Audio Video News

Toronto-based Fabriq aims to fill what it perceives as a void for inexpensive smart speakers that offer decent sound quality with a new Alexa-enabled speaker that sells for $100.

Facebook has announced plans to enable its users to stream videos to their TV.

Still reeling from last month’s data-privacy scandal, Facebook has decided not to preview the smart speaker it has been working on at the upcoming annual Facebook Developer Conference, according to a Bloomberg report.

Facebook last week announced a new platform for watching videos as a follow-up to the video tab it launched last year as a “predictable place to find videos.”

Move over, couch potato. Facebook wants to sit beside you and offer program recommendations based on input from your friends.

The pitch from Facebook's Andy Mitchell, SVP of strategic partner development, came at the PromaxBDA conference last week.

In a recent Ask S&V column, I answered a reader question about North American-made audio: Does anybody make audio gear over here anymore? One name I listed in my response was Canadian speaker-maker Paradigm, a company that manufacturers a wide range of speaker models, subwoofers, and audio electronics in a 225,000 square-foot facility located in Mississaugua, Ontario. Sound & Vision has rarely met a Paradigm speaker or electronics component from Paradigm’s sister-brand Anthem that it didn’t like, so the company is obviously doing something right. To get an overview of just what is happening under the roof of that 225,000-square foot facility, Paradigm’s marketing dept. invited me up for a day to check things out. Ready for a tour? Let’s go!

The US Senate last Friday voted to ban any reinstatement of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which was originally introduced in United States in 1949 and became a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1967, when there were only three television networks and no Internet. The FCC then abolished the doctrine in 1987, claiming that the proliferation of media outlets made it irrelevant.