The theater glut has claimed its latest victim. New York-based Loews Cineplex Entertainment, the second largest movie exhibitor in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday, February 15 in US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The theater giant simultaneously brought an application under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for its Canadian units, including Cineplex Odeon Corporation, with whom it had merged three years ago.

High-quality bi-directional video is on its way from <A HREF="http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent Technologies</A>. The company has announced a new venture, called GeoVideo Networks Inc., that will deliver what Lucent is calling "HDTV-quality" video over the Internet. Entertainment&mdash;including video-on-demand&mdash; is part of the intended package, but Lucent is emphasizing the medical, financial, and business-to-business applications of the broadband fiber network. The announcement was made March 29 at Lucent's Murray Hill, New Jersey headquarters.

<A HREF="http://www.madrigal.com">Madrigal</A> has announced a new media console claimed "to establish new standards for connoisseurs of multichannel audio and video." If early publicity and its spec sheet are any indication, the $30,000 Mark Levinson No. 40 media console may, in fact, live up to the hype.

There's nothing else in home theater like a cinematically stunning film transferred to HDTV videotape and displayed at 720p or 1080i/p. The only problem is that the frame rates for the two formats are not the same, creating a syncing nightmare for the transfer studio. Solutions have involved running a single film frame through more than one scan of the faster DTV format to create a seamless presentation. As networks begin DTV transmission this fall, the ability to transfer film---a major source of primetime programming---and to create original high-definition content in a variety of DTV formats has become even more critical.