Audio Video News

Steve Jobs can go ahead and add another notch to his belt. The Flip camera is the latest casualty of the smartphone's charm offensive and ever-expanding role in our lives; it now joins Microsoft's Zune in the dustbin of history.

A while back, we <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?269">reported</A> on the small island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific, which, as fate would have it, was assigned the international domain of ".tv." It didn't take long for a company called <A HREF="www.tv">dotTV</A> to make a deal with the Tuvalu government to administer and sell the ".tv" domains. Last week, dotTV announced that they have auctioned off three high-priced domain names&mdash;free.tv, china.tv, and net.tv&mdash;each selling for initial annual registration fees of $100,000.

New research from Dallas-based Parks Associates shows that a growing number of American are using good old-fashioned TV antennas to pull in pristine digital broadcasts over the air.

Mother always said TV would rot your brain. Now there's proof.

Copyright hysteria is one of the entertainment industry's longest-running programs. Last week's episode featured an announcement by the recently formed Advanced Television Copyright Coalition (ATCC) that the group would exert legal pressure on <A HREF="http://www.tivo.com/">TiVo, Inc.</A>, and <A HREF="http://www.replaytv.com/">RePlay Networks, Inc.</A>, two Silicon Valley-based makers of personal video recorders (PVRs). These are hard-disk-based video recorders that allow users to easily shift viewing times and instantly zip past commercials if they wish. The machines' manufacturers will be asked to sign licensing agreements for the use of the group members' content.