Bob Ankosko

Signaling the beginning of the end for physical media, Americans are expected to spend more on legal, Internet-delivered movies than they spend on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs for the first time in 2012.

Planning to replace your main TV any time in the near future? Households in 14 markets around the world are now replacing TVs every 6.9 years, according to the NPD DisplaySearch Global TV Replacement Study, which is a year and a half sooner than the 8.4 years reported in last year’s study.

Looking for a little extra holiday spending money? If you purchased an LCD TV between 1999 and 2006 and live in one of the 24 states listed below, you may be entitled to a piece of a $1.1 billion settlement pie.

OK, you can stop drooling now. We know you can’t wait to get your hands on the world’s first TV capable of displaying 8 million pixels of luscious detail—four times the resolution of 1080p. (We can’t, either.) Sony’s 84-inch XBR-84X900 4K LCD HDTV is one of the first 4K TVs to reach a handful of stores across the country. The heart of the set is a new chip that analyzes images with resolutions of 1080p or lower and upscales them to 4K. How well the chip performs that task is vitally important since 4K content for home viewing is not likely to be available for some time, even though Sony says 10,000 U.S. movie theaters are already using 4K projectors, and a growing number of theatrical movies are being shot in 4K.