Audio Video News

New music revitalizes old movie: the Kronos Quartet has just completed an intense eight-day recording session at Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch studio in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The Quartet laid down a Philip Glass score for a reissue of <I>Dracula</I>, the 1931 horror flick starring B&#233;la Lugosi. The effort is part of a <A HREF="http://www.mca.com/home/">Universal Home Video</A> project that will bring classic early horror films to a new audience.

I<I>an Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood, David Hemblin, Brooke Johnson, Arsin&#233;e Khanjian, Tom McCamus, Stephanie Morgenstern, Earl Pastko, Sarah Polley, Gabrielle Rose, Alberta Watson. Directed by Atom Egoyan. Aspect ratio: 2:35:1 (letterbox). Dolby Digital 5.1. 116 minutes. 1998. New Line Platinum Series N4654. R. $24.99.</I>

Interactive TV will reach 10 million viewers by 2002, but a new report from <A HREF="http://www.forrester.com">Forrester Research, Inc.</A> concludes that television providers and interactivity vendors have completely misunderstood the promise of the new medium. For interactive television to succeed, programmers must embrace lazy interactivity---an approach designed for TV viewers of short attention spans.

Convergence might be the brunt of jokes in some quarters, but not at 7 Mark Drive in San Rafael, CA. That's the home of <A HREF="http://www.net-tv.net/">NetTV</A>, which has just announced its new ExtremeDVD home-entertainment system. ExtremeDVD is optimized for 3-D gaming, Internet access, satellite downloads, and high-resolution movie playback.

At the DVD Production '98 conference last week, the International Recording Media Association (IRMA) released sales forecasts for the growth and worldwide expansion of the international DVD marketplace. The numbers are part of a study on the growth and direction of the world optical-media marketplace.

Public awareness of HDTV has almost doubled in the past year, according to a survey recently conducted by the <A HREF="http://www.cemacity.org/">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A>. Over the week of July 6-14, CEMA interviewed 1000 adults, selected at random, to find out how far the coming television format has penetrated into the American consciousness.

The new holy grail of the media business is video-on-demand (VOD)---the ability to make high-quality video, audio, and Web content available on customers' TVs when they want it, not according to a broadcaster's schedule. When you add shopping-on-demand supported by live video and sound, you have the makings of a new media empire.