"More than six months after HD-DVD gave up the ghost, there are several signs that Sony's rival Blu-ray format is struggling to gain consumer acceptance. According to recent sales data from Nielsen, market share for Blu-ray discs in the U.S. is declining, and Sony and its Blu-ray partners are trying several tactics to boost the format — including free trial discs bundled into magazines and cheap Blu-ray players that cost less than $200."
In other news, version 1.0.0 of the Dirac Codec has been released. (We interviewed one of the developers about their work while ago... )
An anonymous reader points out news that the music and movie studios are attempting to develop a new type of DRM that would allow customers more flexibility in playing content on multiple devices. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) would establish a list of devices in your personal "domain" (unrelated to web domains), and minimizes or removes restrictions within that domain.
Of course this then requires a central server with net connection to the customer that provides the validation for the devices. Plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong and annoy the playing customer - as pirated versions always remove the DRM. Meanwhile, still on the subject of music, UK band Marillion have decided that p2p is a good way to expand their fanbase by giving their new album away for free ;
When users download the tracks, an interactive window will appear with a message from the band, telling them about the album, a forthcoming tour and the products and merchandise on the Marillion website. Those who download the album are also asked to provide an email address, so they can be updated and offered the opportunity to make a donation, in the style of Radiohead.
Pact and NESTA have released a range of tools designed to make it easy for TV and Film producers to work with digital producers on convergent or "multi-platform" projects. The tools include legal templates for producers who want to kick off multi-platform development, as well as a 'how to' guide for exploring joint ventures. The tools are freely available to producers across the industry and provide a simple legal framework for producers to work together when developing intellectual property. It is hoped that this initiative will improve the quality and number of multi-platform proposals going to UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4. Visit PACT for more information and to download the Guide to Collaborating.
There has already been lots of reports and speculation about Google and it's release of the beta for 'Chrome', it's new web-browser . The news is this; Google is working on it's own open source web browser to rival Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari . As the web browser sits at the heart of much of our web activity (though instant messenger, network games and peer-to-peer are increasingly important here). There is plenty of interesting writing on the strategy of Google and it's latest move in the grand chess game of web technology. See here, here and here. However Chrome's release has overshadowed another release with potentially far reaching powers of it's own; Ubiquity ;
You're writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You'd like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven't even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them. This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web....Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time....Enter Ubiquity...Today we're announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
The key here is that you use natural language to tell the web what you want it to do (and not just what you want to look at as now) For example, in the Ubiquity window I can type, 'youtube cats' and see the search results for videos about cats on YouTube or 'search-torrents cats' to see torrents for searches of cats. It is an open system so anyone can develop new command words - and that holds a lot of interesting angles for web films.
"The shift from appointment TV to content on demand is well underway," says Michael Saxon, Senior Vice President, Brand and Communications, TNS. "Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice -- TV, PC, or mobile. For consumers, PCs enhance content on demand from simply time-shifting to place-shifting. Online content can be viewed in any room in the house, or at work or school."
Embracing this means embracing new technology. A good example would be Slacker Uprising , the new film from Michael Moore, which Radiohead-style he plans to release online, for free. That really is on-demand!
The idea was to create a gutsy, lively and entertaining film using engines from a computer game that could create low bandwidth/quality images that would be fitting to be screened on the net. One of the things I really like about it is the extreme pixellation in places where it has undergone quite dramatic compression for the web...it really adds to the grungy feel.
