Audio Video News

"RealNetworks' RealDVD should be called StealDVD," asserts the general counsel of the Motion Picture Association of America.

In a curiously ambiguous ruling, a federal court has declared the RealDVD disc copying application illegal. However, the court also left open the possibility that copying DVDs for personal use may be legal in some circumstances under the copyright law's fair use doctrine.

Why is this girl smiling? For heaven's sake, doesn't she know she's just been sued? Well, actually, it's RealNetworks that has entered a new dimension of legal adventure. All because of its RealDVD software. You know, the stuff that lets you rip and...

Nothing less than "a new standard in video quality" was promised this month by <A HREF="http://www.siliconoptix.com">Silicon Optix</A> in announcing its new Realta single-chip video processor.

Back during the analog TV era, a well-regarded manufacturer offered me a rear-projection set—not for review, just for my own use. I turned it down. I didn’t want one of those big, butt-ugly things in my living room. In later years, RPTV went high def, slimmed down, and became the best buy in big-screen TV in terms of inches per dollar. But that wasn’t enough to save it. In the closing jingle-bell months of last year, the one remaining RPTV manufacturer pulled the plug, and the product category quietly passed into history.

Less than four years old, <A HREF="http://www.directv.com">DirecTV</A> announced last week that it has hit the four million subscriber mark, a number that the company says puts it in one of every 25 TV households in the US. Other interesting statistics about DirecTV: 120 million pay-per-view movies and special event purchases have been made; A total of approximately 200,000 hours of professional and collegiate sporting events have been broadcast; Maintained a monthly churn rate (percentage of subscribers who disconnect) of 1 percent (DirecTV claims that this is the lowest in the multichannel video industry. )