray Players
- Aimed at ‘TV Everywhere’ Service Providers
Widevine and Qtv have worked together to develop a media player that works on...
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YouTube, White House Pair for Q&A
YouTube will host a live interview with President Barack Obama next week, which will feature a question and answer session. Questions will come from YouTube users who posted their thoughts and concerns during the Web site's broadcast of Wednesday's State of the Union address. "We'll bring some...
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Wild Bear Has Webcam Birth
The black bear Lily has become an Internet sensation after giving birth live on the Web, thanks to a Webcam installed in her den. The camera was installed on January 8, and users and scientists have been watching her ever since. Lily has likely become more popular...
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Nokia X6 Flagship: It Won't Come With Music
Nokia has decided not to bundle its Comes With Music service on its flagship X6 music phone model, hoping to boost sales by cutting costs. Dropping the unlimited music service will allow Nokia to cut the price of the phone by a third. Nokia so far has...
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Hulu Again Mulling $5 Subscription?
Crank up the rumor mill. With Apple grabbing all the headlines this week with its new iPad, the best way to command attention is to leak possible deals, and Hulu is leading the way. Rekindling old rumors, The LA Times said Hulu was in talks for a...
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IPad's Shortcomings Surprise
"Given Apple's recent track record, what is surprising is how much skepticism and disappointment greeted the iPad's debut. Among the chief complaints: No support for Adobe Flash, no camera, no multi-tasking capabilities, no monthly television service subscriptions and no 3G service partnership with Verizon Wireless." - Jason...
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Majority of Men Prefer 'Geekettes'
So is this what it's come to? UK online gift and gadget retailer Prezzybox.com says its research shows that 61% of men said they would rather date a female geek because she is more likely to be interested in the same things, like gaming, technology and gadgets....
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'Supernatural' Creates Web Spin-Off
The CW drama series "Supernatural" is getting its own Web spin-off called "Ghostfacers," which will be produced by Warner Bros TV's Studio 2.0 and Wonderland. The 10-episode Web series will show on TheWB.com and CWTV.com, both of which will also feature other "Ghostfacers" content, such as gag...
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Yahoo to Spread Videos on All Its Sites
Yahoo intends to add more videos to all its sites this year, according to CEO Carol Bartz, who regards TV as Yahoo's biggest competitor for ads. The company has also made deals with a number of CE manufacturers to embed Yahoo Widgets to their TV sets. ...
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ViaSat Acquires Satellite Broadband Provider WildBlue
ViaSat completed its acquisition of satellite broadband provider WildBlue in December. WildBlue has about 400,000 satellite broadband subscribers, second in the States only to Hughes Network and its more than 500,000 subscribers. It's expected that many of the US' 10 million or so unserved homes will only...
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MagicJack to Launch Femtocell
MagicJack, which has sold millions of its USB adapters for making phone calls via the Net, will soon launch a femtocell device, according to founder Jack Barstow. It reportedly plugs into a PC's USB port and synchs to any compatible mobile phones within 8 feet. The mobile...
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Thomson Restructures, Changes Name to Technicolor
Thomson's shareholders have approved the company's proposed restructuring plan. One result is that the company will now be named Technicolor, the name of one of its operating divisions. ...
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Lionsgate Launches Film Incubator
Movie studio Lionsgate launched its Lionsgate Incubator joint project with online content creation network Massify, saying the companies will distribute on the Web any resulting films or ideas produced by the partnership.
YouTube
is expected to be the primary outlet for content coming...
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Aol Will Make Original Web Content
Recent Time Warner spinoff Aol has purchased video production company StudioNow for $36.5 million in cash and stock with the goal of soon creating original online programming. Aol said it will be folding StudioNow into its Seed.com offering, expanding the suite to cover creation, storage and management...
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YouTube Rentals: A Lead Test Balloon
YouTube's movie rental experiment with the Sundance Film Festival isn't looking so great for the video service.
According to a NewTeeVee report, the five Sundance films saw a mediocre reception over the weekend, renting roughly 1,500 times total for $3.99 a piece. This rounds out...
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Google, Vimeo Try out HTML5 Video
Google has been slowly throwing support behind HTML5, signaling it's considering making the next version of YouTube compatible with the standard.
Google has rolled out a new HTML5-based player on YouTube that allows users to watch videos without needing Adobe's Flash plug-in. Apple has been...
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YouTube Monetizing 1B Videos Weekly
Google's video hub giant YouTube is now monetizing "over a billion videos per week," according to the company's director of video partnerships Patrick Walker.
This would mean that the company monetizes about one day's worth of videos each week.
Speaking at this year's...
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YouTube Goes to the Disco
Google's YouTube has begun testing a new music discovery and playlist creation tool that features artists covered by its Vevo deal and gives users a playlist of songs and videos.
The new service - the YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool, a.k.a. YouTube...
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PRS, Apple Sign Pan-European License
The UK collection society PRS for Music, representing 65,000 songwriters and music publishers, has reached a pan-European licensing agreement with Apple's iTunes Store.
The deal gives iTunes pan-European access to the repertoire of all PRS members that it handles performing rights for, including publishers like...
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Vodafone Claims Largest Music Subscriber Base in Europe
With nearly 450,000 customers having signed up for its music subscription services, Vodafone said it has "the largest number of paying music subscribers in Europe."
It has had music deals with the major labels for DRM-free MP3 music since 2009: Sony Music, EMI Music, Universal...
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Comcast Eyes Streaming Music
While the big buzz about Comcast still centers on its NBC Universal deal, the cable giant is also reportedly in talks to begin offering a music streaming service to its Internet service and cable TV customers.
TechCrunch
, citing multiple sources, said that Comcast...
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Shazam Now Selling 300,000 Daily
Mobile music discovery app provider Shazam is now selling 300,000 digital music tracks every day, the company's CEO Andrew Fisher said on a mobile app and music panel at this year's MIDEMNet.
Fisher said the company is seeing a 13% conversion rate from users tagging...
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Spotify's Big Numbers Game
Spotify's UK head Paul Brown was on hand at this year's MIDEMNet and had a lot of good news from the company - including that it now has 250,000 paying subscribers across its six European markets.
Spotify's ad revenues are now "a double-digit million Euro...
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Germany Tries to Resurrect Interest in Mobile TV
Germany's ZAK, the equivalent of the Ofcom and the FCC, made a conditional offer to invite bids for mobile TV that uses DVB-H technology. It expects to make a final decision by mid-march. The licenses will be for 10 years.
After a prior bid in...
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European Apps Cost More
The app store analytics company Distimo has published its December report on mobile applications and has highlighted the price range of available apps for various countries in the Google Android Market.
Distimo found that app publishers in the European zone - here just concerning Austria,...
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Novatel to Ship HSPA USB Modems
Novatel Wireless plans to ship a USB modem for HSPA cellular networks in 2010's second half. It'll be capable of receiving data at up to 42 Mbps. Actual speeds are expected to be in the 20 Mbps to 30 Mbps range. The device uses Qualcomm chips. ...
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Upgrading 3G Versus Implementing 4G (LTE)
AT&T will begin testing LTE in 2010, but is unlikely to deploy on any scale until 2012 or later, according to Wireless Watch. It says it may be more important for AT&T to invest in further upgrades to HSPA, which can be boosted to a peak data...
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AT&T's Wi-Fi Hotspots Get 85.5M Hits in 2009
There were 85.5 million hits on AT&T's 20,000 or so Wi-Fi hotspots last year - more than four times the number in 2008 - according to AT&T. The company operates Wi-Fi hot spots in retail locations such as Barnes & Noble bookstores, McDonald's and Starbucks.
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Apple Reviews AT&T's Plans to Upgrade Mobile Network
Apple COO Tim Cook said this week that AT&T intends to improve the performance of its mobile broadband service to counter increasing customer complaints. He said Apple has seen the plans.
Cook said, "We have personally reviewed these plans, and we have very high confidence...
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Verizon Wireless' Rush to LTE
The Wall Street Journal's Martin Peer questions the wisdom of Verizon Wireless' current deployment of LTE mobile broadband technology. Peers says there will be no LTE devices available initially so that Verizon Wireless will launch LTE with only LTE adapters for portable PCs.
He...
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Cox Completes LTE Tests
Privately-owned US cableco Cox this week said its trials of LTE mobile broadband network technology have been successfully completed. Cox said the 4G trials included video, a function that could give Cox an edge over telco rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
Cox is the only...
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Recording Industry: Piracy Kills Non-English Artists
Picking up a strategy that's not likely to win support from anyone, the music industry is playing the nationalism card in its latest attempts to combat piracy.
Saying that piracy is killing of non-Anglophone music in countries like Spain, France, Brazil and those throughout Africa...
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Music Sales Fall 10% in 2009
Global recorded music sales were down 10% in 2009, despite digital music growing 12% to $4.2 billion. Digital sales now account for 27% of the total market.
The news comes from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a trade group for the major...
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Nielsen Ratings Include Web Views in 2010
Starting this fall, Nielsen's TV show ratings will include online views with their traditional broadcast ratings. Nielsen intends to introduce a new service to cover the combined viewing tallies.
The service, according to recent reports and statements, isn't going to be as inclusive as it...
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Labels Lose $9m Baidu Suit
A Chinese court has ruled that search engine Baidu is not infringing on the copyrights of major record labels by providing "deep links" to torrents and illegal download links on third-party sites.
Warner Music
, Sony Music and Universal Music filed a $9...
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Supreme Court Denies Sony's 'Interactive' Appeal
The US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from Sony Music, letting stand a lower court's ruling finding that Launch Media's Web radio service does not require additional licensing fees.
The lower court said Launch Media - bought by Yahoo for $12 million...
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Rights Holders to Fund UK Net Crackdown
In the UK, record labels and film studios will have to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to paying for anti-piracy measures, according to the government.
Treasury minister Stephen Timms said at the Oxford Media Convention that rights holders should pay 75%...
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Judge Lowers $2m Piracy Verdict
A US district court judge has radically cut the amount pirate Jammie Thomas-Rasset must pay in damages for illegally sharing music online. A jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for $1.9 million in damages last June.
Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of willful copyright infringement and ordered to...
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Netflix: One More Country Coming
It's easy to forget that Netflix pulled out of the UK six years ago, but recent words from its CEO are making many suspect it'll be back in the UK within six months.
Netflix previously said that it will launch a streaming-only test-market operation in...
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Rogers Has 46,000 TV Anywhere Users
- Adds More Content
Canadian cableco giant Rogers is adding more content to its TV everywhere service and now has 46,000 registered users.
TV everywhere viewers are required to be subscribers to one of Rogers' services. They can access the content from any...
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Roku Seeks Money for 100 Web Video 'Channels'
- Aims to Compete with Pay-TV
Set-top box maker Roku is planning to raise at least $30 million in private funding this quarter and wants to use that money to expand its channel offerings and wage a war for your eyeballs.
Roku CEO...
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DirecTV Taking Large Quantities of MoCA Home Network Chips
MoCA chipmaker Entropic Communications says it's getting volume orders from DirecTV, which is having them built in to the multi-room DVRs it will start selling. Most of the world's cablecos, the US' two satellite TV services and Verizon have standardized on MoCA as their home network. ...
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Siemens Gets LEDs to Transmit up to 500 Mbps
Siemens, working with the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, has discovered a way to use off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data wirelessly at speeds up to 500 Mbps. Previously, the fastest speed Siemens had achieved was 200 Mbps.
The technology, called Visible Light Communication (VLC),...
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US Awards 14 New Broadband Stimulus Grants
Fourteen new US broadband stimulus awards totaling $310 million focusing on broadband, fiber and middle-mile project have been announced by the Rural Utilities Service, one of the awards administrators.
Recipients are a mixture of incumbent phone companies and electric utilities building middle- and last-mile networks....
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Mediacom Offers 105 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 Broadband
Mid-sized cableco Mediacom has deployed its 50 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 broadband in nine additional markets and now offers DOCSIS 3.0 to about 25% of its subscribers.
It is also testing a 105 Mbps down/5 Mbps up offering in two markets. It's offered at $150 per...
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The End of the Line for Wireline? Maybe Not
This article was written by Dave Burstein and originally appeared in his DSLPrime newsletter.
Wireline is declining worldwide, including in fast-growing economies like China and India. Sanford C Bernstein & Co analyst Craig Moffet has run some numbers and come to the conclusion US...
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Motorola Gear Increases Broadband Speeds at Armstrong
It's not only the large cablecos that are using DOCSIS 3.0 to offer subscribers broadband speeds that are faster than the telcos' DSL technology.
Armstrong Cable
, with cable systems in Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, is installing Motorola's DOCSIS...
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Liberty Global Sells Jupiter Shares to focus on European Growth
Liberty Global, which owns cable TV companies outside the States, is selling its 37.8% stake in Japan's Jupiter Telecommunications (J:Com) for $4 billion.
Liberty Global, one of John Malone's media companies, said it wants to focus on expanding its pay-TV operations in Europe.
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From the Analysts: Predicting iPad Sales
The question that financial analysts would like answered is how many iPads Apple will sell once it starts shipping them in March.
1. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray predicts Apple will sell to 4 million iPads in the first year and upward of...
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Samsung 3D TV Panel Production Begins
Samsung has begun production on panels for its 3D TVs, claiming to be the first manufacturer to do so.
It is beginning production with LED- and LCD-compatible panels for 40-inch, 46-inch and 55-inch sets. The panels will allow TVs to display 3D as well as...
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Sky to Drop SD, Launch 3D Early
Sky unveiled its plans to phase out SD receivers while pushing 3D, even giving 3D a bit of an early start.
Its dedicated 3D TV channel, Sky 3D, will launch this April, and it will preview its 3D broadcasts Sunday, January 31, with a live...
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Next3D Takes Aim at Net-Delivered 3D
One of the big worries of 3D - and one purported anti-piracy benefit - is that the content would be too large to deliver successfully over existing broadband connections: enter Next3D.
Next3D, which produces tools for creating and consuming the coming 3D wave, has said...
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Mobile & Broadband Increase AT&T Profits by 26%
Mobile and broadband growth fueled a profit increase of 26% to $3 billion at AT&T for its fourth quarter.
It added 2.7 million mobile customers in the fourth quarter, the second-highest quarterly increase in AT&T history, the company said.
AT&T credited the profit...
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Apple Profits Increase 50%
Apple's fiscal first-quarter profit increased 50% to $3.38 billion on revenue of $15.68 billion - much better than analysts had expected.
IPhone sales doubled, compared with the same quarter a year ago to 8.7 million.
Macintosh sales were up 33% from a year...
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Time Warner: Broadband, Phone Services Look Good
- Pay-TV Subscribers Decline
Perhaps it's the telcos' entry into the pay-TV market, the growing availability of TV shows and movies online or the lame economy, but Time Warner Cable reported a decline in the number of pay-TV subscribers for the quarter.
In...
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Report: Blockbuster Likely to Call It Quits in 2010
It's tough fighting the Internet, as Blockbuster, the record labels and others have learned.
Blockbuster is a probable candidate for going out of business this year, according to the Forbes article "It's Likely Closing Time for These Chains in 2010."
The story quotes...
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FiOS Growth Slows; Verizon Wireless Booms
Verizon's FiOS TV's rate of growth slowed down in the last two quarters of 2009. It added only 344,000 FiOS TV subscribers in the last six months after adding 599,000 in the first six months of the year. It had 2.9 million FiOS TV customers at the...
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New Music File Formats Debut at MIDEM
- The MP3 Was So Last Decade
Interactive music formats didn't grab headlines at this year's MIDEM, as most tried to salvage streaming music models and were closely watching where labels and investors were planning to spend their few dollars for 2010.
MXP4
and MusicDNA...
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Apple's IPad: A New Gateway to Entertainment
- Between a Smartphone and a PC
- A Leisure Media Device for the Couch, Kitchen, Bed, Plane
- Developers Never Mattered So Much
The much-rumored, hinted at and leaked Apple tablet PC was launched this week, aiming squarely at all those times you were...
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Disney, Starz May Give Netflix Streaming Hiccups
Disney and Starz are currently in negotiations to extend its deal to distribute Disney films through...
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PS3 Gets Japanese TV Tuner
Sony Japan has introduced a new TV tuner for the PlayStation 3 — the Torne — which has ...
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Amazon to Launch Kindle SDK
The online retail megastore Amazon.com has announced it will be releasing a software development kit to...
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Cox Already Testing Mobile in 3 Markets
Cox Communications, as it promised, began testing its own mobile phone/broadband service in a few markets...
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The White House Streaming Live In Your Pocket
The White House has announced the official release of an iPhone/iPod Touch application dubbed "The White...
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Apple, Google Face of in Mobile Search/Advertising
The Bloomberg Business Week article Apple v Google details how the two companies are gearing...
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Mobile Devices to Become Dominant for Web Access
Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker predicts that within five years, more users will connect to the...
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NY Times to Start Charging for Access
The New York Times this week joined the Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times and in 2011 will begin charging consumers to ...
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Turner Classic Movies Packs Apps with Content
Cable TV channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has launched what it’s calling a "premium mobile application"...
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Bread and Circuses, Free Wi-Fi Too
The Massachusetts Port Authority has voted to offer free Wi-Fi, to travelers at Logan International Airport,...
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Liberty Global: TV Everywhere? Oui. 3DTV? Non.
Liberty Global said it expects to launch the TV Everywhere service in its European cable TV...
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LeBouquetTV Launches US Web TV Offering
French Web TV service LeBouquetTV is gearing up for a mid-February launch for subscribers in the US, the company said.
The new bouquet of channels ...
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YouTube Downloading Gets Easier for Most Content
There have always been ways to copy content on YouTube, but two services have recently...
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YouTube Nabs Sports Rights
Google is poised to become a big rival for some pay-TV operators and sports broadcasters, ...
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YouTube Begins Movie Rentals on Friday
YouTube has decided to kick off its sponsorship of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival by ...
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Virgin Media Swims to a New Beat
Virgin Media has reportedly given a name to its upcoming music download service and set a ...
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MySpace Finally Revives Imeem Playlists
MySpace has surprised users and made good on a promise to bring back users’ playlists ...
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Rock Band Network Store Opens Its Doors
MTV has launched the public beta of its new Rock Band Network Store, which allows any ...
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Ad-Supported, DRM-Free Downloads Get Second Label
EMI has become the second major music label to license its content to the ad-supported, ...
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Eyeball.fm Aims to Give Music Users Something to See
Since no one music streaming model has broken away from the pack, hybrid services like...
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Sky Upgrades Remote Record App
Sky has given its iPhone Remote Record app a do-over, now allowing users to check ...
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France Telecom’s Orange, Shanghai Media Group’s BesTV to Collaborate on Three-Screen Convergence
BesTV New Media and France Telecom’s Orange have signed an agreement to collaborate on the...
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France 24 Goes to Japan
France 24’s English language programs are available live and on demand to the 55 million...
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Google, Amazon Launch UK Android Music Store
Google and Amazon have teamed up to launch a UK version of Amazon MP3 that works with Google’s mobile Android operating system, allowing users ...
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Apple v Nokia: Content Model Will Be Key to Outcome
- Apple Poised to Unveil iSlate, Nokia a Revamped Ovi Store
- Nokia’s New Web ...
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120 Mbps WiMAX 2 Coming in 2011
The specification for WiMAX 2, the third version of WiMAX after the fixed and mobile ...
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Verizon Wireless Revamps Pricing
Verizon, on the cusp of its first LTE rollouts, has shaken up its prepaid and postpaid price ...
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AT&T Spending Less to Upgrade Mobile Network Than Verizon Wireless
- Investment Analyst Calls for AT&T to Spend Additional $5b
AT&T needs to spend an ...
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Alcatel-Lucent Demos LTE and LTE Applications
LTE and WiMAX wireless network technologies are expected to offer consumers mobile broadband speeds that...
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Pirate VPN up and Running
Last March, founders of The Pirate Bay announced plans to create a virtual private network...
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Virgin Media Takes a Whiff of Web Activities
Virgin Media is planning to use a packet sniffing software to begin monitoring the amount of ...
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Oxford University Bans Spotify Because of P2P Habits
England’s Oxford University has banned students from using the streaming music service Spotify because it...
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Polish Consumers Ready for Mobile TV
Some 75% of respondents in a Polish survey said they’d subscribe to mobile TV for a ...
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Magna Predicts Home Penetration Rates for DVRs, VoD, Broadband
Almost half (44%) of US homes will have a DVR by 2015, according to Mediabrands’ ...
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Blu-ray Revenues up 67% in 2009
One reason Hollywood and CE makers are so excited about 3D Blu-ray content must be the...
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Swedish Music Sales See First Gain Since 2000
Music sales in 2009 rose 10.2% in Sweden, representing the first revenue increase in the ...
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Internet Capable Phones to Outnumber PCs by 2013
Consumers will have more Internet capable phones (1.82 billion) than PCs (1.78 billion) by 2013,...
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Mobile Broadband Growing Twice as Fast as Landline in Africa
Mobile broadband is growing at nearly twice that of landline broadband in Africa, according to...
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384m Internet Users in China
The number of Internet users in China increased 28.9% in 2009 to a total of 384 ...
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America’s Youth Are Always Connected
Americans age 8 to 18 are now spending more than seven and a half hours per day with media ...
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Mobile Content Revenues to Increase 28% in 2010
Revenues from mobile content will increase 28% this year, according to a study from the...
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Homes With Internet-Connected TVs, Blu-ray Players to Exceed 473m by 2015
Worldwide revenues from sales of Internet connectable TVs will reach $29.3 billion (€20.4 billion) in...
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Broadband Brings Job Growth but Not Higher Wages
Areas of the US where broadband access was increased showed job growth, but the increased...
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Traditional TV Viewing Will Continue to Dominate
TV sets and broadcasters’ linear schedules will continue to be the dominant source of entertainment...
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Sales Increase of Notebooks to Exceed Netbooks in 2010
The popularity of low-profit netbooks has forced PC makers to produce lower cost notebooks that...
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Only 19% of World’s Broadband Connections Are at 5 Mbps or More
Only 19% of the world’s Internet connections are at speeds of 5 Mbps or more, according ...
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Verizon Cuts the Pirate Chord
A few months after Verizon Communications began issuing file-sharing warnings to customers, the company has acknowledged it is cutting off access ...
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Microsoft Sues TiVo Over Patents
Microsoft has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against TiVo, saying that the DVR company is violating...
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‘2010 Will Be the Year G.hn Captures the Market’
- DS2 to Ship G.hn Chips in Q3 and in Quantity in Q4 2010.
- Demos Backward ...
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Pace Shipping New DVR for BT Vision
Pace says the newest DVR set-top box that it makes for the BT Vision IPTV service ...
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Connexion Goes for HomePNA
Connexion Technologies, which installs and manages home networks in single-family, multi-family, high-rise, resort and hospitality...
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Gefen Offers Wireless HDMI
Consumer demand continues to ratchet up for wirelessly connecting devices in home entertainment centers as...
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ARM Shows More Powerful Processors
ARM, which designs but does not make processor chips, continues to increase their ability to ...
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Carphone Warehouse Sees Growth in Broadband
Carphone Warehouse remains optimistic about its TalkTalk operations. It thinks it’ll add 36,000 new broadband subscribers,...
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France Commits to 100% High-Speed Broadband
The French government is anteing up €2 billion ($2.88 billion) that’ll be used as low-interest...
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O2 UK to Sell Landline Broadband
Mobile phone operator O2 UK will begin selling landline broadband in March. It will lease lines from other landline broadband companies such as its ...
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US Streamlines Broadband Stimulus Funding
US agencies are running about three months behind schedule on allocating funds from the first...
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Foxtel 3D Coming in 2011
Foxtel has announced that it will be one of the first Australian broadcasters to deliver ...
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CableLabs: Existing STBs are 3D Compatible
The cable industry’s research and development shop, CableLabs, has said that 3D support testing has...
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Motorola Withdraws Offer to Sell Its Network/Home Division
Motorola, which has been trying to sell itself off by the piece, said this week it has ...
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Google-China Spat Leaves Uncertainty in the Middle Kingdom
While Google and China have been going back and forth over recent cyber-attacks and China’s...
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Apple: Making Users Want a Tablet for No Apparent Reason
You have to hand it to Apple. It’s one of the best there is at two very important aspects of ...
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BT to Offer 40 Mbps Fiber Broadband for £19.99/Month
BT Retail is taking dead aim at Virgin Media with its upcoming fiber optic-based broadband service that’ll be called BT ...
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Media Adapters to Take Over Sales of Web-Delivered Entertainment
- Consumers Want One Log-In for All Web-based Services
While allowing access to Web services ...
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CES Attendance Up
Consumer attendance at this year’s CES was up from 2009, despite a slight decrease in company participation. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) released a final total of 120,000 attendees, up from 113,000 in 2009; however, the numbers marked a decline from 141,000 in 2008. Only...
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Yes, There’s Already 3D Adult Content
One thing about having the Adult Entertainment Expo happening at the same time as CES is that there are always questions and answers for the things most attendees wonder but few dare ask. Adult entertainment producers are already using 3D cameras and techniques for filming their...
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‘TVs Have Never Crashed Historically’
Scott Smyers, president and chairman of the board of DLNA and a senior vice president at Sony Electronics, said that one of the big fears with all these new widgets is what could happen to the TV set. "TVs have never crashed historically," Smyers said at...
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Showtime Widget Goes After New Eyes
Showtime Networks has announced the launch of a new Showtime TV widget running on Yahoo’s Widgets platform. The widget lets viewers access free samples of Showtime original series premieres, behind-the-scenes content and more value added content in hopes of converting Web-enabled TV owners to new...
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YouTube: Bigger Than You Remember
With all the Web connections going on between CE and videos at this year’s CES, YouTube was left by the wayside in a lot of product announcements and partner lists despite being on just about every single Web-based platform and Web-enabled device that came out. While...
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See Doomsday Tick Closer, Live on the Web!
For the first time in two years, the hands of doomsday have moved, and users were able to see it live on the Web on Thursday. Representatives from the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand on Doomsday Clock live on the...
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Verizon Doubles FiOS Termination Fees
Verizon plans to double the early termination fee for its FiOS TV service, according to a variety of reports. Most say the fee will jump from $179 to $360 for customers who leave before their two-year contracts are up, though such rates are often pro-rated depending...
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Zune HD Ups Video, Playlists
The little media player that could, Microsoft’s Zune HD, has released an update adding Xvid support to help be more compatible with the MPEG4 format. DivX, the other popular format for video junkies, won’t likely be making the scene because of its proprietary nature. To make...
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Don’t Fear the Napster Generation
Sony CTO and DECE president Mitch Singer is bad at hiding his disdain for the so-called millennial generation, but there is one thing he’s forced to count on them for — embracing HD and 3D content very quickly.
While these are the users that fully embraced Napster and...
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Universal Licenses FreeAllMusic
When not filing lawsuits, Universal Music is expanding the reach of its catalog through deals like a recent one with FreeAllMusic.com (FAM), an ad-supported music download service. FAM is one of the few ad-supported download services picking up new label support instead of watching its...
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Pandora Profitable in Q4 2009
Pandora was on hand at this year’s CES to announce a relationship with automakers for in-car audio systems —featured in Ford’s keynote — but more exciting news was garnered from the showroom floor: Pandora became profitable at the end of 2009.
Pandora, which now counts more than...
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Alarm Bells Ring for App Store Piracy
A recent report has said that the companies selling iPhone and iPod Touch applications have lost more than $450 million due to piracy since the store opened in July 2008.
At first, this sounds like a lot — and this is one of those piracy figures that is...
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Palm Brings 3D Gaming to WebOS
One of the tricky things about the new 3D craze is how exactly to describe content like Palm’s newly announced 3D games.
Perhaps jumping on the crazed bandwagon, Palm has announced seven new 3D mobile games, all now available on its Palm App Catalog storefront.
The games themselves...
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Same Apps are Popular, Despite the Platform
It looks like the same apps tend to be popular no matter which app store you’re perusing, according to new research from Mplayit.
The company, which runs an app discovery service for Facebook, has taken a look at the most popular iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps among...
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Android Apps Go for the Wallet
Some apps are after your money — literally.
Fraud has apparently hit the Android market as security outfits have begun issuing warnings that some banking apps are apparently more included to empty your account than to tell you how much is left.
So far, the apps in question seem...
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UK Wants Free Laptops, Web for Poor
The UK has made a pledge of giving away more than 270,000 free laptops with mobile broadband to low-income families under a new government program.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the goal is for families to be connected to their children’s schools and lessons via the Internet....
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Sprint Drops WiMAX by Another $10
To help boost sales of its WiMAX service — and likely its new 4G wireless router the Overdrive — Sprint has cut the price of its WiMAX service by another $10, down to $59.99 per month.
This is the second $10 cut in about five months and shows...
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Kineto Offers Dual Mode Wi-Fi/Cellular Technology for Smartphones
Smartphone users prefer to connect to Wi-Fi rather than a cellular network for accessing the Net because it’s faster. Cellcos prefer the use of Wi-Fi, too, because it reduces the traffic on their cellular networks.
Kineto Wireless is offering its Smart Wi-Fi Offload system, which allows...
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YouTube Helps Drive Vevo to Number 1
After its early December launch, Vevo was able to claim the title of the biggest US music service on the Web that month.
The music video site, a joint venture from Google, Universal Music, Sony Music and reportedly EMI, attracted 35.4 million unique viewers in December, besting...
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Digital Music to Beat out Physical in ’10
Total dollars spent on digital music this year will finally surpass the sale of physical music goods, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.
Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report, said that US consumer spending on digital music will increase at a compound...
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Web TV, Blu-ray Set to Boom
Web-enabled video devices are expected to get quite the boost in global shipments this year, climbing 78% in year-over-year shipments from 2009 to 2010.
The subcategories here that will see the biggest uptake in the short term will be enabled-TVs and Blu-ray players, according to IMS Research....
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European Physicians Turn to Web Videos for Work
Roughly 46% of online physicians in Western Europe tune in to online video for professional purposes — that’s just for conferences, Webinars, video calls and technique demonstrations, not those animal clips that fill up work time for many others.
According to the study from pharmaceutical and healthcare...
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US Finds Mobile Tech as a Positive Change
While the majority of Americans look back on the previous decade with a bit of disdain, innovations in both mobile hardware and software were viewed as positive changes.
The new data comes from a Pew Research Center study that also found Millennials — those age 18 to 29 —...
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Netbooks, Low-Cost Portables Drive PC Sales Growth
Netbooks and low-cost portable PCs increased PCs sales 22.1% worldwide to more than 90 million units in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner. Rival IDC reported similar results.
HP, Dell, Acer and Toshiba increased market share with lower prices at the expense of Apple, which did not cut...
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Rural US Broadband Subscribers Happy, Want More Services
Satisfaction with their broadband service and the percentage with home networks installed is about the same in rural America as in urban/suburban areas, according to a free report from Parks Associates called "Rural Broadband Services and the Digital Home."
Key points from the report include:
1. Rural broadband...
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Japan Ends 2009 With 110m Mobile Users
Japan has released figures for the end of December 2009 that show 110.62 million mobile subscribers — a 440,700 user gain from the end of November.
The figures come form the Telecommunications Carrier Association, which found some good news for the major players in the market:
- Softbank...
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Forrester: For Tech Spending, the Worst Could Be Over
Spending in the technology sector has leveled off and could begin seeing a rebound this year, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
The firm expects US spending to grow by 6.6% in 2010, following an 8.2% decline in 2009. Globally, expenditures are expected to jump...
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Major Labels Want Pirate Bay to Walk the Plank
The four major record labels are petitioning the Swedish courts to compel two of The Pirate Bay (TPB) operators to pay the fines awarded to the labels during the operators’ convictions on charges of copyright infringement last year.
The court previously ordered Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and ...
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Universal Sues Grooveshark Over Copyright Infringements
Universal Music, one of the big four labels, has sued the music download service Grooveshark, alleging that the Web site is offering Universal recordings from before 1972 for free. According to the label, this includes "some of the most popular and successful recording artists of the...
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Spain Steps Up to Anti-Piracy Plate
Spain is considered one of the safest places for pirates to thrive — but that could be changing.
The Spanish government has approved new legislation that will empower its courts to shut down and block access to Web sites that offer unauthorized downloads of music and video ...
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Court: Satellite TV Pirate Must Pay $51m
A federal court in Florida has ordered a man to pay $51 million in damages to satellite TV operators after posting software online that helps others to illegally receive satellite TV programming.
The summary judgment against Robert Ward awarded damages to DISH Network, EchoStar and NagraStar.
The court...
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Widgets Gaining Adoption; ‘Snacking’ Now a TV Possibility
Yahoo’s Widgets platform had a great showing at CES, even if some of its partners were less inclined to say that Yahoo was powering the app platform for their TV sets or Blu-ray players
Widgets are bridging the gap between PC and TV, allowing a push and...
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Rovi Supports HbbTV
Rovi (formerly Macrovision) has announced its support for the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) project, the European initiative aimed at standardizing access to and delivery of advanced TV services, like catch-up TV and Web-based offerings.
Rovi said it is eager to work with the HbbTV project and...
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DivX Launches New TV Content Platform
Digital media developer DivX has launched a new platform — DivX TV — aimed specifically at those Net-connected TV sets that are winding up in living rooms with more and more frequency.
DivX TV aims to bring a "diverse line-up of online media content streamed directly to...
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LG Unites Services Through Blu-ray Player
CES was chock full of products and gadgets with Net connections, huge hard drives and other built-ins, but now that the dust has settled, a Blu-ray player from LG Electronics looks to be one of the best models around.
LG’s BD590 is a Blu-ray player with a built-in...
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LG TV Sets Get a Splash of Color
Orange and LG Electronics have signed an exclusive agreement to bring Orange’s Web video portal to LG TV sets in France beginning this March.
The dedicated Orange portal will offer a variety of entertainment content and information services, including Orange Sports Info; 24/24 Actu News Service; live...
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AT&T’s U-verse Gets a Bigger Microsoft Focus
After a rumored three years in the works, AT&T has officially said it will give U-verse TV subscribers the ability to access the service from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console sometime later this year.
The big question now: For how much?
Through the service addition, customers "will be able to...
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Samsung, BBC Love Film
The BBC’s iPlayer and the on-demand movie service Lovefilm are getting some top-line billing in a range of new connected TVs being shown by Samsung Electronics.
Between 70 and 100 applications will be featured on Samsung’s new Net TV platform — dubbed Internet@TV — and will span the...
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Vudu Shopping Itself Around
The digital video service and set-top box maker Vudu is reportedly in acquisition talks, and it’s most interested buyer appears to be Wal-Mart.
According to All Things Digital, citing sources associated with the talks, Vudu is in "meaningful" discussions with the retail giant.
Wal-Mart is said to be a...
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Epix Finalizes Cox Deal
Epix — a Web and pay-TV video channel joint venture among Viacom, its Paramount division, Lionsgate and MGM — has finally reached a carriage agreement with Cox Communications, which claims to be the nation’s third-largest cable TV provider with around 6 million subscribers.
Epix allows its users to...
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Wii is Feather in Netflix’s Cap
Netflix has completed its gaming console dominance by securing a deal to deliver movies and TV shows to the last of three major consoles — Nintendo’s Wii — according to an agreement with Nintendo America.
The Internet-based video streaming service from Netflix will become available to US...
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Sony Puts Very Short Range Wireless Connectivity Into Cameras
Short range wireless standards are all the rage, but most of the activity has been around personal area networks that cover a few meters or yards.
Sony is targeting its would-be industry standard, TransferJet, at far shorter distances, about three centimeters (1.2 inches). The technology will...
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SiBeam Shows off Next Gen WirelessHD Chips
During the hoopla over 3D at this year’s CES, SiBeam quietly made considerable headway with its chipsets aimed at delivering high-speed WirelessHD. It showed existing Panasonic designs and added US TV maker Vizio to its customer base.
It was almost exactly a year ago to the day that...
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FCC Won’t Swipe Spectrum From Broadcasters
The FCC is dropping a plan that required broadcasters to give up some of their spectrum holdings for wireless broadband use.
While it was a plan that had made its way to the ears of broadcasters and has leaked out sufficiently, an FCC spokesperson said that it...
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For TV: Explaining Why ‘There’s an App for That’
Apple’s slogan for its iPhone commercials has sunk deep into the psyche of the consumer electronics industry, as every piece of connected CE develops a series of widgets, apps or a platform for apps. While some blame Apple for putting a heavy demand on every new...
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Tablets Heat up; Cool-Down Expected Soon
If CES is good for anything, it’s about the best outlet there is for generating hype. This year, tablet PCs took full advantage of the ballyhoo and are on everyone’s purchase list, despite most not being ready for store shelves.
Tablets, slates, wrist computers, hybrid screens; no...
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CES Trend: Media Becoming Bigger, More Social
After poring over our coverage of CES and the insurmountable stack of USB press kits given out at the show, there was an overwhelming desire to pull out an MP3 player and detach from the connected-CE space, an experience CES didn’t want anyone to have.
The big...
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DECE Selects Neustar to Operate DRM Rights Database
A coalition of studios and technology companies operating under the industry standard DRM called Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) has selected Neustar to operate a database that is intended to limit piracy.
The intent is to allow consumers to watch content they have purchased on all...
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3D’s Cold Shower
- Standards Merely Sub-Standard
- Content: Time, Location, Cost
As the smoke clears from the 2010 CES, it’s hard not to look at 3D as the next big thing happening soon in home entertainment. It’s hard not to get caught up in the frenzy and feel the excitement that...
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Vudu Ups Its CE Ante
At this year’s CES, Vudu announced an expansion to its collaborator list for its 1080p streaming media platform. Vudu is expanding into broadband home theaters, more HD TVs and new Blu-ray players from LG, Mitsubishi, Samsung, SanyoManufacturing, Sharp, Toshiba and Vizio. Vudu chairman and CEO Alain Rossmann said...
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Nine Inch Nails Gives Away 405GB of HD Concert Video
In March 2009, the heavy rock band Nine Inch Nails went on a US tour, collecting a total of 405GB of raw HD footage. The band has released all of that footage free to its fans and is offering them free Blu-ray and DVD copies. The rest of...
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Sony’s ‘Moon’ Wants No Oscars
In a bold and smart move, Sony has said it will not promote its underground hit “Moon” for an Oscar award because the movie does not come out on DVD until later this month. The studio wants to keep the film off the Net and avoid piracy that’s...
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Nintendo Jumps on 3D Bandwagon
The buzz around 3D isn’t just at CES this month. According to a recent interview with the Japanese site Asahi, Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata said that a new, upcoming Nintendo DS handheld is currently under development and will include at least one HD resolution screen and either a...
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Amazon Has a Blu-ray Sale
Amazon put nine Blu-ray players on sale last week following the CES announcements of dozens of new Blu-ray players. The new nine are all under $200, with a Sony player setting the cheapest mark at $125. Panasonic has a close model that runs $127. Some devices Web-enabled, but they lack...
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The CES Specter: Apple
The most buzzed about new product and the most talked about mobile — and the mobile with the most products aimed at it — weren’t on display this year, and their parent didn’t have a presence. Apple’s rumored iSlate tablet PC and the iPhone grabbed a lot of...
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Sony Accidently Gives Access to Film Still in Theaters
Sony Computer Entertainment accidently made the film “Armored” from Screen Gems available as a download on its PlayStation Network (PSN) for a few hours recently, despite the fact that the film is still in theaters and has no release date set for its DVD. Sony said it removed the film...
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Jamendo Puts up ‘For Sale’ Sign
Jamendo, a Web site featuring free music downloads for Creative Commons licensed content, is actively seeking a buyer or a merger partner and has reportedly been in talks with at least one possible buyer. The company last raised funds in mid-2007 and has been unsuccessful in recent funding attempts. Jamendo...
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Rovi’s Web Video Content Guide Broadens Service
Rovi has announced a number of new content partners for its TotalGuide media service, which attempts to provide a full listing of movies, TV shows and other video and audio content available for Web-enabled TV sets. Rovi added ShowTime, ZillionTV, Rhapsody and 15 European content providers for its service. Rovi’s...
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Intel Streams Video Into Program Guides
One of the most interesting uses of video came from Intel in what appeared to be a Web-based service that could easily be adapted to an IPTV service.
During CEO Paul Otellini’s CES keynote, he demonstrated an updated version of the TV channel guide. Instead of showing the traditional text information...
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YouTube 3D: The Free Riddle
The one partner that rarely showed up at CES was YouTube. Premium content was a big focus for the TV sets featuring 3D, but even many of the laptops and desktop PCs that were 3D-capable avoided going to everyone’s favorite user-generated content hub.
TV sets might’ve avoided YouTube because it’s not...
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DISH Launches Its TV Everywhere Suite
Satellite TV service provider DISH Network last week launched its “TV Everywhere” service — capitalizing on a very familiar name it trademarked last September — which will let its customers remotely access live and recorded TV programs through the Web and existing home networks.
DISH has partnered with EchoStar’s Sling Media...
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Microsoft Puts Stock in Xbox: 3D, Motion and Retro
During his CES keynote, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer discussed some of the company’s upcoming improvements to its Xbox 360 lineup.
What grabbed the most hype and applause was the announcement that the gesture-based control system, “Project Natal,” would ship for the game console in time for the 2010 year-end holiday season. The...
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Baidu Plans Chinese Hulu-Like Service
Chinese search giant Baidu has announced plans to create a new independent company to launch a licensed video portal of premium content for Chinese Internet users.
There has been a lot of speculation about this for quite some time, and Baidu confirmed most rumors with the news. The service will inevitably...
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Sony Gets Personal With Its New Dash
Sony rolled out a product that instantly spawned comparison to the upcoming Apple tablet — and losing to the so-far fictitious tablet where bloggers and tech journalists are concerned — and is definitely one of the top products to watch coming from this year’s CES.
Called a “personal Internet” viewer, Sony’s...
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CES Trend: Netbooks, Tablets and E-Readers! Oh, My!
If there’s one thing that might’ve outnumbered and out-buzzed 3D TV sets at this year’s CES, it was the new spate of netbooks, tablets and e-readers from just about every established name in computers — and quite a few brand-new players.
Some products were very hard to distinguish from each other,...
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Tivit Ready for Spring US Launch for Mobile TV on Wi-Fi
Sneaking out from CES is a device that has already made waves in the Far East, so far only in Japan: a simple mobile TV product called the Tivit. It adds a new dimension to place shifting by taking TV signals in — whether they’re designed for TV sets or...
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Live Mobile TV Flows to the iPhone
FLO TV, a mobile TV unit of Qualcomm, has partnered with Mophie to develop a new product that will bring live TV to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
The Mophie “juice pack” will be integrated with the new offering, giving the iPhone a more protective case and an extended battery...
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Nexus One: Much Ado About Nothing?
Is the Google Nexus One really a groundbreaking “superphone” (the term used by the company itself) or just an Android version of the HTC HD2 made to look like an iPhone? Some believe that it really won’t matter either way, because the pros and cons of the gadget itself were...
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Thumbplay Launches Mobile Music Offering
Mobile entertainment distributor Thumbplay entered the mobile music fray at this year’s CES, launching a beta version of a streaming music application first available on BlackBerrys and as an Adobe Air desktop application.
Thumbplay said it has millions of songs from the four major labels and from leading independent groups like...
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Google Fetches Local Info for Mobile Users
Google has integrated a new location-based feature for its search service when accessed by iPhone and Android-based mobiles, allowing users to discover content that is physically nearby.
The “Near me now” service provides information on local restaurants, coffee shops, bars and retail shopping — in Las Vegas it also pointed out...
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Clearwire WiMAX Reaches European Shores
While the world had its eyes turned toward Las Vegas, Clearwire had its hands busy across the Pond, rolling out a WiMAX service that will initially cover roughly 600,000 people.
The US-based operator had its first entrance into the European market at the end of the week, offering high-speed mobile broadband...
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Sprint Shocks CES With 4G Flash
Sprint hosted a flashy, star-studded CES event this year that had the audience anxiously waiting for the big reveal: the Overdrive.
There was a palpable confusion in the air as Sprint unveiled its new Wi-Fi router, and many in the audience expressed that they were looking for a new tablet or...
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Augmented Reality Apps Expected to Soar Through 2014
The yearly number of mobile downloads for augmented reality content is expected to rise from just under 1 million in 2009 to more than 400 million by 2014.
The new projection from Juniper Research said that the increased penetration will come from the development of new app stores, newer augmented reality...
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US Music Purchases Amp up in 2009
US music purchases were up a total of 2.1% in 2009, reaching 1.54 billion in album, single, video and digital track sales. Digital music in the States now accounts for 40% of total music purchases.
The news comes from Nielsen’s year-end report that is a bit of a mixed blessing for...
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2010 Could See Broadband Adoption Drag
In 2010, roughly four million US households are expected to become new high-speed Internet service customers, a 10% decline from 2009’s gains.
The forecast comes from Pike & Fischer, which estimates that roughly 65% of US homes will have broadband by the end of the year, totaling 77 million homes. Most...
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US Justice Department to Look at Comcast-NBC Universal Deal
The US Department of Justice has announced it will take the lead in the government’s peering into Comcast’s $30 billion proposed purchase of a controlling stake in NBCUniversal.
The agency will be taking a look into Comcast and might be giving a more scrutinizing glance because of a recent complaint that...
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Viacom, YouTube $1b Lawsuit Heats Up
Roughly three years after Viacom sued Google over copyright infringements on YouTube, the case appears to be getting some fresh legs.
Both sides have asked for a summary judgment in the case, meaning that the federal court may in fact make a clear decision in the billion-dollar lawsuit, based on the...
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Netflix Announces New Partners,Bigger Wait Times
Netflix announced five new consumer electronics partners that have integrated the video rental service into their Blu-ray players and Net-connected TVs.
The new partners include Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Sanyo and Funai, which covers the Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania and Emerson brands.
At this year’s CES, a multitude of new CE devices and software...
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Netgear Stora Simplifies Storage Access, Expands Reach
Netgear is leaving behind the notion of a multi-room home network and thinking about more of a multi-national home network, thanks to its new Stora.
In addition to all of its networking devices, Netgear’s Stora is an Internet-capable device that allows users access to all of their locally-saved music, movies and...
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MoCA and HomePlug Powerline Alliance Make Relationship Official
The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and the HomePlug Powerline Alliance entered a formal liaison agreement last week to better facilitate communication and information sharing between the two organizations. They have agreed to begin coordinating their efforts in “educational and informational programs and activities that promote new multimedia applications and...
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Netbooks Approach Instantaneous Booting
During the LG keynote, a sly announcement was made that its new X-120 netbook will be able to boot up and access content in seven seconds.
And it’s true.
Splashtop has created an “instant-on access” platform for an assortment of netbooks that works with a variety of operating systems and configures them...
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FCC Has Strong Plans for US Broadband
The federal government had a strong presence at this year’s CES, including FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who promised innovative, new ideas and approaches to encourage more competition for Net-enabled CE, especially Web content on TVs.
“One of the things we’re looking at hard in the broadband report, and everywhere, is the...
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Whatever the Apple Tablet Is, It Apparently Leaks Like a Sieve
This article first appeared Client Server News. For more information on the publication email paperboy@riderresearch.com
There may be little left for Apple to announce about its purported tablet or “iSlate” come January 27, a date change since January 26 was noised about. The rumor mill is slowly teasing out...
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3D Blu-ray Gets Approval, Logo
After getting ratified in December, the new Blu-ray 3D standard has just had its logo unveiled by the Blu-ray Disc Association.
The specification allows for 1080p video delivery to each eye while a user wears stereoscopic glasses. The standard will work with all the new 3D TVs coming out of CES,...
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The New Living Room Default: Net-Connected
- Video Conferencing, Widgets Now Standard
- Connections Coming Built-in to TVs and CE
- Whole Home is Next
While the few, hyped TV sets of CES 2010 were the 3D sets, the show marked a shift toward the new standard for an HD TV as the connected-set.
There was not...
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3D TV: The CES Hype and the CE Hope
- 5 Powerhouses, 5 Approaches
- Building the Ecosystem All at Once
- Moving From Kitschy to Relevant
There’s no doubt that 3D was the big story of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, but as the show wrapped up and the displays went back to their corporate homes, the consumer...
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Making It "Ruff Ruff" for the Telcos
DOCSIS 3.0 broadband technology is so important to the cablecos that their NCTA trade show’s official dog, a Dalmatian, is named "DOGSIS 3.0."

Instead of Rolling Over, They Say, ...
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UK Likes Its Net Radio
According to RAJAR’s fifth Net audio survey, 17.4 million UK residents, roughly one-third of the adult population, now say they have listened to an Internet radio station. Nearly 4.5 million say they use personalized Web radio services like Last.fm and Spotify, up from May’s...
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Mozilla To Browse the Mobile Web
Mozilla is said to be finalizing work on its first mobile version of its Firefox Web browser. The company said it hopes to release a candidate version this week with a final version out before year-end. The first browser will be configured for Nokia’s ...
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Public Enemy Finds Public-Funded Album Adversary
In October, Public Enemy gave the fan-based fundraising platform SellaBand a big endorsement by saying its next album would be made through funding on the platform. The group hoped to raise $250,000 and grabbed $50,000 in the first couple of weeks; donations seemed to...
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Epix Nears Carriage Deal With Cox Communications
Epix, the pay-TV and online movie channel coming from Viacom, Lionsgate and MGM, is close to signing its first distribution deal with a major TV provider, Cox Communications. The news comes from Bloomberg, which said Cox will begin airing the content next year. Cox...
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NBC Backs TV Show With Social Web, Game
NBC is promoting the next season of its TV series "Chuck" through the launch of a social game "Mission: Chuck Me Out" that rewards players for mentioning, viewing or recommending the series on social networking sites. Users log in to the game through Facebook,...
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Big Mac, Fries and Free Wi-Fi
Beginning January 2010, 11,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the States and some in Canada will offer free and unlimited access to their AT&T operated Wi-Fi hotspots. Another 3,000 locations don’t currently offer Wi-Fi. The company has been pushing its stores as alternatives to Starbucks coffee...
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Game Console Makers Likely to Increase Online Efforts
Makers of video game consoles — Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo — are likely to push their online content services even more. US sales of video games and consoles fell 7.6% last month compared with November 2008, according to NPD Group. Sales declined from $2.9...
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Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Amazon Duke It Out in Laptops, TVs
There’s a three-way race in the States for supremacy in consumer electronics among Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon.com, and it’s being duked out with price cuts. It looks like consumers are winning. Wal-Mart cut prices early and often. Best Buy this week said it will...
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YouTube Flick to Become Feature Film
In a harrowing Internet man-bites-dog tale, a four-minute, 48-second-long YouTube clip from Uruguay has landed its creator a $30 million contract to create a Hollywood sci-fi flick.
Fede Alvarez’s YouTube video "Ataque de Panico" (Panic Attack) showed giant robots invading and destroying Uruguay’s ...
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Comcast Goes to Xfinity and Beyond
Comcast has unmasked its Xfinity TV, formerly known as TV Everywhere, and is opening up the trial to give its subscribers access to extra TV programming on the Web.
Comcast’s offering so far includes around 2,000 hours of programming from 30 cable networks and...
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Paramount Pushes Physical Rentals Through 2014
Viacom’s Paramount Home Entertainment has expanded its distribution deal with Coinstar’s kiosk movie rental service Redbox through 2014 after recent test runs of a variety of distribution options.
Paramount, which Redbox has been sharing rental information and user data with, will now...
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TV-Web DRM Gets $15M Backing
Widevine, which specializes in forensic watermarking and DRM services on the content-owner side, announced this week that it raised $15 million in new funding.
Widevine currently powers a wide variety of Web-based movie services, including those powered by Sonic Solution’s CinemaNow, as...
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Paramount Sells Movie Bytes
Paramount Pictures is looking to make a few extra bucks by selling its older movies one clip at a time.
While DVD sales continue to fall and online video services eat up eyeballs and advertising dollars, Paramount is hoping its new storefront will attract...
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Pandora: 40m Strong and Growing
Someone’s been taking his vitamins.
Pandora Media said it will end the year with more than 40 million registered users and 15 million other users actively visiting its Web site — not bad for starting 2009 with only 20 million users.
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Seeqpod Sell-off, New Venture Likely
Seeqpod, a music search and streaming service that was sued by the major labels and ended up declaring bankruptcy this year, is closing a deal to sell off its assets. Seeqpod will sell as much as it can to "a large Japanese media company," its...
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MySpace, Imeem Deal Leaves 110,000 Indies Unpaid
More than 110,000 independent artists who used an imeem-backed online storefront will not be paid for their music sold through the service even after MySpace Music’s imeem buyout is complete.
Wired.com is reporting that MySpace’s purchase of imeem only covered...
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O2 Hits 150 Mbps in LTE Test
Telco giant Telefonica’s O2 is testing LTE with a few users in Slough, near London’s Heathrow airport. Testers have been given Huawei-made LTE dongles to use with their PCs.
A peak download speed of 150 Mbps was achieved in the Slough area,...
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Verizon Wireless Makes Wi-Fi Access Free in US, Canada & Mexico
- But Not to Its Smartphone Subscribers
Verizon Wireless is following the path that AT&T made by offering its Mobile Broadband and Global Access subscribers free access to its thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots in the US, Canada and Mexico. The plan is available for...
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Ericsson, STM First With Dual Mode LTE/3G Chip
Consumers want faster mobile broadband but don’t want the nightmare of having to carry two devices, one for LTE and another for existing 3G networks.
Network gear maker Ericsson and chip maker ST-Ericsson, a joint venture with STMicroelectronics, say they are the first...
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Viral Videos Favored Music in 2009
While the big buzz for viral content is often given to user-generated content and home videos of funny pets or stunts gone wrong, professionally produced content proliferated the major hotspots for viral videos in 2009.
Specifically, music videos were king.
Eight of the...
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Report: More Mobile Broadband Users in 5 Years Than Wireline
Do you see what I see? The mobile broadband world will soon pass the wireline broadband market in number of users.
Within five years, more consumers will use mobile broadband devices than wireline broadband, according to the Wall Street shop Morgan Stanley, which says...
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Net TVs Pick up Popularity Points
It’s no surprise that people want to watch more Internet video, but it will surprise some that consumers want to do so consistently on their TV sets.
A new report from consulting firm Deloitte found interest in Web content on the TV and says this...
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US HDTV Penetration up; HD Channels Not Following
One of the best reasons to make HD Web-based content available to connected TV sets could be that while the HDTV penetration in the US is approaching the 50% milestone, users are not readily switching to HD pay-for TV packages.
According to researcher DisplaySearch,...
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TV is Still King
While the content offering on the Web expands exponentially and box office revenues continue to soar to new heights, the US is still showing a preference for the glowing box in the living room.
According to Deloitte’s latest report, 34% of Americans say...
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Facebook’s Silver Lining
The youth may be the future, but the more experienced among us are beginning to present a very significant presence on the Web — and Facebook seems to have a tight grip on both.
The social networking site was the third most visited...
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WiMAX’s Momentum Increasing
- 3.9 Million Subscribers by Year-end
Like a sprout in spring, LTE popped up this week in Stockholm and Oslo with the world’s first public deployment — by TeliaSonera — but WiMAX isn’t going to slow down.
Infonetics...
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OECD Says Universal Fiber Broadband Would Pay for Its Cost
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says government investment in national fiber optic broadband "could be justified based on even small direct benefits in just four key sectors of the economy — electricity, health, education and transportation.
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Vimeo Sued for Lip-Syncing
Video hosting site Vimeo got a lot of buzz a few years ago when its employees did a lip-synced song as a recruiting video.
Now called "lip dubbing" on the service, the method has gotten rather popular there and elsewhere on the Web,...
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India Full of Pirate Plunder
India looks to have reached the number four spot of the world’s largest illegally downloading countries.
That ranking comes from the Motion Picture Distributors Association (MPDA), which has commissioned two recent reports on the country’s bad habits.
The first study, from DtecNet, tracked...
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Australia: Web Filter A’hoy!
The government of Australia plans to introduce an Internet filtering system in an attempt to block obscene and crime-linked Web sites, amid concerns that filters don’t work but do restrict individual and organizational freedoms.
On Tuesday it said it will introduce legislation next...
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Citigroup Misled Us, Says EMI Acquirer Terra Firma
The private-equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners has sued Citigroup in New York, claiming that Citigroup falsely scared it into increasing its offer in the 2007 purchase of record label EMI. Terra Firma said the bank knowingly misled it by saying Cerberus Capital Management...
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Channel 4, Talk Talk Join BBC-Led Project Canvas
- Venture to Be Called Digital Television Group
- Group Wants More Members
The companies that started Project Canvas — the BBC, ITV, British Telecom, (Channel) Five — whose goal is to develop a universal technology to access and play videos on Internet-connected TV...
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‘The CloudTV Revolution Is Now Coming to CE’
The natural evolution of technology leads to the centralizing of content by getting it from separate devices, whether it’s media servers in the home, Internet-based e-mail or the network DVRs that Cablevision got the courts to approve.
ActiveVideo Networks, calling...
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Blu-ray Players the New STBs?
Web-based home entertainment options are slowly collapsing that tangled mass on consumer shelves into one solid, connected set-top box — and some believe that box will begin life as a Blu-ray player.
New research from The Diffusion Group (TDG) sees the Blu-ray player...
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Oregan’s Onyx Browser Makes CE Debut in Cello’s TV Sets
Oregan Networks developed the Onyx browser that’s embedded in Cello’s new iViewer TV sets. Cello bundles free-to-view Web video services like YouTube, as well as social services such as Twitter and Facebook, in its iViewer packages. The sets also come with the BBC’s iPlayer...
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Sony: PlayStations Might Go Network-Only Storage
Sony engineers and designers are considering using network-only storage, according to Sony’s Masayuki Chatani, speaking to Nikkei Electronics Asia.
Chatani said the console previously featured a traditional hard drive because of the cost of Flash storage and the limits of network...
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Home Theater PCs Now Sliding Behind the TV
While Net-connected set-top boxes are all the rage, there is another option for getting all that great Web content to an HDTV set: a home theater PC located somewhere nearby.
These PCs traditionally take up a bit more space than the average STB and...
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Competing HD Connectivity Technologies Race to Completion
The following analysis first appeared in Faultline. For the complete report, please e-mail reports@riderresearch.com and ask for FL332.
The race to develop wired and wireless replacements of HDMI to connect nearby devices like a TV set and a Blu-ray player continues with four...
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FCC Offers 3 Proposals for Universal Broadband
Responding to a demand from the US Congress for universal broadband, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week made several recommendations:
1. Revising the country’s telco-funded subsidy program, the Universal Service Fund (USF), for rural phone service to add broadband funding. The USF...
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Google Heads up Consortium to Build 17 Tbps Undersea Cable in Asia
The oceans’ bottoms may soon be covered by wall-to-wall fiber optic cables.
The Southeast Asia Japan Cable Consortium intends to lay an 8,300 kilometer (5,000 mile) cable for broadband connectivity throughout Asia. It will initially link Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan.
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Nvidia Will Bring 3D Mainstream
With the 3D specifications for the Blu-ray format nearing formalization — let’s hope there’s no HD-DVD snafu — Nvidia said it’s preparing to bring 3D video entertainment to consumer’s homes in a very big way next year.
Nvidia says it will offer a complete...
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Spec Finished for 3D Versions of Blu-ray Players
It’s finished! The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) this week said the specification for "Blu-ray 3D" is completed and available. Producers will be able to issue 3D movies, TV shows and other videos with the certainty they can be played on any 3D-equipped Blu-ray player. In...
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LG Commits to 3D TV Sets
Like Sony and Panasonic before it, LG, the world’s second-largest maker of TV sets, has committed to produce 3D models. LG said it’ll sell a paltry 400,000 3D TVs in 2010 and 3.4 million in 2011. By comparison, it expects to sell 25 million LCD...
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NXP Makes Breakthrough in Chip for Affordable 3D TV Sets
Bringing new technologies such as 3D to consumers requires chips that are highly functional and low cost.
Philips spinout chipmaker NXP Semiconductors this week announced what it called the industry’s first video co-processor enabling 3D TV, frame-rate conversion (FRC) and...
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Product Categories We’ll Investigate at CES
- Internet connected CE gear like TVs, Blu-ray players, pay-TV set-top boxes and digital media adapters
- Widgets and other platforms that are embedded in CE products to help viewers access walled gardens on Internet content
- 3D including TV...
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US VP Biden Leads Charge Against IP Piracy
- ‘Flat, Unadulterated Theft’
- Promises National Effort
While the US is no longer a leader in making hardware — things like TV sets, cars and PCs — it still produces and exports a great deal of valuable intellectual property (IP) such as ...
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Sweden’s TeliaSonera First to Launch LTE
Help in the form of faster speeds, greater capacity and fewer disconnects for smartphone and portable PC users is on its way.
Sweden-based mobile operator TeliaSonera is the first to announce officially a publicly available 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network. It’s in the central...
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New Broadcom Chip for Smartphones Offers 1080p Video & 20-Megapixel Camera
- Smaller, 20% - 50% Less Power Consumption
- 4 - 6 Hours of 1080p Video Recording; 8 - 10 Hours of Mobile Playback
- Development of Digital Media Technology Inexorably Increasing
Broadcom’s new BCM2763 VideoCore IV chip for smartphones supports 1080p...
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3D Flick Avatar Premieres December 18
The much ballyhooed 20th Century Fox 3D flick "Avatar," produced by John Cameron, premieres December 18. It’s reportedly "must see" if you want to know whether 3D video will become primetime in homes. If it does, 3D will put a strain on existing broadband networks. There’s a view...
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Search Engine Ads Get a Bit Muddled
Google Music is a pretty new service, so it’s getting the word out by buying ad space on Microsoft’s Bing search service, showing how far Google will go to make the service a success and steal back as many eyeballs as it can. Seeing ads for Google on Bing doesn’t...
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Sigma Designs Reports a Bummer Quarter
Chipmaker Sigma Designs, which recently acquired home network chipmaker CopperGate, reported poor results for its third quarter. Revenue was $35.5 million, down by $15.8 million, or 31%, from the prior quarter and down $11.3 million, or 24%, from this time last year. It lost $2.3 million compared to...
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Black Friday Blu-ray Sales Double
Despite our dire predictions for Blu-ray, US consumers bought $69 million in Blu-ray discs over the Black Friday weekend − double last year’s figure. Total DVD sales, including Blu-ray, were down 8%, so traditional DVDs are really taking a beating. Why buy a DVD when the same quality,...
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Dubai Metro Goes WiMAX
UAE telecom provider du has launched a mobile WiMAX network in Dubai Metro’s transport system train carriages as well as in the Metro stations. Travelers will be able to access the Net via their Wi-Fi devices like smartphones and laptops at speeds up to 90 kilometers (55 miles)...
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MySpace Allows Others to Wade in Real-Time Data Stream
Myspace wants to become an entertainment hub so it is opening up all of its public user information to outside developers, hoping they’ll create services that show the latest trends and consistently link back to the MySpace site. The hub has released a data stream interface that gives real-time access...
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Consoles, Games Looking to the Web
Game consoles are looking to the Web for more content and features, which videogame makers have noticed and are preparing for. After a recent acquisition of the massively popular Facebook game developer Playfish, EA has said the digital market will beat out the physical as early as next...
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Mobile Orchestra Develops Own Apps
Cell phones had better be turned on when class starts for the orchestra at the University of Michigan. Students in its Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble have spent the semester developing their own music instrument apps; some mirror real instruments, and others seem a hybrid of a few. The...
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Apple Releases ITunes LP and Extras for All
Despite many initial claims about thousands of dollars being charged for the API and development of iTunes LP and movie Extras offerings, Apple is releasing a how-to for free. Apple released an SDK and a series of guides for services and best practices − even one concerning how...
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PlayStation 3 Gets More Free Music Videos
Some PlayStation 3 users will soon begin getting access to roughly 10,000 music videos all in 1080 HD, thanks to a Sony deal with Vidzone. Vidzone, which is London-based but heavily tied to New Zealand, will be a free download, music on-demand service that features adverts. The service...
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YouSee Launches Portal for Web TV
Denmark cableco YouSee has begun offering its customers free access to 30 of the country’s most popular TV channels for the PC via an online portal.
In a TV Everywhere-esque move, YouSee is launching this initial offering for all. It eventually plans to fully mirror its three...
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YouTube Launches Sports Section
YouTube is preparing to launch a "Sports Hub" through a partnership with SportAccord, a group that represents global sports organizations, and will have roughly 2,000 videos by next spring. The videos will cover clips and full versions of matches, competitions, interviews and educational materials from a wide range...
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Web Moves Nobel Speeches From Invite-Only to Open for All
For the majority of its history, the viewing of lectures and acceptance speeches of Nobel laureates was reserved for special and honored guests specifically invited to Oslo and Stockholm − and citizens of Sweden and Norway with the right TV packages − but this year, the analog dragon...
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YouTube Ends Download Tests
YouTube has ended its experimental free- and paid-video downloads, according to an e-mail sent out to its download partners.
The program, launched in February, allowed some producers to sell or give away video downloads and allowed them to download their own content as MP4...
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Vevo Launches With Fanfare, Viewers
The BBC is the latest media partner to jump in on an EU-funded research project using BitTorrent to test Web-based video delivery. The research comes from P2P-Next.
P2P-Next’s new trial streams TV show episodes in HD quality through BitTorrent.
If this and following tests go well,...
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Vevo Launches With Fanfare, Viewers
The BBC is the latest media partner to jump in on an EU-funded research project using BitTorrent to test Web-based video delivery. The research comes from P2P-Next.
P2P-Next’s new trial streams TV show episodes in HD quality through BitTorrent.
If this and following tests go well,...
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Vevo Launches With Fanfare, Viewers
- Site Overwhelmed by ‘Magnitude’ on Day One
After a star-studded launch event in New York City, the label- and YouTube-backed music video site Vevo is now live.
Vevo is a premium online music video service powered by YouTube’s video technology. Users can watch...
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YouTube: Light as a Feather
While its been running full speed at 3D, and 1080p and the HDTV set in many living rooms, YouTube has also been quietly taking a lighter approach for users on those netbooks that can’t quite deliver HD quality video.
Launched within its TestTube, YouTube’s new products incubator...
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Alicia Keys Streams Album on Facebook
Fans of Alicia Keys will be updating their Facebook status more than usual this week as Keys releases her newest album, "The Element of Freedom," exclusively through the social networking giant. Fans can visit Keys’ fan page on Facebook and stream the entire album free of charge, though...
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Venture Capital Gets Smaller for Music Services
Some of the bigger names in digital music services that grabbed the big bucks for their launches or improvements over the past couple of years were imeem, iLike and Lala − and they’ve all been bought out.
MySpace picked up iLike, rolled most of its...
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MySpace Acquires Imeem; Will Move Playlists, Users
Social networking site turned entertainment hub MySpace made good on earlier promises and finished its purchase of imeem - and immediately began redirecting users to MySpace’s own Web site.
So far, the roughly "16 million" users are being transitioned to the MySpace site, but their imeem playlists...
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Pandora Set to Groove in the Auto
The Web radio service Pandora is preparing an aggressive jump into the automotive space and says significant integration with car radios and controls are coming − and coming soon.
Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, at a panel at the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, said Pandora will initially...
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Sales of Vinyl LPs Move Up a Tad
Can it possibly be that vinyl LPs are making a comeback in the era of iPods and downloads? Is the tin-ear generation beginning to realize that vinyl sounds better than digital?
The New York Times picked up on a recent report from Nielsen Soundtrack that said LP...
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Apple Buys Lala; Rattles Online Music Industry
The rumors of Apple buying music service Lala are coming true, and as the news spreads, the Internet is slowly turning into some new streaming beast with a mix of joy and dread.
Lala is a pay-for music service that allows users two options: 1) pay for...
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Maxlinear Unveils Diversity Chip for Broadcast Mobile TV
US radio chip designer MaxLinear has launched a new diversity chip for ISDB-T handsets in the Japanese market, a move that promises to cut around $2 from the bill of materials for providing mobile TV in a handset and eliminate external antennas, according to Faultline.
While the...
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Maxlinear Unveils Diversity Chip for Broadcast Mobile TV
US radio chip designer MaxLinear has launched a new diversity chip for ISDB-T handsets in the Japanese market, a move that promises to cut around $2 from the bill of materials for providing mobile TV in a handset and eliminate external antennas, according to Faultline.
While the...
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Mobile TV Market Resumes in China after 6-Month Pause
Mobile TV development and deployment in China has resumed after a six-month moratorium, according to Faultline, which says the plan is shifting through the gears but is still not cruising.
Shipments accelerated to 2 million in the last quarter, all using TD-SCDMA technology.
New entrants are...
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FLO TV Opens Purse to Get Top Disney Content
Qualcomm subsidiary FLO TV has reached into its coffers and bought rights to prime Disney content that may finally begin to attract viewers to its MediaFLO network in the US.
The new offerings are a simulcast Disney channel, bolstered by some original Disney Movies,...
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Consumers Want Mobile TV. Period.
Told you so. Several times, too.
Almost 90% of mobile phone users are interested in viewing live local news programming on their handsets, and 47% are likely to buy handsets with mobile TV, according to study by Magid Media Labs in partnership with the Open Mobile Video...
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Ustream Brings Live Broadcasting to the IPhone
- Introduces Video Recording for Older Models
With iTunes having more than 100,000 apps, it’s getting hard to stand out − but some like Ustream are doing that.
Ustream has been garnering a lot of attention by allowing music artists to stream concerts, music...
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Nokia Lands Chinese Partner to Develop Content and Services
Nokia and the Chinese investment company New Alliance have formed a 50/50 joint venture called Nokia Alliance Internet Services. It’ll help Chinese companies develop and distribute content and services for Nokia’s Ovi mobile broadband service.
Nokia executive VP for services Niklas Savander said China is...
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The IPod Touch: Apple’s Ace in the Hole
Planning to tackle the smartphone market? Why not grab a little bit more of the market with a device or two that does all the fun extras and comes with no network hassles or unexpected coverage holes.
Apple has taken this approach and is scoring well, according...
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Verizon Wireless: LTE Ecosystem Will Be Larger Than WiMAX
Verizon Wireless ’ executive director of networks Chris Neisinger said at a meeting of the WiMAX Forum that his company selected LTE as its 4G technology because it believed LTE will ultimately have a larger ecosystem of devices and network gear, Wireless Watch reports.
Neisinger...
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Alcatel-Lucent Signs up Bouygues Telecom for LTE
The battle wages on by wireless network equipment makers to sign up mobilcos for LTE network gear. France’s Bouygues Telecom will use LTE gear from France’s Alcatel-Lucent in a trial deployment in several locations in western France.
Alcatel-Lucent said it has signed up 19 mobile phone companies...
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More LTE Tests: Australia and Singapore
Mobilecos perhaps see that launching the much faster LTE mobile broadband technology will give them a competitive edge.
Australia-based Telstra is testing LTE mobile in its Hong Kong subsidiary CSL Limited. Singapore-based SingTel is testing LTE in its Australian subsidiary Optus.
Telstra said it doesn’t need...
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Cox Begins Testing Sprint’s Mobile Broadband in 3 Markets
Cox , the only major cableco to build its own mobile broadband network, has started testing the service in three markets: Hampton Roads, Virginia; Omaha, Nebraska; and Orange County, California.
Cox paid $304.6 million for spectrum licenses that cover much of its footprint. It has...
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The Last HDTV Report
- 45% Increase in Worldwide LCD HD TV Sales in October
This will be, we hope, the last time we make the point that HD TVs and HD videos have become the minimum expectation in video quality for consumers. As a result of consumers’ love...
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1b Mobile Internet Devices by 2013
The number of mobile Internet devices (MIDs) will surpass the 1 billion mark worldwide by 2013 as more consumers and businesses pick up these devices due to increased functionality and lower prices.
According to IDC, the MID explosion will go hand-in-hand with increased mobile Internet users and...
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Give Us This Day Our Daily Data
The average American snacks on about 34GB of data and information every day when looking at all forms of media, a 350% increase over the past three decades, according to the University of California.
According to the report, the daily consumption includes around 100,000 words − both...
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Portable Device Shipments up 10%
While the economy is proving to be a persistent sour note for many, portable electronic devices are expected to grow 10% in 2009 to more than 400 million units shipped, according to the latest report from In-Stat.
This category includes digital radio, e-readers, handheld game consoles, MP3...
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The Pirate Bay Stops Fighting
In November, a judge ruled that The Pirate Bay (TPB) must remove all of its copyright infringing torrents from its Web site and block access to Dutch users.
While TPB was considering an appeal, the trio behind the site subsequently announced it will close down and, according...
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O Tenenbaum, Your Money Green Delights Labels
A US federal judge has ordered graduate student Joel Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 in compensation to the major record labels and to destroy his illegally downloaded songs after finding him guilty of copyright infringement for file-sharing.
The labels were also pressing for Tenenbaum to be ordered to...
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Bye-bye Digital Media Adapters; We Hardly Knew Ye
- Internet Connectivity Is Added to TVs, Blu-ray Players, Gaming Consoles
Digital media adapters (DMAs), those boxes that connect TV sets to PCs and allow Internet-delivered videos to be shown in the living room, came along before most consumers wanted to watch homemade YouTube videos...
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Boxee Announces Its STB; Everyone Asks about Hulu
Anyone got any room left near the TV set for another set-top box?
On Monday night, the Internet video for the TV service Boxee got a crowd together in Brooklyn to demonstrate its latest service update and announce an upcoming Boxee set-top box. It’s the company’s first...
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UK-Made TV Set Comes With BBC IPlayer
UK-based Cello Electronics has started shipping a TV set called iViewer, which has an Internet connection and the BBC’s iPlayer embedded. It needs, of course, a broadband connection.
Marks and Spencer stores will have the product exclusively, at least for this holiday shopping season.
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TVs Catching Internet Flu
Financial news channel CNBC’s tech expert John Quain this week demonstrated the Internet connectivity of an LG 50-inch TV set with prices ranging from $1,150 to $1,800. Caught between the technology waves of HD and 3D, TV makers need a difference-maker and for the 2009 holiday season, that’s...
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Three Wireless HDMI-Like Standards Duke It Out
- WHDI Still Thinks It Can Outshine Wi-Fi for Video
"Wanna-be" wireless standards battle while the tangle of cables in, around and behind the home’s entertainment center continues to grow like a cancer. The fight is to become the universal standard for wireless high speed, short-range connections...
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Seagate Launches Solid State Drive, Finally
Solid-state drives (SSDs), which store everything in memory chips, took another step closer to becoming an option for PCs this week when Seagate, the world’s largest maker of traditional disk drives, launched its Pulsar solid-state drives.
SSDs use flash memory, which can boot, retrieve data and load...
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Labor Proposes £6 ($10) Annual Broadband Tax
Not to bring up a sore and long-forgotten matter, but the UK once taxed sunshine back when an Irish home’s taxes were based on the size of its windows. Now it’s the phone line.
UK Chancellor Alistair Darling has put £6 ($10) a year broadband tax on...
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Two New Undersea Cables to Connect Asia to the Rest of the World
The world keeps getting bigger wires, larger "pipes" that will allow entertainment and information producers to distribute contents directly to billions of consumers worldwide with the click of a mouse.
Singapore’s StarHub this week launched the first undersea cable linking Singapore directly to the United States. Called...
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DSL 2013: Double and Triple Speeds Possible, But Limited Deployment
By Dave Burstein of DSL Prime
John Cioffi, CEO of ASSIA, which specializes in high-performance DSL designs using Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM), amazed the FCC hearing with talk of 200 Mbps bonded VDSL with DSM3, which one carrier believes will make fiber unnecessary. Infineon and ECI in...
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Hollywood’s Daily Variety to Start Charging for Access Again
The Hollywood insider publication Daily Variety will return to its roots when it phases in charges to access news on its Web site. It said that when it made the access free in 2006, the number of Web visitors increased − but not substantially its online advertising revenue. ...
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AT&T Exec Upbeat on U-Verse Pay-TV & IPhone
- Promises Congestion on Wireless Network Will Be Cleared
In markets where AT&T has advertised its U-verse pay-TV service for 24 months or more, its penetration rate is more than 20%, Ralph de la Vega, who runs AT&T’s wireless and consumer operations, said in a meeting with...
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Consumers Now Drive the Growth and Innovation in Technology
By Charles Hall
The 1990s was a decade that saw the total computerization of businesses and other organizations with PCs going on every desk. The typical company now has more than one PC per employee.
In the current decade of the "aughts," it was consumers that...
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Netgem Spins Out VideoFutur Entertainment Group
Fresh from landing a major deal with Telstra for its Internet-capable T-Box set-top box (STB), the France-based Netgem Group is splitting into two companies: one with technology and the other distributing video content via stores, kiosks, the Net and on-demand.
The consumer-focused audio/visual publishing and distribution operations...
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Comcast Seems Certain to Right the NBCU Ship
- NBCU CEO Zucker: ‘We Haven’t Done a Good Enough Job’
- NBC TV Dropped to Last in Viewership
- GE’s Financial Troubles Held NBCU Back
In the prelude to and in the aftermath of Comcast’s proposed and agreed to acquisition of NBCU from General...
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New WiGig Wirelessly Connects CE Gear at 7 Gbps
- Bye, Bye HDMI Cables
- Connect STBs, Smartphones, Blu-ray Players, PCs, Digital Cameras
- Copy a DVD in 15 Seconds
- Intel Led Alliance Promises CE Products in 2011
The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance, backed by the likes of chipmaking giants Intel, Broadcom, Atheros...
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A Glimpse Into IDC’s 2010 Crystal Ball
The New York Times preview of IDC’s 2010 predictions include: an Apple iPad digital tablet; pricier but higher function netbooks; 300,000 iPhone applications by year-end; 50,000 to 75,000 apps...
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Netbooks, iPhones/iPods, HDTVs, eBook Readers Fill Holiday Shopping Carts
Netbooks look certain to outsell iPhones and iPods this holiday shopping season — in revenue if not in units. TV sets are likely to be the biggest revenue producer, however, ...
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Micron to Ship Faster SSD Drives
PC users who want faster starts and file copying plus quick loading of applications need look no further than buying a PC with a solid-state drive (SSD) or adding one as a...
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Panasonic Sees Its Future in Solar & Energy-Saving Products
Sony sees its future as 3D video and Internet-connected CE gear. Panasonic, the world’s largest maker of plasma TV sets, sees its future in solar power and ...
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Spanish Cablecos May Follow Clearwire Model to National 4G Network
It may work in Spain, but it hasn’t worked in the States, at least not yet. Four of Spain’s largest Spanish cablecos — Ono, Euskaltel, R and Telecable — are emulating the...
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Redbox Gets Smart
Redbox has launched a new iPhone app this week that will publish codes for people to receive free DVD rentals, generally on Mondays. The app will send users to their nearest ...
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NY Uses Xbox, Playstation for Emergency Broadcasts
New York state officials are revamping their emergency alert broadcast system for natural disasters, emergency situations and terror attacks to include alternative media devices,...
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7digital Opens Finland, Norway Storefronts
The UK digital music store provider 7digital has launched new stores in Norway and Finland, selling more than 8 million tracks of CD-quality MP3s. 7digital has existing ...
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Blu-ray, DVD Combine for ‘Flipper’ Discs
Universal Studios Home Entertainment said it will release its first "flipper" discs — which contain both the Blu-ray and DVD versions of a film on ...
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Chamillionaire Goes to Vidly Express After YouTube Flap
Musical artist Chamillionaire was recently made to sit in a corner by his label Universal Music after uploading a video to YouTube and letting fans embed it throughout the Web.
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TV Everywhere Keeps Pay-TV Alternatives Out of the Market
Marvin Ammori, a media law professor at the University of Nebraska, told The Washington Post that services like TV Everywhere could keep start-ups out of ...
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The New Music Service for Television
Operators and content owners could work together to produce new music video TV channels by creating genre-based stations that fill the gap of previous music-related TV ...
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Comcast, Time Warner Ready to Launch TV Everywhere
Comcast, still a year or so away from taking over NBC Universal, will present its TV Everywhere service this month. Time Warner is expected to follow shortly ...
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Arqiva’s SeeSaw Online Video Service Gets BBC Content
The SeeSaw online video service was developed by the BBC under the name Project Kangaroo but was forced to sell it to Arqiva when the UK regulator Ofcom refused to let...
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Sony: PlayStation Will Get a ‘Premium Level’ for Content
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO Kaz Hirai has confirmed that the company will be adding a "premium level" to the PlayStation Network (PSN) in an effort ...
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YouTube Adds Captions for Deaf Viewers
Google has begun adding automatic captions to videos available via YouTube in order to give deaf viewers full access to the service.
Ken Harrenstien, a hearing impaired ...
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MySpace Music Hits the UK
MySpace has finally launched its MySpace Music in the UK this week, expanding its ad-supported music audio and video-streaming service in hopes to drive up traffic with its ...
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Background Music Gets a Label, Seeks Talent
Australian label Moo Moo Music supplies sounds and songs to background music systems, and it is currently on the hunt for new talent.
By looking for talent from emerging ...
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Country Music Sees the Benefit of Apps
While the music industry is always looking for the next big thing to drive sales amid its tumultuous seasons, it is starting to look at smartphones and their apps as a...
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Concert Webcasts Pick up Steam; Questions Arise
Webcasts of live and recorded concerts, music videos and recording studio sessions have been very hit-or-miss and have ranged from blurry, pixilated videos of Madonna to ...
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Euro Alliance Forms Buyers Club for DVB-H Mobile TV Handsets
- The Need for Low-Cost Mobile TV Handsets Makes for Strange Bedfellows
- 15 Mobile Operators Dangle Large 100K to 500K Orders
- Clarify What They Want
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There IS Consumer Demand for Mobile TV
Mirics, which makes chips for wireless devices to receive TV broadcasts — thus pushing an agenda of driving broadcast TV through netbooks and PCs — reported that ...
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Archos Opens up for 3rd Party Apps
The next thing we’ll have is programmers writing applications to run on refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. France-based Archos has opened its newest portable media...
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Android Phones Go Adult Content
The biggest difference between a strict app approval process and a more lax one got highlighted this week: adult content on mobiles.
For the iPhone, there’s no app ...
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Clearwire Meets Promise for 2009 Opening Schedule
Clearwire has met its promise of being available to 30 million people, the final two markets being Seattle and Honolulu, by year-end.
It says it’ll quadruple its ...
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Virgin Media’s Mobile Broadband Goes Faster
Faster, faster, said the smartphone user.
Virgin Media has begun offering 7.2 Mbps mobile broadband via a USB modem. It’s offered in a number of separate plans...
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Hulu, BBC by the Numbers
Faultline pointed out that, while the BBC revealed record numbers for viewing on its iPlayer this week, by comparison with Hulu, it was a relatively weak showing.
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Peeking at Digital, Physical Musical Parrying
Harvard Business School Professor Anita Elberse has published a new study claiming the drop of around 33% of total weekly sales of any album and its songs are linked to consumers ...
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Fastest Growth for Pay-TV in Europe Will Be Cablecos
- 90M Pay-TV Subscribers by 2012
Two myths that exist at many US companies are that European households only have one TV set and few Europeans subscribe to cable...
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BRICs to Have 300m Broadband Subscribers by 2013
Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries), with 42% of the world’s population, will have 139 million broadband connections at the end of 2009, according to Strategy ...
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AT&T, Verizon Wireless Agree to Fight Outside
AT&T and Verizon Wireless have decided to settle their disputes in the marketplace rather than in the New York and Georgia courts. Their suits/countersuits dealt with which had the best, biggest and...
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Internet Giants Opposes Arbitrary Changes to UK Copyright Laws
Internet gargantuans Google, Facebook, Yahoo and eBay plus other Internet companies have told the UK government they’re opposed to a proposed law that...
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Italian Police Hit Pirate Disc Factory
At the end of November, police in Italy raided a factory that was manufacturing counterfeit discs shipped and sold throughout Europe.
The Italian Fiscal Police raided a ...
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Zorap Snags Funding for Video, File-sharing Rooms
Zorap, a "coming soon" service that allows users to video chat and share files, is slowly coming to life though it seems to be biding its time.
The service...
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Virgin Media Beats Rovi in UK Suit Over Patents
- Throws Cloud Over Future Rovi Revenues
It is a litigant’s nightmare and a lawyers dream to try to sue anyone in a European court for a patent ...
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Australia Considers Download Royalties
Australia’s Copyright Tribunal has started discussions over the country’s digital download royalty rates for authors’ rights as a case from 2007 finally reaches the bench.
The Australasian Performing ...
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Japan Jails 10 for Share-ing
Authorities in Japan have arrested 10 users of Share, a popular file-sharing application, on copyright violations, according to the Anti-Counterfeiting Association.
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Nordija Goes Widgets-Only for Set-Top Boxes
- From TV Channels to Web Browsing
-‘Easily Ported to Many Devices’
TV and set-top box widgets are all ...
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Spotify Isn’t Eyeing Consoles But Definitely Looking at TVs
The latest buzz around the music phenom Spotify is that it is aiming at game consoles and next-gen CE devices.
Spotify has said that the rumor isn’t ...
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Nintendo Wii Gets Pay-for VOD
Nintendo is delivering on its promises — and quite a few rumors — and has rolled out a new pay-per section for its Japanese VOD offering "Wii no Ma" or Wii...
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YouTube’s TV Talks Heat Up
YouTube has been going after premium content for some time, but new reports show it is looking at TV network content in a new way.
YouTube is in early...
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Thomson Gets Bankruptcy Protection
France-based technology and media services company Thomson, which owns Technicolor and other digital media operations, has obtained protection from creditors so it can...
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DS2’s Powerline Chips Get Embedded in Woxter’s Digital Media Adapter
Companies such as Entropic, Intellon, CopperGate, DS2 and Broadcom, which make chips for wireline home networking gear, have to take two paths to succeed with ...
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Africa-to-Europe Undersea Cable Gets Public Service Partner
The ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) submarine cable system that’s being built by a consortium of companies will stretch 14,000 kilometers (8,400 miles) from France to South ...
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Qualcomm, Philips, Vodafone Step up Mobile Healthcare Initiatives
Coming soon, according to Wireless Watch, are devices that will allow remote monitoring of healthcare for users to manage their own fitness and their medical records. The ...
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Six More Brazilian Cities Shatter the Digital Divide With Free Wireless Broadband
- ‘A Computer With a Broadband Connection Is Like A School Inside Every Home’
- ‘Transform the State of Rio De Janeiro Into a Digitally Intelligent State’
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Feds Delay Awards of Broadband Subsidies
If US broadband service providers could only build broadband networks as fast as they can produce requests for government subsidies!
The US’ NTIA, one of the ...
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Clearwire Lacks Compelling WiMAX Devices
- But Will Have 600,000 Subscribers by Year-end 2010
Must-have, low-cost devices are no-shows for WiMAX. That’s a song that’s been played in The ...
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A ‘Cash for Dial-up’ Stimulus Is Needed to Close the Digital Divide
After World War II, then US President Dwight Eisenhower, impressed with Germany’s autobahn, got the US Congress to appropriate substantial funds to build a high-speed, ...
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Panasonic: 3D Winter Olympics Coming
Panasonic, the official audio and video sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, will use the event to promote an upcoming line of "advanced 3D products," which means TVs, ...
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Sony Counting on 3D for Revival in TV Sets
In four years — 2013 — one-third to one-half of new Sony TV sets will be 3D capable, according to Sony executive deputy president Hiroshi Yoshioka in an ...
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Murdoch Wins Round One Against Google
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch has won round one in his attack on Google and other news aggregators for using others’ content to make money.
Google says it has...
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Comcast Becomes World’s Largest Media Company by Acquiring NBC Universal
- The Media Industry Will Never Be the Same
- Gets the Content It Wants, When It Wants It and on the Devices It Wants It On
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Creating an ‘ITunes for Magazines’
- Isn’t There an App for That?
Time Inc, Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith are developing plans to create an "iTunes for magazines," according to The New York Times, citing...
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Cableco Charter Emerges From Bankruptcy With a Smile
- Quarterly Revenue up 3.5% to 41.7B
- Monthly ARPU Jumps 8.2% to $115
Charter Communications, the major US...
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Investors Should Beware of Aol.
The Wall Street Journal’s Martin Peers this week wrote a very critical article about Aol. (the company’s new name), saying that Time Warner and shareholders will be better off...
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Digital Divide Between Age Groups & Generations Is Disappearing
Boomers are just as likely, if not more likely, to use technology in the same way and as frequently as Millennials, according to the "The 2009 Media Engagement ...
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Universal Broadband Comes to Markets with Tens and Hundreds of Households
- ‘Free’ Unlicensed Spectrum for WiMAX
- Alvarion Finds WiMAX’s Sweet Spot
- ‘The New Wireless Broadband Experience’
The goal is to have 100% broadband availability, right? Universal access? Every home?
To get there...
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TiVo Working on HD STB with Virgin Media
TiVo appears to be slowly getting its desire: exiting DVR manufacturing and licensing its software and designs to others. This week, it said it’s working with the UK cable king Virgin Media to develop interactive programs that’ll be in Virgin...
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Swedes Buying More Music
Music sales in Sweden are on the rise, and depending on who you ask, it’s either due to all the piracy legislation and court battles or the introduction of better legal alternatives like the four new physical retailers that have opened...
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Swisscom’s Bluewin TV Becomes Swisscom TV
Swisscom is changing the name of its IPTV pay-TV service, which uses Microsoft’s Mediaroom software, from Bluewin to Swisscom TV. After three years, it has almost 200,000 customers. ...
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Tories: Make Local News Coverage More Internet-like
The out-of-power Conservative party wants the government to help start about 80 local news channels that would be manned by volunteers. It sounds like Google’s YouTube Direct, which allows TV and online news editors to get free videos from “citizen...
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ARM Sees Strong Demand for Smartphones, e-Book Readers and the Like
ARM, which designs processor chips that go in mobile handsets and other devices, said companies that use its designs to make chips are expected to have a good 2010. President Tudor Brown told Dow Jones Newswires that ARM’s conversations with...
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All ‘In Our Time’ Episodes Available on the Net
The BBC is making every episode of Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” from Radio 4 available on the Net. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot ...
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NBCU/Comcast/Vivendi/GE Matter Still Unresolved
Vivendi with its 20% ownership of NBCU is still the block that’s preventing consummation of GE’s sale of a majority of NBCU shares to Comcast. Vivendi also has the right to offer its NBCU shares in an IPO but that could...
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News Corp, 2 Local Papers Consider Blocking Google Searches
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, the London Times and other newspapers worldwide, the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are considering action to block Google from indexing and offering their articles. Instead they’ll do a deal with...
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EBay Completes Sale of Skype
EBay has completed the sale of 70% of Skype for $2.75 billion to a group of investors and the Janus Friis/Niklas Zennstrom-owned Joltid. Here’s hoping Skype now has 100% ownership or at least 100% control of the Global Intelligence software...
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Netflix Grabs Some Indies
IFC Entertainment has signed a deal with Netflix to distribute 53 independent films on the service. The titles are already available for streaming on PCs and TVs, marking the first expansion of IFC content to the digital space on Netflix. ...
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Epix: First Original Series Pilot Coming in 2010
Epix, the pay-TV and Web joint venture from Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, has announced that the pilot for its first original series will air early next year. The series, “Tough Trade,” will begin production for its pilot next month....
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MySpace Music Makes a Merlin Deal
MySpace Music, the joint venture from the major record labels and News Corp’s MySpace, has signed a global licensing agreement with independent label Merlin. It is uncertain if Merlin, which represents 10% of global music sales, will get an equity...
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Project Canvas Could Be Delayed to 2011
Project Canvas may not be available until 2011, according to the BBC’s head of future media and technology Erik Huggers in a Daily Telegraph report.
The obstacle, he said is the BBC Trust, which is...
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Freesat Boxes get iPlayer
The BBC will begin limited testing of its iPlayer service on Humax-manufactured Freesat STBs on December 7. About one-third of Freesat users have a Humax box. A trial with the ITV catch-up service will begin in early 2010.
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Verizon Says Hulu ‘Won’t Matter’
For the US, Hulu is the Internet video service that consumers most want to get on the TV set and content producers can’t try harder to keep off, but according to Verizon Communications CEO Iven Seidenberg, Hulu “won’t matter” a...
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UK YouTube Gets Shows
YouTube has now grouped its premium content on its UK site under a “Shows” section, combining clips and full programs from Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, Fremantle and others.
At launch, it included around 5,000...
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50 Cent Snags 255k Fans for Online Movie Premiere
Rap artist 50 Cent is the latest to sign up and promote with the online Webcasting firm Ustream, though unlike most musicians, the artist is using the service to premiere his new movie, “Before I Self Destruct,” instead of a live...
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PogoPlug as the ‘Personal Cloud’
E-Book readers aren’t the only single-use Internet-connected devices.
There’s also the $129 PogoPlug. It connects — via the home’s network, a media server or USB drive — to the Net so users can share with...
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Live Nation to Sell Concert Videos on iTunes
Live Nation has announced a partnership with Apple to begin to develop a live music offering that will sell recorded and filmed concerts for purchase on iTunes. Apple has been stepping up its music-related video offering lately, and this addition...
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UK Radioplayer to Offer 400 Stations Online
The BBC, working with the country’s radio stations, will in January launch an Internet radio player called the UK Radioplayer. It will be open for every Ofcom-licensed UK station to use. It’s expected to have more than 400 stations on ...
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Guvera Gets Universal Music, Sets February US Launch
Universal Music Group has agreed to license its top artists’ work for free, legal downloads on Guvera Limited’s ad-supported guvera.com. Guvera is picking up its stream before its February 2010 US launch.
Originally...
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Pandora’s Mobile Users Picking Up Steam
The Web radio service Pandora has said repeatedly that mobile is the way forward for the service and the avenue for a lot of purchases and usage.
The company has given out some new numbers, via...
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Mog Will Launch Music Subscription Service Next Week
Mog, a network of music-centered blogs that host content and receive 10 million monthly visitors, has said its subscription-based music streaming service will launch next Wednesday, December 2. The service will come with unlimited streams from its catalog of tracks...
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Rhapsody Could Go Dust in the Wind
A recent SEC filing from RealNetworks appears to state that it and MTV are in talks about restructuring their joint venture participation in the music service Rhapsody.
According to the filing, the move is...
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Apple’s Runaway Apps
Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller recently said Apple receives more than 10,000 new app submissions each week. This is the same number of total apps that the Android Marketplace has and roughly ten times the amount of...
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Google Increases Mobile Movie Search
Study after study has shown that mobile searches are trending toward local entertainment and restaurant information, so Google has streamlined its movie search function for the iPhone, Palm WebOS and Android-powered devices.
Users can simply...
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Spotify Reaches Symbian Ears
Spotify, the European streaming music service that could, has introduced a new application for the Symbian operating system, giving it reach into Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung mobiles and covering about 50% of the smartphone market.
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Belgacom Picks Huawei for Integrated 2G, 3G, LTE Network
LTE mobile broadband and China-based network gear maker Huawei keep on marching hand-in-hand.
Belgacom, the Belgian incumbent telco, has selected Huawei to build a nationwide integrated 2G, 3G and LTE network with a “Single Radio...
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TeliaSonera to Build LTE Network in Nokia’s Home Country
TeliaSonera’s Finnish operation Sonera has won an auction for the frequencies it needs in Finland to deploy a 4G LTE mobile broadband network — with the first pilot in 2010’s first quarter.
Sonera said the...
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Gridlock Beats Mobile
One of the most popular iPhone regions in the US is the San Francisco Bay Area, which houses a large number of iPhone app developers and Apple itself. This area often has extremely sluggish 3G connections for the mobile due to...
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Telecom Italia World’s First With LTE
Telecom Italia says its pre-commercial trial of 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology is “the world’s first.”
LTE technology promises average mobile broadband speeds up to 140 Mbps, far faster than what’s now available...
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China Mobile to Offer 60 Mbps, HDTV in Shanghai by May
China Mobile, the world’s largest cellco by number of subscribers, intends to begin testing its LTE-based 4G network during World Expo 2010 in Shanghai from May 1 to October 31, 2010.
China Mobile’s goal for...
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Winning Streak for Huawei and Its HSPA+ & LTE Products
HSPA+, a 3.5G half-step on the way from 3G to 4G’s LTE, and LTE are riding high in Europe, helped along by China-based Huawei’s SingleRAN platform that allows 3G, HSPA+ and LTE to run on the same network:
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Social Networking Video: Just Under 1b Monthly Minutes
Internet users are now spending nearly twice as much time watching videos on social networking sites than they did just one year ago, reaching 999.4 million minutes this October.
According to Nielsen, this number...
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Apple Gobbles 50% of Global Mobile Data Traffic
Apple is stuffing itself with mobile traffic data, now exceeding a 50% share in US, UK and global traffic numbers. All those cellcos reselling the iPhone that were smiling on the way to the bank are now writing out big checks...
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Ultra HDTV: Big in 2025
Just in case you were finally getting caught up on all things HDTV and 3D TV, analysts and companies are now looking ahead to the next-gen sets — ultra HDTV.
Ultra HD formats are expected ...
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LTE to Dominate 4G in Asia/Pacific
LTE, not WiMAX, will be the dominant technology for mobile broadband by the end of the next decade, according to IDC. However, it expects HSPA technology in handsets, portable PCs and PC dongles to be widely used in Asia/Pacific not including...
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LTE to Dominate 4G in Asia/Pacific
LTE, not WiMAX, will be the dominant technology for mobile broadband by the end of the next decade, according to IDC. However, it expects HSPA technology in handsets, portable PCs and PC dongles to be widely used in Asia/Pacific not including...
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1b Mobile Subscribers in India by 2015
There may be more than 1 billion mobile phone users by 2015, according to Bharti Airtel CEO Manoj Kohli in an article in Agence France Presse. He said most would be in rural areas where wireline phone and broadband services are...
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New Apple Worms Rot to the Core
The first iPhone worm attacked earlier this year, connecting to jailbroken iPhones and messing around with the lock screen background and other non-malevolent annoyances, but the latest worms have a much more sinister underbelly.
A...
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EU Warns Spain: No Judgeless 3-Strike Policy
The European Commission has issued a warning to the Spanish government that any laws or actions to disconnect accused file-sharers from the Net without a judge’s involvement would create conflict with the EU. The warning could also be applied to the...
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PS3 Gets Ozzie’s Catch-up iView Player
Australia’s ABC is making its iPlayer-like iView catch-up player available on PS3s. IView lets viewers watch shows from ABC1 and ABC2 plus iView originals for up to two weeks after they’ve aired. A free software upgrade will add the iView...
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Putting Netflix in the TV Set
Netflix is reportedly working on a TV set that comes embedded with a Netflix video player, so users will not need a separate set-top box to connect the TV set to the Net. Currently, Netflix online subscribers need external boxes such...
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Microsoft Xbox Likes Millions
Microsoft has said that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged on to Facebook, and 1.7 million users have visited the new Zune marketplace to watch a video during the past week. While there were no total numbers for...
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25% of iPlayer Views Come From Virgin Media’s STBs
Lots of consumers want to watch catch-up TV on their TV sets. The BBC’s iPlayer on the cableco Virgin Media STBs now accounts for about 25% of all iPlayer views. It was not available on Virgin Media STBs until last year....
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Rogers Offers Free TV Anytime/ Anywhere to Its Subscribers
Rogers, Canada’s and perhaps the world’s largest quad play service, will launch on November 30 a free, ad-supported TV service on PCs called Rogers On Demand. It will be available to all subscribers to its wireless, cable TV, home phone ...
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Sony Adds HD to PlayTV
- Launches It Down Under
Sony’s PlayTV, an add-on for PlayStation 3 that’s available only in some countries, is getting an HD upgrade via download. Users will be able to watch, pause and record HD...
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Roku Opens Up, Brings 10 New Channels
Roku has expanded its platform and announced the Roku Channel Store as well as its first wave of new content — 10 free channels for existing and new users.
The first 10 channels were expected...
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Consoles Look Beyond Gaming
While the gaming industry has been swinging wildly between great sales and lost profits throughout the past two years, device makers have begun embracing the idea of an entertainment console — rather than just a gaming one — in hopes ...
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Telstra Offers Wireless to the Home & Wireless Inside the Home
- Wireless Broadband Speeds up 8 Mbps
Telstra is taking advantage of its rollout of the super-fast HSPA+ wireless broadband technology by launching BigPond Elite Network Gateway, which it calls Australia’s fastest wireless broadband...
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Intel Gets New Atom Ready for CES
Intel, facing increasing competition for processor chips for netbooks, is launching a new version of its Atom chip, which has dominated the netbook market.
Ever the orchestrator, Intel, is working with several PC makers such...
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Verizon to Offer Telemedicine Services
Verizon with its speedy new FiOS fiber optic network and faster DSL broadband is introducing new telemedicine services to help doctors and their patients.
Called Verizon Telehealth Collaboration Services, it will allow remote treatment and...
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Broadband Is “The Blackboard of the 21st Century”
Public school students in Australia’s state of New South Wales will get access to 100 Mbps broadband and free laptops. The state government has made an A$280 (US$260) million deal with Telstra to build a fiber optic network that will connect...
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Telemedicine, Tele-education and Other Social Betterments That Broadband Makes Possible
From time to time, we’ll publish articles based on the ways broadband — especially high-speed broadband — is making for a better world and not just for entertainment and the illegal sharing of copyrighted music and videos. ...
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Czech Republic Cablecos Go for DOCSIS 3.0
The cable TV companies in Europe, operating in a vacuum the telcos have allowed, continue to grow and to upgrade their network technology in anticipation of the day when telcos build nationwide fiber-to-the-home networks.
Equipment...
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The Old Silver Mining Village of Alston Moor in England to Get 100 Mbps Broadband
People really want the speeds that fiber optic networks and DOCSIS 3.0 provide. Residents in the small and still-cobbled UK village of Alston Moor, when told no by BT, took matters into their own hands. First, they built a muni-Wi-Fi network...
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AOL Sheds Old Name and 2,500 Employees
A new name — Aol. — and 2,500 employee terminations, about one-third of its total, will herald America Online’s debut as a separate company from Time Warner on December 10. The big questions are what the company will be and whether...
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Sony Looks to Net to Save Its Future
- SOS Online Entertainment Service Embedded in Every Sony Device
- One ID to Play Content on All Sony Devices
Sony, continuing to come up short of its financial goals, now...
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Moto Makes Another Major Acquisition
Motorola’s Home & Networks Mobility operation showed that its continued profitability gives it the clout within an otherwise financially troubled company to make acquisitions. The acquisitions show where Motorola thinks some of its future opportunities for growth lie: delivering data,...
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Augmented Reality: It’s Reality in Four Dimensions
- Adobe: ‘Will Be Mainstream by 2011’
- A New Method of User Interaction
Augmented reality was not on the agenda at last week’s TelcoTV, but it was on the...
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Telstra’s T-Box Gets On-Demand Movies, Local TV Stations & Its Broadband-Delivered Videos
- A DVR for Local Stations’ Broadcasts
- But Lacks Premium TV Channels & Access to Online Video Services
- Starts Testing Netgem-Made T-Boxes in Melbourne
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Amazon Starts Black Friday 4 Days Early
Eventually, the retailers’ golden after-Thanksgiving holiday, best known as Black Friday, will be celebrated in ...
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Local Content Gets CBS ‘Torrid’ Growth
It’s often asked how important local content is to such as pay-TV services, local TV stations and newspapers. Here’s ...
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Zune Goes International
Microsoft is sending the Zune brand beyond US borders for the first time, hoping to expand its music and movie platform ...
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Apple’s iTunes Preview Launches; We Hope It’s Just a Preview
Many app and music reviews, whether on the Web or an e-mail from a friend, like to link back to iTunes to suggest a ...
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Microsoft Opens App Doors a Little Wider
At its original launch, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile was only available to phones running ...
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Google Gives Chrome Glimpses
Google is preparing to show off a little bit and release some details of its Chrome operating system this week. What’s ...
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Vudu Makes HDTVs Less TV
Leaving its box behind, Vudu is increasing its CE platform by making all of its Vudu Labs partners’ ...
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Is This the Year Every Analog TV Hits the Trash?
It was only a few years back when electronics stores replaced the analog TV sets on their shelves with flat-panel ...
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Glyde Path to Selling Unwanted CDs & DVDs
What do consumers do with all those used CDs and DVDs once they’ve gone digital and no longer need them? Ex-eBay-er ...
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T-Mobile USA Kicks off Sidekick Again
T-Mobile USA said has resumed sales of the Sidekick after pulling it off the shelves following a massive outage. ...
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Redbox Is Going Digital
Redbox and CinemaNow are joining forces to test a new digital download program that gives frequent Redbox kiosk ...
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YouTube Wants Free News Videos From Amateurs
Google has come up with another scheme to get free news content that’ll help it rake in advertising revenue. Its YouTube has added YouTube Direct, which allows TV and online...
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Univision, Google Agree to Make a Lot of Money
Univision has signed an agreement with Google to bring its TV content to YouTube, marking a huge ...
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YouTube Adds 1080p HD: Taking Its Revenue Model Seriously Yet?
YouTube has long been the de facto Internet video service that users flock to; mobiles develop homescreen apps ...
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Vevo Gets a Date
This week, Vevo sent out a notice that it will be launching on December 8. The joint venture from Sony Music and Universal Music aims to capitalize on the ...
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EMI Becomes First Hulu Label Partner
EMI has signed a deal to become Hulu’s first major record label partner. The deal kicks off with exclusive ...
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Europe to Get 150 Channel Satellite Radio Service
In 2012, European radio stations in 27 countries will get competition from the subscription-based and ad-free satellite ...
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Mexico Sees Digital Track Prices Drop
Thanks to more players entering the market, digital music services in Mexico have begun dropping their prices, most to ...
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Will MySpace Drop Free Music Streams?
The times they are a-changin’.
It wasn’t long ago that the music industry began to realize how much of a problem piracy was— thanks to Napster and Kazaa —...
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Money Problems Continue Between EMI Owner and Bankers
Running a music company business is tough under the best of circumstances what with online piracy and rampant copying of ...
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Qualcomm’s FLO TV Set Goes on Sale
Qualcomm’s hand sized FLO TV set became available this week for about $250 at Amazon, Best Buy, Radio ...
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Qualcomm: Subscription & Free Mobile TV Can Coexist
- One Device Shows Both
Michael Hirsch, director of product management for Qualcomm’s FLO TV, told TechNewsWorld that the mobile TV service ...
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Can Nokia’s New Handset Save Europe’s Mobile TV?
You just knew Nokia would be a player in mobile TV.
The Finland-based handset king (over 40% market share worldwide) launched Nokia 5330 Mobile TV Edition, which also ...
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The Parlous State of European Broadcast Mobile TV
Faultline’s Peter White filed the following report after attending the Marcus Evans Mobile TV and Video Services ...
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Qualcomm Expects Millions of Smartbooks to Be Sold
Qualcomm expects to sell millions of its ARM-based Snapdragon chips that’ll be used in smartbooks, which fit ...
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DoCoMo Plans LTE Cloud
An LTE early adopter is NTT DoCoMo in Japan, which aims to skip over the HSPA+ stage and start rolling out 4G in ...
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Ofcom Looking to Use White Space Spectrum for Mobile Broadband
The UK’s regulatory agency Ofcom is looking at the possibility that the "white space" that’s between ...
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Alcatel Lucent Lands SingTel for LTE Tests
There’s a real food fight going on to sell LTE network gear to the world’s cellcos. It’s a make or break fight ...
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O3b Networks Gets $75m From SES Global
The Financial Times reports that the world’s largest satellite operator, SES Global, has invested $75 ...
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BT’s Ex-Mobile Phone Service O2 Now Has More Marbles
The mobile phone operator O2, which BT spun out in 2001, now has more mobile phone subscribers than BT has ...
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Americans Keep Watching More TV
Maybe it’s the increased number of unemployed that’s causing the increase in TV watching in the States. Americans ...
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Hush! I’m Searching the Web
The uptick in smartphone sales is changing consumer habits, with them talking a little less and using mobiles for ...
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Entertainment Subscription Models Still Afloat
Subscription models for TV, music, games and mobile services are holding their ground or even picking up steam as ...
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Economy Can’t Get HDTV Down
US unemployment numbers aren’t putting a damper on everyone’s celebrations this year as millions in the States ...
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US 2009: 70m Will Access 3G Mobile Internet Monthly
A recent study has found that nearly 70 million US citizens will access the 3G mobile Internet a minimum of once a month ...
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US Web Film, TV Viewing Doubles in 2009
Currently, more than 25 million US broadband homes regularly watch full-length TV shows online, while over 20 ...
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Report: 80% of Consumers Won’t Pay for Web News
The digital landscape is slowly evolving into more pay-for models, but a new Forrester Research report shows that ...
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Huh? Chinese Court Finds Microsoft Guilty of Pirating Intellectual Property
Hypocrisy runs rampant this week in the capital cities of both the US and China when it comes to dealing with pirated ...
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Congress Show Hypocrisy in Thwarting P2P Software
Many US congressmen ignored the threat of illegal P2P technology to the music, movie, TV and software industries. ...
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Plundering a Pirate Logo
After discovering that The Pirate Bay’s (TPB) logo was not registered with the Swedish patent office, another ...
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IPRED Finds Fear Only Works So Well
Sweden’s IPRED legislation lobbed a mortar into the country’s Internet traffic when it went into effect on April ...
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Shazam’s Identity Could Be Stolen
Shazam Entertainment, maker of a popular mobile music identification app for the iPhone, is being sued by Digimarc for three patent infringements.
Digimarc says that Shazam’s music ID technology...
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When Contracts Get in the Way of Success and Money
Last week, the hip hop artist Chamillionaire streamed the premiere of his "Good Morning" music video to fans ...
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Pirate Bay Sails off Into the Sunset
It seems 2012 came a little early for The Pirate Bay (TPB) Web site. Like Napster before it, TPB will be closing up shop.
The pirates announced that the...
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Saankhya Labs Promises One Demodulator for All TV Sets
In a world of changing standards for everything from home networks to over-the-air TV, here’s a list of digital TV (DTV) ...
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Everyzing Ramps up Indexing Videos
Ramp is the new name for Everyzing, the company whose technology converts the spoken word in online videos to ...
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Motorola Acquires IPTV/VoD Technology Maker BitBand
Motorola’s Broadband Home operations may be up for sale — for a reported $4.5 billion — but still has enough ...
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Liberty Media Grabs Germany’s Unity to Break the 20 Million Customer Mark
- Second Largest Cableco Worldwide, Trailing Only Comcast
Liberty Media’s Liberty Global, the world’s second largest cableco after Comcast, has bought Germany’s ...
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US’ $7.2b Broadband Stimulus Plan Filled with Potential for ‘Waste, Fraud and Abuse’
The programs to spend (invest?) $7.2 billion to increase US broadband coverage, part of the US’ stimulus bill, lacks ...
full story
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EMetric Measures Broadband Speeds in Remote Areas
Australia’s Enex TestLab has developed a remotely-operated bandwidth meter called eMetric, which ...
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Queen’s Speech Used to Announce Digital Economy Bill
- ‘A Communications Infrastructure That Is Fit for the Digital Age’
- Mandate & Tax for Universal Next Gen Broadband to ...
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Ruckus Wireless’ Wi-Fi Goes Head-to-Head Against WiMAX
- WiMAX Performance & Reliability but at Wi-Fi Prices
- Wi-Fi Comes in Every CE Device, but ‘Have You EVER Seen a Single Device that Integrates WiMAX?’
Ruckus...
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Swindon to Go 100% Wi-Fi
Swindon is building a Wi-Fi mesh network called Signal, which will provide free broadband access to its 186,000 ...
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Muni Wi-Fi Making a Comeback
The many failures of muni Wi-Fi networks in city after city coupled with the ascent of WiMAX led most of us to believe it ...
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Amimon Shifts Focus to Wi-Fi As Sony Drops It for WirelessHD
Transmitting high-definition video around the home wirelessly is a key application for the consumer electronics ...
full story
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Churn, Baby, Churn
For the service providers we talked to at Telco TV, concern over churn was by far the biggest reason for showing up this ...
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The Telco TV Infomercials
‘Video is the new dial tone.’ There’s no doubt that the economy and mobile phones are hurting the wireline ...
full story
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Murdoch Either Trailblazer or Facing Disaster
Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, told The Sydney Morning Herald when asked about News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch’s ...
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DirecTV Open to Inquiries by AT&T and Verizon
US cablecos and the two largest telcos have a major but different flaw in their quad play plans. The cablecos don’t ...
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AOL Goes Solo Again on December 9
December 9 is the day that Time Warner will completely spin out its AOL operations after a long, ...
full story
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10m Open University Courses Downloaded From iTunes U
The Internet, as predicted here a decade ago, has become the most powerful distribution network for entertainment ...
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TV Everywhere: Getting Context Behind the Content
- Benefits and Boundaries
At this year’s TelcoTV, the concept of TV Everywhere was big. While many are looking to the major cablecos and telcos ...
full story
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Sezmi’s Single Play Broadband/Broadcast Service Threatens Traditional Pay-TV
- One Box, One Menu for Local TV, Pay-TV, Online Videos & DVR
- $25 a Month
There’s been a lot of talk — scads of it —...
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Apple Opens Store in the Louvre
Microsoft may have a fancy new operating system, but Apple trumps it with a fancy new store opening Saturday in a chichi shopping center beneath Paris’ Louvre museum. To launch ...
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Facebook, Twitter Come to Xbox on Tuesday
Facebook and Twitter will make their debuts on Xbox Live next Tuesday, according to what Xbox Live general manager ...
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3, Orange Tangle Over Which Has the Largest Mobile Broadband Network
Like their American counterparts, 3 and Orange are in tiff about confusing consumers over who has the biggest high-speed mobile network, a claim that Orange has made but ...
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Verizon Wireless Offers Daily, Weekly, Monthly Pre-Paid Mobile Broadband
Verizon Wireless’ new prepaid mobile broadband plan will appeal to those who travel only infrequently or don’t know ...
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Simplicity Brings PCs & the Net to Elderly
UK startup Simplicity Computers is launching a line of computers designed for those of the 50+ age set who have no ...
full story
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2nd & 3rd iPhone Resellers Doing Well in France
The original and once exclusive iPhone reseller Orange (France Telecom) sold 1.3 million iPhones between November 2007 and September 2009. New iPhone resellers SFR and Bouygues Telecom have sold around 200,000 iPhones...
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Google to Offer Free Holiday Wi-Fi in 47 US Airports
Google is playing Santa Claus in 47 US airports by offering free Wi-Fi now through January 15, 2010. It’s also matching ...
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CEA Fails to Nominate Apple for Best Design and Engineering
You have to ask how the Consumer Electronics Association could nominate the industry’s best engineered and most innovative products and not include anything from Apple. ...
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Microsoft Celebrates 7’s ‘Fantastic’ Success, Terminates 800 More Employees
Last week, NPD Group reported that Windows 7 is selling at a faster pace than its predecessor Windows ...
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Jobs Needs Apple Tablet to ‘Cement His Legacy’
Steve Jobs can "cement his legacy" and become a man for the ages — not just the decade — by developing a ...
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Nokia Is Shipping N900
Nokia has started shipping its much ballyhooed N900 smartphone in North America, Europe, the Middle East and ...
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Blu-ray: You Gotta See It to Believe It
Blu-ray players, having been on the market for four years, are currently in around 11.7 million US residences, according ...
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EpixHD Puts Its Money Where Its Promise Is
- Hires Top Creator of Original Series Laverne McKinnon
A number of online video services have talked about developing original content when they first started. However, 3 ...
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Spotify Delays US Launch
Spotify has postponed its planned U.S. launch until 2010 because of uncompleted negotiations with thousands of US music ...
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EMI Signs With South Asia’s Largest Digital Distributor Hungama
Hungama Digital Media, which says it’s South Asia’s largest "digital entertainment" company, has signed ...
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IFPI Temporarily Drops Anti-Piracy Suits in Denmark
IFPI, the anti-piracy organization representing the labels, has apparently dropped all lawsuits in Denmark because the ...
full story
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Qtrax Delays Another Launch of Its Free, Ad-Supported Music Service
Qtrax, once 80% owned by Brilliant Digital of Kazaa.com fame and which claims to be the first with free ...
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Music Industry Must Win Battle for the Living Room
The music industry will have to go far beyond the improved sound quality that we’ve called for and embrace larger ...
full story
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Malaysia Gets Made-for-Mobile-TV Sci-fi Series
Malaysia’s Maxis will create and distribute mobile TV content to Measat Broadcast Network Systems subscibers, ...
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China’s Mobile TV Follows China’s Blue HD Discs
Beijing-based chip maker Vimicro this week announced a strategic development partnership with China Satellite ...
full story
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Sky Offers Live Football on iPhones
The trend to offering sports videos on smartphones continues with BSkyB, which said this week it’ll ...
full story
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RIM’s Blackberry Gets Closer to Adobe Flash
Blackberry maker RIM and Flash video developer Adobe previously said they’re working together to take the runtime version of Flash Player browser to BlackBerry handsets. This ...
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Snapdragon Smartbooks Start Popping Up
- AT&T and Vodafone to Resell
- Lenovo, HTC, Toshiba, Acer, Asus, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG Making Them
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told investors on Thursday that AT&T will sell a Snapdragon-based smartbook from...
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T-Mobile USA Moves Quickly to Upgrade Mobile Broadband Speeds
T-Mobile USA, the country’s third largest cellco, has been late to the 3G mobile broadband party but is accelerating ...
full story
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Google Calls for Open Spectrum Rules Again
More than two years ago, ahead of the US 700MHz auctions, Google awarded itself the role of chief lobbyist for an open mobile Internet and set out its four-point plan — open...
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O2 Offers Always Connected iPhone Service
O2’s monthly pay iPhone subscribers who purchase the £9.79 ($16.35) per month 3GB Internet Tethering Bolt On by ...
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Sprint & Partners Put Another $1.56B in Their Great 4G Hope
Financially troubled Sprint Nextel said this week that it and several other companies will invest another $1.56 ...
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Spotify Helps Consumers Kick Piracy Addiction
Spotify does it all — even reducing online music piracy — according to research that the price comparison Web site ...
full story
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Boxee to Get Its Own Set-Top Box
This has got to stop. There isn’t enough room or electrical outlets for every online video service to put its ...
full story
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Apple Building Broadcaster Interest in US TV Armageddon
- If Apple TV Channels Can Compete with Pay-TV, It Could Turn US TV on Its Head
- Apple’s Typical ‘Go It Alone, Cut out the Middleman’ ...
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Is Netflix Turning Every Blu-ray Player into Internet-Connected Box?
By Andy Tarczon, Founding Partner of The Diffusion Group (TDG)
To date, the most successful over-the-top (OTT) video player has been the game console. With Internet connectivity, ...
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Sony Pictures Offers Movie on Net Before DVD
With one eye looking over the wall at what the Internet did to the unsuspecting music industry, the studios continue to ...
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Microsoft Shipping Xbox 360 Wi-Fi ‘N’ Adapter
Microsoft is shipping its new $99 Wireless N Network dual band Wi-Fi adapter for the Xbox 360, which the company said it ...
full story
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Rovi Makes Car ‘Just Another’ Home Network-Connected Device
It looks like the car will start connecting to the home network — and seamlessly, no doubt.
Rovi, owner of the largest database of content ...
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Motorola’s NBBS Offers Remote Management of Home Networked Devices
Motorola’s NBBS remote device management software is now used in its Microsoft Mediaroom-certified IPTV set-top ...
full story
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Lantiq Spinout Complete
Germany-based chipmaker Infineon has completed the sale of its Lantiq operations to Golden Gate Capital for about €243 ($364) million. Lantiq says it will ...
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Genexis Lands 5 FTTH Deals, Mostly With Municipalities
Genexis, which focuses on making fiber-to-the-home equipment, has landed five new deals with municipalities and ...
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Netgear Offers 320 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 Home Gateway
Could the cablecos’ DOCSIS 3.0 broadband be the telcos’ undoing, what with its potential speeds in excess of 300 Mbps? ...
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Stats from TelcoTV
At shows like TelcoTV, stats are tossed around every which way depending on who is presenting and what point they’re ...
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Buzz from the Showroom Floor
By Geoff Whiting
Two big things we heard from just about everyone at the show are that pay-TV now needs to copy the online video ...
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Ex-CEO Whitman Doesn’t Explain EBay’s Failure to Acquire Essential Skype Software
Meg Whitman, eBay CEO when the company acquired Skype and now a gubernatorial candidate in California, has been criticized for the acquisition because she did not acquire the ...
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Motorola Puts Home & Network Operations up for Sale
It was inevitable that after Motorola tried and failed to sell its mobile handset operation that it would put ...
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Good News: Skype Settles Suit; Bad News: Skype Faces Google
Skype may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire when it settled with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. ...
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Comcast Edges Closer to Acquiring Control of NBCU
Comcast this week took another step toward buying more than 50% of NBC Universal from General Electric when ...
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Discovery Launches Science & Technology Web Site
Perhaps for every newspaper or magazine that dies, a news/information Web site is born. Or, maybe it’s the other ...
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Murdoch Determinedly Plows Ahead With Pay-to-View Web Site Plan
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch told Sky News, which News Corp owns, that the company’s Web sites such as The ...
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2010’s 10 Most Endangered Technologies
The pace of change is accelerating. According to Pixmania, which claims to be Europe’s largest electronics retailer, ...
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Carphone Warehouse to Offer IP Vision’s Do-It-All FetchTV SmartBox
- Internet Delivered Videos on the Telly – No PC, No Subscription Required
- Freeview+, iPlayer, SkyPlayer & 1,500 Hours ...
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TVGuide.com Adds Online DVR
- Alerts Users When Favorite Episodes Are Available
TVGuide.com has gone a step beyond the network DVRs that several cable TV companies fought in the courts to get the ...
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Free Weekend Pass to Movies at EpixHD
You have until the end of December to get and use in the States a free three-day pass to EpixHD at http://www.epixhd.com/invite ...
full story
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Intel Pulls Upgrade for Solid State Drives
Oops! Intel "temporarily" pulled the TRIM firmware upgrade for its super-fast X25-M SSD solid state ...
full story
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Wii Want Netflix
More reports are surfacing that say Netflix will make its on-demand service available on Nintendo’s ...
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BitTorrent Can Throttle Itself
The latest version of the popular uTorrent BitTorrent client is being billed as more intelligent, claiming it can detect network congestion and adjust its behavior to ...
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Apple Hits 100,000 Apps
Apple has officially confirmed that it has 100,000 iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Consumers in 77 countries have downloaded ...
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£400,000 ($640,000) Spent Deciding Whether to Launch Project Canvas
Surely there’s a better use for a large sum of money than spending it on consultancy services to decide whether the BBC should launch Project Canvas. The BBC Trust has spent ...
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AT&T Mobility Takes Verizon Wireless to Court
The nastiest toilet talk in the corporate world happens when a company sends its lawyers to court to file a lawsuit. ...
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Arqiva CEO: "Having a UK-Centric Proposition Is an Important Piece"
Tom Bennie, CEO of Arqiva, which recently bought the assets of the Project Kangaroo online video service ...
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Bye Bye DVD/CD Drives! Hello Internet!
PCs used to come with one or two floppy drives, which are now extinct. Instead, they come with DVD/CD drives, which also ...
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This Video Should Be Available in Your Location
Citizens of the world are often met with a single, frustrating message when trying to see the latest TV show, ...
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CableLabs to Select Standards for TV Everywhere
The reality of TV Everywhere, where people can view content for free on the Web, as long as they have a pay-TV ...
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Concerts Hit the Web
What’s the difference between 440,000 and 10 million viewers — content or platform?
The live Web cast of a concert by the Foo Fighters from ...
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Hulu Doles out a Schedule
It’s about time.
Hulu, the video joint venture of News Corp, NBC Universal and Disney, has launched a new section of ...
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Ten Alternatives to Pay-TV
Republic Publishing’s Electrigpig.co.uk lists ten alternatives to pay-TV at: http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/11/03/freeview-retune-10-alternatives-to-help-you-escape-the-chaos
1. TellyBox, which serves up BBC TV and allows ...
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Startover TV a Finger in the Dike Against the Internet Flood
Startover TV is spreading, most recently in Denmark, where cableco YouSee is expanding the service with five more ...
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TDG’s Quantum Theory of Digital Media Explains All
- Makes Sense of Seemingly Contradictory Events
- More Frequent and Dramatic Shifts Will Soon Follow
There’s a quantum theory in digital media that explains seemingly contradictory recent happenings and helps to make ...
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40 Music Artists Creating MXP4 Interactive Singles
MXP4 says more than 40 artists are using its interactive digital music technology to create interactive singles. MXP4’s ...
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Lala, Google to Further Customize Music Search
Artists will eventually be able to choose what users see when they search for artists or bands in Google.
Through Lala’s platform, artists will be able to ...
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Qtrax Begins its Asian Expansion
Qtrax, the provider of an ad-supported, legal song-download service, has developed a new deal with China’s search-giant Baidu to direct all users searching for songs or artists on Baidu to ...
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Mog Picks up Echo Nest Aide
Mog’s forthcoming All Access online music service is enlisting a little help from The Echo Nest to show ...
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Beatlemania Goes Digital
While their yellow submarine might have sailed off into the sunset years ago, the Beatles are returning to the world in a ...
full story
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Mobile TV to Take Off in Poland Next Year
Albert Kuzmicz, president of NFI Magna Polonia that’ll launch the mobile TV service Info-TV-FM next year, told Wirtualne ...
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AT&T Adds 3 Mobile TV Channels, Slashes Monthly Rates
$10 a month will get AT&T’s basic FLO TV service, which will soon get three new but as yet unnamed channels. ...
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Chrysler Vehicles First to Get Mobile FLO TV
And people are upset about drivers who text and make phone calls!
Riders in Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and ...
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Qualcomm: Broadcast More Efficient at Delivering Mobile TV Than Cellular
Asked why Qualcomm’s FLO Technologies developed its own mobile TV technology rather than use cellular networks or the DVB-T technology that stations use ...
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China Broadcasting to Use Novel-Super Digital TV Technology
China Broadcasting Corp (CBC) will use Novel-Super Digital TV technology as the digital broadcasting platform and ...
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Children’s Shows, Learning Channels Lead Mobile TV Hit Parade
OMVC, the US broadcasters’ mobile TV interest group, had the users in its Vegas trial studied and found that shows for ...
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Free Report on Mobile TV Usage
OMVC, the association of TV stations for furthering mobile TV in the States, has issued a new report. Called "OMVC ...
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Devices and Adapters Coming for Viewing Mobile TV
Mobile TV is coming in the States, but devices for watching haven’t yet hit the market. Jay Adrick, VP of broadcast ...
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Grass Valley Ready to Install Mobile TV Gear at Local Stations
The recently standardized ATSC Mobile DTV technology allows local TV stations to broadcast shows to portable mobile ...
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Verizon Wireless Opens 2 More Markets for Mobile TV
Verizon Wireless is opening new markets for its Flo TV-based V Cast mobile TV service, this time in Rockford and ...
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Google Gets Its Place in the Sun with Cellcos
Verizon Wireless gave AT&T/iPhone a run for its money with the high octane impact of the launch of its first ...
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NBA Live Streams Go Mobile
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has developed a live mobile video app and is initially launching ...
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FCC: ‘We’re Facing a Looming Spectrum Gap’
The FCC is trying to formulate a universal national broadband plan and is considering taking spectrum from TV ...
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LTE Looks Set for Widespread Deployment
- Up to 100 Mbps Down and 50 Mbps Up
- Speeds Suited for Mobile TVs
Continuous Computing, which develops LTE mobile broadband hardware and software, provides these factoids about the ...
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Cablevision Ahead of Schedule & Under Budget on Public Wi-Fi Network
Long Island-based Cablevision says it’s ahead of schedule and 15% under budget 19 months into its build of a ...
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O2 Launches 28 Mbps Mobile Broadband in Germany
Mobile phone services like AT&T, Telstra and now O2 are seizing the opportunity of more mobile bandwidth demand that’s being created by smartphones and ...
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EU’s Reding Calls for More Immediate Wireless Broadband
Europe is beginning to feel the demand for increased mobile broadband bandwidth as shown by the EU’s commissioner for ...
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Government Steps in to Fix South Korea’s WiMAX Shortfalls
- WiMAX Subscribers at 3.5% of Forecast; Revenue at 1.4%
- National WiMAX Network to Serve as ‘Global Mobile Internet Test Bed’
Doubts about WiMAX’s success continue to appear like ...
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Internet Radio Could Strengthen Digital Home
Internet radio has been steadily picking up steam and is now becoming a mainstay that can revitalize the home audio ...
full story
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Pirates Purchase with Plundered Gold
Another survey has come to light showing that users who download songs from unauthorized file-sharing services are the ...
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Touch-Screens Leading the Way
Adoption of touch-screen mobile phones grows with the release of every new handset, but the rate of its climb has ...
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Telcos That Own Mobile Services Have Future Growth Advantage
Telcos that own mobile phone/broadband services clearly see where their opportunities are. Infonetics Research reports that there were almost four times more mobile ...
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IPhone Moving up in Dual Mode Cellular/Wi-Fi Smartphone Market
Before our vision can see only 4G mobile broadband, let’s not forget that for many smartphone users, Wi-Fi hotspots are ...
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Report: WiMAX Rollout Is Slow; Lack of Devices Delays LTE
There were about 4 million WiMAX subscribers worldwide at the end of June, according to a report from Maravedis. ...
full story
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Video Will Drive Mobile Data to 724TBs per Month by 2015
It’s video on handsets that’ll drive the demand for increased mobile broadband capacity, according to a report ...
full story
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EU Eyes Internet Access
European lawmakers agreed on new protections for Internet users this Thursday, finding a line between national ...
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Apple, Palm Still Fighting Over the Pre
Apple has broken the Palm Pre’s ability to sync directly with iTunes yet again. Thanks to the latest iTunes ...
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Private Party, No Rightsholders Allowed
Pirates are responding to the entertainment industry and its lobbying efforts by taking steps to hide their identities ...
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Pirate Party Gets Second EU Seat
The Pirate Party has won its second seat in the European Parliament. After securing its first seat in a Swedish ...
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Sony Ups PlayStation Network Content
Sony signed deals with Lucasfilm, Cinetic FilmBuff, ContentFilm International, Image Entertainment, MPI Media Group...
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Prices of Internet-Connectable HDTV Start Dropping
Prices for Internet-capable TV sets are already headed down. Samsung’s PN50B650 50-inch 1080p Plasma HDTV ...
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Apple Gets Intense about Its Hobby
- New Features Now, New Service Soon?
- Bridging Music and Video
Apple has released the Apple TV 3.0 software, giving its set-top box a much needed upgrade and extra features that move ...
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Blu-Ray: The Future Is with the Web
The latest funeral call for the DVD format came as the US film industry said movie disc purchases were down 13.8% in the ...
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Best Buy, Sonic Launch Download Store
- Connects to Best Buy’s CE
Electronics retailer Best Buy said this week it will launch its own branded on-demand movie and entertainment ...
full story
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Rogers Seeks Alternative to Tru2way
Rogers Communications, Canada’s biggest cableco, is looking for an alternative to tru2way, according to its senior ...
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Broadcom Puts Everything But Kitchen Sink on a Chip for DVRs
Broadcom’s new BCM7125 system-on-a-chip (SoC) supports almost every technology a media-loving consumer could want. It ...
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Pace Touts New HCS DVR for US Market
Pace sees its new HCS DVR as a way to break into the US cable TV market big time. See: "Vroom! Vroom! New Pace HD ...
full story
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Government Must Stop Living in a Time Warp and Commit to Higher Speed Broadband
Faster broadband is essential for businesses, according to John Wright, national chairman of the Federation of Small ...
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Swedish Minister Promises 100 Mbps Broadband for 90%
The newest trend is for governments to promise universal broadband.
The latest to join the chorus is Sweden. This week the ...
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4.8 Tbps Undersea Fiber to Connect US-Japan
Bandwidth demand between North America and the Pacific region grew at a CAGR of 62.8% between 2002 and 2008, and ...
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Windows 7 Off to a Much Faster Start Than Vista
Windows 7 pudding is proving to be very good. Windows 7, which makes digital media easier to use and manage, sold 234% ...
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Jobs Anointed CEO of the Decade
Time Warner’s Fortune magazine this week anointed, rightly, Apple chief Steve Jobs as CEO of the ’90s ...
full story
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Redbox Ponders $2 Kiosk
Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk unit of Coinstar, is testing new prices above its $1 standard fee per video per ...
full story
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Google: We Don’t Do Android Hardware
In case you were wondering, Google is not in the business of making mobile phones, so don’t look for a Google-developed ...
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Skype, eBay Litigation May Soon Be Settled
Told you!
EBay, Skype and a group of investors are reportedly about to settle their three lawsuits. The purported ...
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Confessions of The Online Reporter
In the early days of digital media, we spent a lot of time covering the telcos’ IPTV rollout until we figured out that ...
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French Pay-TV Service Canal+ Launches Internet-Connectable TV Sets
By Simon Thompson
The Vivendi-owned French satellite TV service Canal+ will bypass cable and phone pay-TV operators by launching two models of TV sets called MyWish that allow viewers direct access via the Net to its CanalPlay VoD platform, which has 3,500 films. Who needs an Apple TV, a Roku, a...
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BBC: The I is for International
The BBC is said to be developing an international version of its iPlayer which will allow global users to watch ...
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United Arab Emirates to Get Mobile TV
The United Arab Emirates regulator TRA has given a ten year license for mobile TV broadcasting to the Emirates ...
full story
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MySpace Music Introduces New Artists
MySpace Music has launched a new service to boost its upcoming artists through both online and offline promotions. ...
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MySpace Gets Paramount Series Debut
Viacom’s Paramount Digital Entertainment said its new supernatural thriller "Circle of Eight" will exclusively...
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The Web Brings Back Bruce Lee
After a recent purchase of merchandising rights from Universal Studios, Bruce Lee Enterprises and LeeWay Media have launched a new Web site for the late martial arts movie ...
full story
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Wal-Mart to Offer In-Home Tech Support
Who’d have thunk it? By year-end all Wal-Mart stores will be offering in-home tech support. It won’t be only installation of TVs, either, but will include home ...
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US Newspaper Subscriptions Decline 10.5%
The Internet and the recession drove circulation down 10.5% at 379 US newspapers during the third quarter, according to ...
full story
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Nokia N900 Smartphone Slides Back One Month
Nokia will delay one month to November the launch of its N900 smartphone, the one the company has said can do anything ...
full story
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Acer Boots Up Dual Windows XP — Android Netbook
Acer has officially launched, as promised, a dual boot Windows XP-Android netbook — the Atom-based Aspire One D250. ...
full story
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Internet Technology Will Disrupt the TV Market
"The entertainment industry will see major disruptions over the next few years. Evolution of broadband networks will ...
full story
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More Signs Hulu Wants Your Money
News Corp deputy chairman Chase Carey is the latest to come out and say that charges need to come for quality Internet ...
full story
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Will Wii Get Netflix, Too?
Ask Netflix and it’ll tell you it’s considering expanding to the Wii platform at some point, but there are ...
full story
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Report: Project Canvas Likely to Succeed
Project Canvas, if approved by the government’s BBC Trust and Ofcom, could have 3.5 million users by ...
full story
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Video to Save the Radio Star
The CBS Interactive-owned music streaming service Last.fm is aiming to branch out into the growing — and hopefully profitable — Web video sector with the coming launch of its ...
full story
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Blinkx Launches Music Video Search
After seeing decent success with its searchable index of Web video content, Blinkx has announced the launch of a ...
full story
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Vevo Gets a Sponsor; Partner Maybe?
Vevo, the upcoming online music portal joint venture from Universal Music, Sony Music and the Abu Dhabi Media ...
full story
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ADB Brings Tru2way to TV Sets
ADB, which this week announced the first set-top box with the new MoCA 1.1 home network technology, is also adding ...
full story
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Samsung Launches Two Dual HDTV/PC Displays
Samsung has two new LCDs that double as a PC display and as a TV set with an HD tuner that can be used to pick up free ...
full story
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Intel Increases Speeds of Already Fast Solid State Drives
The computer technology industry’s mantra — "faster, smaller, cheaper" — keeps on humming.
Intel is speeding up its already super-fast solid ...
full story
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Google Gets Groovin’
Google has given its music search legs through an official launch with a slate of service and label partners, but so far ...
full story
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MySpace Seeks Friendship from Old Enemies
News Corp’s MySpace is still in the process of rebranding itself as an entertainment hub instead of some ...
full story
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The New Digital Dime Jukebox
Lala is having a good couple of weeks, with three big announcements covering new services and offerings — all ...
full story
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Mobile TV in the US May Arrive through the Back Door on Cellcos’ Netbook Bundles
US mobile operators may want to bundle mobile TV into their netbooks and initially bypass handsets altogether, according ...
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Samsung Produces Mobile Digital TV on a Single Chip
Samsung Electronics says it’s developed the world’s first single chip for North America’s ATSC mobile digital TV ...
full story
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First White Spaces Wireless Broadband Goes Live
Last week, the first mobile broadband network in the license-exempt "white spaces" spectrum went live in ...
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Clearwire, Russia’s Enforta Each Commit to WiMAX in 25 Cities by Year-End
Clearwire this week confirmed it’ll have its WiMAX up and running in 25 cities at year end by opening 11 cities in the ...
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Explosive Growth in Mobile Broadband Use
Cosmologists say the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. It’s certain that mobile broadband usage ...
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70% of 30-Somethings Want Internet Videos on Their TV Set
The 30-somethings seem to be more Internet-centric and less demanding about having HD than the 40-somethings, according to ...
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CBS Jumps to Fourth in Online Ratings
CBS is fighting to make it on the Net as the lone wolf go-it-alone TV network. It’s the only US major network that ...
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Gaming Handhelds Reach Saturation; Enter the Smartphones
The future of handheld media players is the ability to move past just a gaming experience.
According to new research from DFC Intelligence, Nintendo and Sony handhelds have nearly reached their full ...
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Yes, the US is IPhone-Crazy
In the US market, the iPhone is on track to become the most popular smartphone, thanks to expected future purchases.
A new report from ChangeWave Research puts the ...
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Mobile TV Set Records in Q2 2009
The market research and consultancy shop TeleAnalytics reports that 6.97 million new mobile TV users were added worldwide in 2009’s second quarter. It said it was the ...
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Windows 7 & Refresh Cycle Could Increase PC Sales 12-15% in 2010
2010 PC shipments are expected to increase 12-15% following a decline of 0-5% in 2009, according to Wells Fargo ...
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