Audio Video News

E<I>veryone with a TV has seen the traditional winter holiday fare: </I>Miracle on 34th Street<I>, </I>It's a Wonderful Life<I>, and any one of a dozen versions of Charles Dickens' </I>A Christmas Carol<I>. If you're not totally burned out on the subject, there are less-well-known films with Christmas (and other) themes that are worth seeking out. Here's a short list of recommendations from the staff that might round out your holiday viewing:</I>

Flat-panel TVs, DVD players, computers, mopeds, and kitchen appliances were among the goods that went on sale in Cuba this week. Incredibly, the old Fidel Castro regime had forbidden sales of these items till just this Tuesday. The new regime is a tad more reasonable about what Raul Castro calls "excessive prohibitions." But there's just one catch.

On June 14, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) introduced a bill that would set a hard cutoff date of January 1, 2009, for the shutdown of analog over-the-air (OTA) television broadcasting. The bill, formally S.1237, is also known as the SAVE LIVES Act of 2005. Someone worked pretty hard to come up with the words to fit that acronym: Spectrum Availability for Emergency-Response and Law-Enforcement to Improve Vital Emergency Services Act.

According to an aide to Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the US Senate yesterday unanimously passed a revised version of a bill that would delay the transition to digital television from February 17 to June 12. The revisions had to do with budget rules and first-responder communications, changes that were added by the House of Representatives before the bill was defeated there on Tuesday.

The long-discussed and often-postponed changeover from analog television broadcasting to a purely digital format is still somewhere over the rainbow, thanks to a September 23 vote by the Senate Commerce Committee (SCC).

Excessive caution over copyrights could inhibit the already slow rollout of digital television, electronics industry executives told a US Senate committee last week.

 Cell phones have been on the offensive when it comes to replacing dedicated digital music players, which means iPhone- (and smartphone)- compatible headhpones have been multiplying like a swimming pool full of Gremlins. The latest batch...