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Music by Google Will Store, Not Sell
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 11, 2011  | 
Music by Google, a.k.a. Google Music, launched in beta yesterday. Surprise: The new service will not sell music. However, it will let you store up to 20,000 songs in the cloud, making it similar to Amazon's just-launched Cloud Drive and Player.

In its haste to launch the site, Google fell into the same trap as Amazon: It hasn't managed to negotiate sales terms with the music industry. So no store, just storage. Like Amazon's Cloud Player, Music by Google will also play stored music directly from the web.

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Audio Video News
Pink Floyd on the wing, again
Michael Berk  |  May 10, 2011  | 

Big news from the Pink Floyd camp today (a new site with full info should be relaunching today, so check back over the course of the afternoon).

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Audio Video News
Momentum...mobile...and more from the Googleplex
Michael Berk  |  May 10, 2011  | 

Following yesterday's YouTube announcement, Google should have even more big news today - the Google I/O developer conference kicks off today at noon, with the license-free

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Audio Video News
Hollywood's Netflix Anxiety Subsiding
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 10, 2011  | 
Netflix, previously the bane of content owners, is now wearing a halo of approval. What changed? Netflix is now willing to part with more of its burgeoning revenue for content acquisition.

One notable example is Time Warner, whose CEO Jeff Bewkes once referred to Netflix as the Albanian army. As in: "Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?" Then Netflix paid Time Warner $200,000 per episode for 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck. Now Bewkes refers to Netflix with "fondness."

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Audio Video News
YouTube begins movie rentals
Michael Berk  |  May 09, 2011  | 

Following up on a post earlier today by YouTube head Salar Kamangar, the company formally announced the launch of its movie

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Audio Video News
Samsung ups the ante on immersive TV
Michael Berk  |  May 09, 2011  | 

Samsung today unveiled the biggest 3D set to come to market (that's just the Korean market for now) thus far.

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Audio Video News
CEA Unveils Spectrum Crunch Clock
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 09, 2011  | 
Should the spectrum allocated during the DTV transition be left alone? Or should some of it be reallocated to wireless broadband? The Consumer Electronics Association leans to the latter side and is dramatizing its position with the Spectrum Crunch Clock.

The SCC, as it explains itself, "tracks the lost opportunity costs to the U.S. economy and consumers with every minute we delay responsibly managing our nation's spectrum resources. The Spectrum Crunch Clock estimates that we have been losing $14,444 per minute since the clock started ticking on March 16, 2010, when the FCC introduced the National Broadband Plan."

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Audio Video News
Cutting the Cord?
Michael Berk  |  May 06, 2011  | 

Two recent surveys have come to different conclusions on whether or not American consumers are abandoning cable in favor of Web-based on-demand and streaming media.

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Audio Video News
Star Wars Saga Blus Coming in September
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 06, 2011  | 
The Blu-ray release of Star Wars: The Complete Saga is coming September 16, 2011 in the U.S. and four days earlier internationally. LucasFilm made the announcement this week, on May 4, Star Wars Day.

The versions used will be the ones released theatrically in 1997 and restored for the 2004 DVD release, George Lucas told The New York Times. The press release does not list resolution but we're guessing it's 1080p. The audio codec is listed as "6.1 DTS Surround Sound." It is not known whether that's DTS-HD Master Audio or lossy DTS 5.1. However, Fox has supported Master Audio in many other BD releases.

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Audio Video News
Panasonic 2011 TV Briefing
Scott Wilkinson  |  May 05, 2011  | 
Yesterday, I attended an in-depth briefing on Panasonic's 2011 lineup of TVs, which included some interesting side-by-side demos. Of course, 3D was a central theme, along with online content, technology improvements, and the company's growing emphasis on LCD TVs.
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Audio Video News
Bowie: artist, philanthropist
Michael Berk  |  May 05, 2011  | 

Man for all seasons, adopted New Yorker, and sometime visual artist David Bowie (who's the subject of a new retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design) has contributed a print for auction to a new fundraising e

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Audio Video News
iPod dock, Grande Luxe Edition
Michael Berk  |  May 05, 2011  | 

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Audio Video News
MC Vin Diesel - What Might Have Been?
Michael Berk  |  May 05, 2011  | 

Yes, here's evidence (posted by former Magic Band guitarslinger Gary Lucas) of a 1986 recording engineered by Lucas, featuring the teenage Diesel (then going by his given name,

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Hidden Solutions from Revel
Kim Wilson  |  May 05, 2011  | 
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Audio Video News
Some People Still Love Their TVs
Mark Fleischmann  |  May 05, 2011  | 
Yesterday we reported a Nielsen survey showing that TV ownership has dropped two percent. Unmentioned were a couple of other TV ownership patterns, both reported by DisplaySearch: Consumers who do own TVs are replacing their sets more frequently. And those who own flat panel sets are likely to own multiple sets.

Worldwide, consumers are replacing both tube-based and flat-panel sets at a faster rate than they had in the previous 10- to 15-year average. What's attracting them are not the latest technologies, such as 3DTV or IPTV, but more basic things such as picture quality and price. See press release.

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