INDIAN WELLS, Cal. -- Pilots of Warner Bros.’ combo Blu- ray/HD DVD disc are on a fast track and the hybrid likely will be ready for Q4 sales, replicator Cinram told this week’s IRMA Recording Media Forum here. Playback has been flawless on the incompatible rival hardware using the dual- sided Total HD Disc (THD), with Blu-ray and HD DVD versions of a movie on either side, Cinram said.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
The vendor that NTIA picks to run the DTV coupon program must be ready to accept coupon requests Jan. 1, 2008, as required by law, but likely won’t start distributing coupons before April 1, 2008, or when systems are tested and certified as working. That was the message in NTIA’s request for proposals (RFP), released Wed. after months of delay.
INDIAN WELLS, Cal. -- Until the Internet becomes a dominant form of movie delivery a decade from now, Hollywood will need to rely on a combination of DVD and one or both of the 2 new HD disc formats, former Warner Home Video Pres. Warren Lieberfarb said in a keynote here Tues. at IRMA’s Recording Media Forum.
HDMI Licensing sees “a potential for increasing consumer confusion” with introduction of new features enabled by HDMI 1.3, Pres. Les Chard told us, following up on a DisplaySearch conference presentation he gave last week (CED March 8 p2). “This can be caused by manufacturers not specifying which features they're supporting” under HDMI 1.3 or “using different names for such features,” Chard said. He again cited examples of CE makers using names like ColorMax, C Pass or VelvetVision to describe HDMI 1.3’s Deep Color function. But unlike his remarks at DisplaySearch, Chard said: “These are hypothetical names, and should not be attributed to any specific manufacturer. We apologize for any confusion that we may have helped cause on this issue in the past.” HDMI Licensing is working with manufacturers and retailers to solve these problems, Chard said. Options include updated HDMI “branding guidelines” that won’t let manufacturers simply say products are HDMI 1.3, but require them to “clearly call out which HDMI 1.3 functionality they are supporting,” he said: “We hope to make these public in the next month or 2. We are also looking at possibly creating a minimum feature mark whereby all products that bear the mark would have to support some minimum feature set.” The HDMI standard rarely requires that manufacturers incorporate specific high-level features, he said. For example, all versions of HDMI support 1080p, “but we of course do not require manufacturers to implement this functionality,” he said: “We believe that manufacturers are often in a better position to make decisions about the feature sets their customers will want to see. All versions of HDMI are backward compatible. Consumers should not look for a particular version of HDMI, but rather for the functionality that they want the device to support.”
LA JOLLA, Cal. -- It’s too early to declare a format-war winner, but if this spring sees Blu-ray harness the power of major hits due for exclusive release in the format, “they could win it all” the next 3-4 months, Paramount consultant Vito Mandato told the DisplaySearch Flat Panel Display conference here Wed.
LA JOLLA, Cal. -- “Certain” CE makers fought the holiday flat-panel price wars to prove that “it’s very easy to sell a dollar for a nickel,” but with very little long-term gain, keynoter Randy Waynick, senior vp-Sony Home Products Div., told the DisplaySearch Flat-Panel Display Conference here Wed., an implied slap at Panasonic and other rivals.
LA JOLLA, Cal. -- That major publicly traded retailers reported depressed growth margins in an HDTV era that should bring record profits is proof that “something clearly did go wrong” at retail Q4, Dave Workman, PRO Buying Group exec. dir., told the DisplaySearch Flat Panel Display Conference here Tues.
Despite 20 months of trying by DTLA, CableLabs refuses to approve DTCP-IP as a digital output protection technology for one-way plug & play cable devices, putting its “business interests over the interests of consumers and competition,” DTLA told the FCC in a much-expected petition (CED Feb 26 p10) OR (CD Feb 26 p11). DTLA -- founded by Hitachi, Intel, Sony, Matsushita and Toshiba -- urged the FCC to reverse CableLabs’ “wrongful refusal” and order CableLabs to “approve DTCP-IP as an effective digital output protection technology for audiovisual content.” The refusal “has nothing to do with content protection, theft of service, or harm to the cable network,” DTLA said. The decision arose from “extraneous considerations that impermissibly leverage its power to approve content protection technologies into virtual control over every device capable of receiving video content over the entire home network,” DTLA said. CableLabs conditions approval of DTCP-IP on license terms “that require every device that touches cable-received content, regardless of how far downstream that device resides on the home network, to permanently mark and segregate that content as ‘Cable Content,'” it said. This would force DTLA to re- engineer DTCP-IP “to restrict delivery of Cable Content only to devices that CableLabs considers part of its ‘cable ecosystem,'” DTLA said. “But what CableLabs benignly terms its ‘cable ecosystem’ is what a consumer calls ‘my home network’ -- the products a consumer buys for home personal entertainment. These CableLabs requirements constitute a rejection of DTCP-IP.” CableLabs said it stood by earlier statements that it keeps talking with DTLA and its member companies “to resolve outstanding business and licensing issues in an attempt to come to a marketplace solution similar to those CableLabs has reached with Microsoft, Real and Motorola for IP-based outputs.”
Sirius and XM vowed as a condition of their FCC licenses to “create the ability to have an interoperable radio, and we have such a radio -- it’s in my office,” Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin told a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wed. on the proposed satellite radio merger (CED March 1 p2). “The problem with it is there’s no receiver manufacturer that wants to pay to supply it,” he said in reply to a question from Committee Chmn. Conyers (D-Mich.). “We're subsidizing our radios today because we get a subscription from it. The idea of our subsidizing a radio when we may not get a subscription doesn’t make any sense for us.” Sirius and XM “did not in any way, shape or form” break their promise to the FCC on receiver interoperability, Karmazin said. “We've offered our intellectual property to receiver manufacturers, so any receiver manufacturer that wants to make an interoperable radio, they can make it. The problem is, it would sell for somewhere around $700 without a subsidy.” Sirius’ 10-K, filed Thurs. at the SEC, makes no mention of the receiver Karmazin cited at the hearing. “Our FCC license is conditioned on us certifying that our system includes a receiver design that will permit end users to access XM Radio’s system,” the 10-K says. “We have signed an agreement with XM Radio to develop jointly a unified standard for satellite radios to facilitate the ability of consumers to purchase one radio capable of receiving both our and XM Radio’s services. We believe that this agreement, and our efforts with XM Radio to develop this unified standard for satellite radios, satisfies the interoperability condition contained in our FCC license.”
Major CE makers we polled said they're in a high state of readiness for the FCC’s DTV tuner mandate, which takes effect today (Thurs.) on all TV sets and TV interface devices such as DVD recorders and VCRs. But a fuzzier picture emerged from insiders we canvassed on how much analog-only product remains in the supply chain and retail inventory. That key metric may indicate how long a shelf life legacy analog TVs will have.