Digital-Lifestyles

Platforms

  • IBM Makes d-Cinema Moves

    IBM have made a move to become involved with digital cinema (otherwise known as e-cinema or d-cinema) partnering with Kodak and bringing the operating system (OS) to the party. There’s been an underground excitement about d-cinema for a couple of years now but it’s been hampered by both the cost of the equipment and primarily by the industries inability to decide who should pay for the equipment.

    Neither the cinemas or the distributors what to put their hands in their pockets. The outlets say they don’t have the reserves to be able to afford it as their current margins are squeezed so hard by the distributors. The distributors say they don’t feel they should pay for it, even though I think they have the most to gain from it. One advantage of the indecision is that over the last couple of years the prices of the equipment have dropped substantially.

    In a different time I think the people with the most to gain, the advertisers, would have put money in, but their hardly likely to do that currently.

  • Non-MS Media player for Xbox

    Some clever characters have written a media player for the Xbox. Currently running videos on DivX 3 & 4, it will soon have MP3 and Windows Media capabilities as well. This kind of thing has been on the Dreamcast for a while by bedroom developers, and given the supposed ease of development of the Xbox, I would have thought it’s something Microsoft would want to encourage. Apparently they’re trying to take legal action to stop it.

  • Speculation on the future use of ITV Digital’s frequency

    Murmurs that the frequency that was/is used by ITV Digital in the UK could be sub-divided for wireless broadband access.

  • Xbox sales lower than expected

    The sales on the Microsoft Xbox have been lower than expected, so they have now downwardly adjusted the sales targets from 4.5m to 6m to 3.5m to 4m). Where they are different from the game console makers is in the fact broadband and a hard drive are included with the unit, giving them a natural advantage in broadband, multi-user games.

  • Xbox price drop in the UK

    I was briefly at a MS PocketPC social event in London last night and MS had taken the opportunity of making a large numbers of Xboxes available (around 30-40). It’s no shock that the attendees were keen to play, they must be the perfect market, but they were incredibly popular. So why isn’t Xbox selling in the numbers anticipated – the price maybe?

    Microsoft UK have announced they’re taking 1/3 off the price of an Xbox from 26th April, dropping the price to £199. The PR quote is that they are “determined to not make price an issue” – translation – people think it’s too expensive and the GameCube is going to be coming out at the beginning of May in the low hundreds. The current three-way battle should be interesting to watch over the coming months.

  • Will current HDTV’s work in the future?

    There have been rumours buzzing around about the possibility of many of the $5-10k HDTV set that have been sold in the US won’t be able to display HDTV by the time it’s actually publicly launched. A news item appears to confirm the rumour. Discussions between the Hollywood studios and equipment manufacturers has lead to the creation of the High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI). HDMI will be the interface between the receiving set top box and the screen/monitor, enabling the content to remain encrypted up to the point it is displayed. By unscrambling at the point it is actually viewed, the studios hope to reduce unauthorised copying of films.

  • SonicBlue to combine PVR and DVD

    The constantly innovative SonicBlue have been talking about combining PVR and DVD players in the same unit for only about an extra $75 on top of one of the individual box price by xmas 2003. Their CTO also predicted that in two years they will have one terabyte of storage in their PVR – giving around 3,000 of programming.

  • SonicBlue to sell via Amazon

    SonicBlue have signed and exclusive deal with Amazon to sell it’s 4000 range of broadband-enabled PVR’s.

  • Broadband TV service launched in Helsinki

    A new Broadband delivered TV service is being launched in Helsinki. One of the companies, Elisa Communications, is also going to be working on a wireless version in a shopping centre.

  • Broadband connected TV from Panasonic

    Another broadband connected device, this time a TV from Panasonic. It will also have a dial-up modem and is reported as being able to download content at off-peak hours ready for viewing later, so I assume PVR functions.