Audio Video News

By the first day of November, more than half the nation's television viewers&mdash;those within reach of the <A HREF="http://www.cbs.com/">Columbia Broadcasting System</A>'s 40 major stations&mdash;will be in the "footprint" of HDTV broadcasting from CBS. The network has announced an ambitious production schedule for the fall season that includes at least 12 hours of prime-time HDTV programming each week.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington in Seattle reported last week that digital high-definition TV signals (HDTV) had been successfully transmitted across the so-called "<A HREF="http://www.Internet2.org/">Internet2</A>" network. The group says that the transmission has proved the capability of Internet technology to transmit broadcast-quality video, in stark contrast to the poor-quality video loaded onto today's commercial Internet systems.

An ambitious plan to bring high-speed interactive video services to cable subscribers in the New York area has been announced by <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation</A> and <A HREF="http://www.cablevision.com/">Cablevision Systems Corporation</A>. Sony will supply approximately 3 million set-top converter boxes to Cablevision customers.

Movie fans don't normally associate an organization as stodgy as the <A HREF="http://www.AICPA.org/">American Institute of Certified Public Accountants</A> (AICPA) with the glamour of Hollywood, but as of Tuesday, September 14, the accountants' group will have had an everlasting effect on the industry and its notoriously loose accounting procedures. A new set of rules about the way the industry figures profits and losses will soon cause some irrevocable changes in the financial picture of the movie business.

Years ago, Brian Eno pushed the artistic envelope with "sonic wallpaper," or background music as art. Artists working in film and video have exploited the concept too, using their cameras to record campfires, roaring surf, sleeping people and animals, stationary buildings, and other excruciatingly boring subjects. In playback, such fare tests viewers' patience and challenges their assumptions about art.

Competition in the personal video recorder market heated up considerably on September 8, when <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation of America</A> announced that it had made an equity investment in <A HREF="http://www.tivo.com/">TiVo, Inc</A>. TiVo is a Sunnyvale, California-based maker of personal video recorders (PVRs), a new category of product using hard-disk technology for time-shifting television viewing.

The recently released "World DVD Planning Report" is predicting that US sales of DVD software this year will reach 57 million discs (worth $1.5 billion), and that by 2005 more than 1.3 billion discs will be shipped annually (worth $36 billion). Annual sales of DVD players are predicted to reach 9.1 million units in 1999, a growth rate of 128%, and will continue to soar, reaching 52 million by 2005. More forecasts: Video titles currently account for over 90% of the software market, but by 2005 their share will have fallen to 43%, while DVD-ROM will account for 28% and games formats 24%.