Audio Video News

A federal court has handed a defeat to Kaleidescape, whose superb video-server technology has been fighting for its life in the courts for several years.

Director Steven Soderbergh is mad. And he has every right to be. His work is being deliberately butchered for television. This was once routine in a world where widescreen films had to fit onto a 4:3 screen. Yet even now, in the age of 16:9 and high-def, widescreen films continue to be cropped in ways that horrify the artists who made them.

When the phrase "video revolution" was in vogue, a generation of viewers weaned on commercial broadcast TV suddenly found they could skip ads in a whole bunch of new ways. With a VCR, they could time-shift programming and fast-scan through ads. They could rent ad-free movies at a video store (trailers don't count). And they could subscribe to pay-TV channels, paying for hipper programming almost without ads. But the heirs to those technologies--DVRs and video on demand --are increasingly overrun by ads, even though consumers have paid to avoid them.

Amazon Video On Demand is now available in Panasonic's 2009 Viera Cast Blu-ray players, having already come to Panasonic's Viera Cast plasmas in April.

In a departure from conventional Blu-ray and DVD release strategy, Paramount will begin holding back DVD release-to-own titles in order to emphasize Blu-ray sales as well as rentals in either format. This could give Blu-ray sales a leg up.

Most of our readers probably don't care, but just in case you know someone with an analog TV that still hasn't got a source of digital signals, tomorrow is a big day. It's the last day when the federal government will be handing out $40 subsidy coupons to offset the cost of a set-top box that would keep an old analog TV running.