Audio Video News

Late last week, <A HREF="http://www.intel.com">Intel</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sony.com">Sony</A> announced that they intend to collaborate in an effort to give consumers the ability to share electronic content between PCs and various consumer electronic devices, including home entertainment systems (digital televisions, set-top boxes), digital cameras, digital camcorders, and portable music players. Intel says that the effort is part of the companies' vision of the "e-Home" of the future, in which the Internet will be available throughout a range of devices.

The results of a recent study released by <A HREF="http://www.techtrends.net">TechTrends</A> last week reveal that consumer electronics manufacturers are poised to take significant market share from traditional set-top box makers. TechTrends reports that, by next year, half of North America's leading cable operators will deploy digital set-top boxes from Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer or Sony, at the expense of Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta.

As if dozens of surround-sound formats weren't enough, some new ones are being introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Among them is MP3 Surround, a multichannel version of the 2-channel compression scheme that has become ubiquitous on the Internet as it fueled the success of MP3 players such as the Apple iPod. MP3 Surround is being unveiled by Thomson Electronics and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, co-creators of MP3 (which is shorthand for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3), and Agere Systems, a semiconductor and software company.

What would you pay for a display with more than four times the resolution of the best HDTV on the market today? Don't even bother to answer that unless you are an official at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which is scheduled to receive the first such units from <A HREF="http://www.ibm.com/news/2000/11/10.phtml"> IBM</A>. The new 22-inch display boasts an astounding 200 pixels per inch and a total of more than 9 million pixels on its screen. It is said to create images "as clear as an original photograph."