Audio Video News

It's official: Netflix is now king of the internet, eclipsing all other forms of net traffic, bringing an abrupt end to the nation's use of other video streaming operations, web browsing, email, and naughty bits.

Oh all right, that's an exaggeration. But not by much. a recent study by Sandvine, a network analytics firm, reveals that Netflix is indeed the biggest bandwidth consumer on the net.

For the first time, Miramax movies will become available on a digital subscription service. And the name of that service? Netflix, of course.

Miramax and Netflix have signed a multi-year agreement to stream hundreds of movies including Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, Good Will Hunting, Bad Santa, Scream, Spy Kids, The Piano, and Kill Bill. Look for them starting in June 2011.

You already may have heard about the massive "Why Pink Floyd...?" reissue series scheduled to hit in September 2011. But the most artistically significant aspect of it has been grossly under-reported. The series will include the first release of the 1975 album Wish You Were Here in a 5.1-channel high-res medium.

There will be two ways to get it. One is the six-disc "Immersion" boxed set, which will include both new 5.1-channel and old quad mixes, not to mention stereo mixes, in multiple formats. One disc will be a DVD with lossy codecs (we're guessing Dolby Digital). The other—be still, our hearts—will be a Blu-ray disc with both 5.1 and stereo mixes in 96/24. You can read about the numerous other extras on Amazon.

Music by Google, a.k.a. Google Music, launched in beta yesterday. Surprise: The new service will not sell music. However, it will let you store up to 20,000 songs in the cloud, making it similar to Amazon's just-launched Cloud Drive and Player.

In its haste to launch the site, Google fell into the same trap as Amazon: It hasn't managed to negotiate sales terms with the music industry. So no store, just storage. Like Amazon's Cloud Player, Music by Google will also play stored music directly from the web.

Should the spectrum allocated during the DTV transition be left alone? Or should some of it be reallocated to wireless broadband? The Consumer Electronics Association leans to the latter side and is dramatizing its position with the Spectrum Crunch Clock.

The SCC, as it explains itself, "tracks the lost opportunity costs to the U.S. economy and consumers with every minute we delay responsibly managing our nation's spectrum resources. The Spectrum Crunch Clock estimates that we have been losing $14,444 per minute since the clock started ticking on March 16, 2010, when the FCC introduced the National Broadband Plan."

Yesterday we reported a Nielsen survey showing that TV ownership has dropped two percent. Unmentioned were a couple of other TV ownership patterns, both reported by DisplaySearch: Consumers who do own TVs are replacing their sets more frequently. And those who own flat panel sets are likely to own multiple sets.

Worldwide, consumers are replacing both tube-based and flat-panel sets at a faster rate than they had in the previous 10- to 15-year average. What's attracting them are not the latest technologies, such as 3DTV or IPTV, but more basic things such as picture quality and price. See press release.