Audio Video News

Does the United States Patent and Trademark Office operate on a first come, first served basis, or will it bow to the applicant with the biggest bucks? The issue of legal ownership of the "Titanic" trademark---a name worth millions in the wake of the biggest blockbuster movie in history---is being contested at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in Arlington, Virginia.

According to a recent Reuters report, London-based Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) has announced a very original product: a plastic video display. In the report, the company said, "CDT and its Japanese partner, Seiko-Epson Corp., have unveiled the world's first plastic TV display and will set aggressive targets for commercializing the technology." According to CDT chief executive Danny Chapchal, "The announcement will demonstrate that our technology is very close to commercialization for computer and video display applications."

All it will take is $20 million to make things right between <A HREF="http://www.mgm.com">Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer</A> and <A HREF="http://www.spe.sony.com">Sony Pictures Entertainment</A>. A suit filed on February 8 by MGM's Orion Pictures Corporation in Los Angeles Superior Court charges Sony and its subsidiaries, Columbia TriStar Home Video and Columbia Pictures Entertainment, with "substantially underreporting revenues" and "failing properly to account for monies received" for distributing Orion's films on video outside the US. Orion had an exclusive distribution contract with Columbia/Sony from 1985 to 1992.

At the upcoming <A HREF="http://www.nab.org/conventions/">National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show</A>, <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/">Sony Electronics</A> will be showing a full line of professional products to enable DTV implementation in 1998. The company's Business and Professional Group recently unveiled its strategy and plans, which include interfacing SDTV and HDTV formats for all DTV applications through an MPEG2 environment, the industry's global standard for DTV broadcasting.

Due to the astounding box-office success of James Cameron's <I>Titanic</I>, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox have scrapped their plans for releasing the film's home-video version early this summer.Taken by surprise at the unending box-office interest in the film (over $300 million so far), the studios say that they will have to completely rethink the home video release. Rumors are that <I>Titanic</I> will be released on video for the 1998 holiday season.

According to statistics released January 20 by the Arlington, Virginia-based <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A> (CEMA), sales to dealers of projection televisions, TV/VCR combinations, VCRs, and camcorders each climbed in 1997 to record-setting levels. The new Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players also showed well, selling nearly 350,000 units since the product's inception in April.