Video Games: UK’s top entertainment form
According to research by retail experts, video games will prove to be Britain’s number one form of entertainment in 2008, beating music and other video products for the first time. Verdict Research predicts the video games market will grow by £1.37 billion ($2.19 billion), about 42% in 2008. The figure outstrips music and video sales which were expected to stagnate anyway.
The entire video games market in the UK is valued at about £4.64 billion ($7.42 billion), compared to music and video at £4.46 billion ($7.13 billion). “The music and video market is not just suffering from a slowing of growth but a massive transfer of spend to online,” said the report’s author Malcolm Pinkerton. “So in actual fact, the sales via high street shops are being hit a lot harder than the overall growth figures would suggest.”
The report claimed that the music market gained revenue from sales of digital downloads but was hurt by growing piracy, price deflation and a decline in physical CD sales. “Games represent a relatively cheap, but also exciting and innovative pastime,” said Matthew Piner, author of the Video Games and Consoles Retailing report. “As more people save money by staying in, a video game, although it may cost three of four times as much as a DVD or CD, offers much more longevity and hence better value for money.”
The Entertainment Retailers Association agreed that the games sector had a great year, but took issue with the figures. It points out that the videogame figures include both hardware and software units sold. “So to compare like with like, you’d have to add in DVD players and CD players,” said ERA spokesman Steve Redmond.
Norway puts more pressure on Apple over iTunes DRM
Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon is keeping his pledge to put more pressure on Apple to cut the DRM tie between its iPod models and music downloads from the iTunes download store. The consumer mediator gave Apple a November 3rd deadline back in September this year, and now that the deadline has passed without Apple making enough effort (in the Ombudsman’s opinion), it may face being brought before a government agency.
“iTunes has shown a lacking will to comply with our demand and we are now preparing to try this case in the Market Council,” Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said in a statement. Back in 2006, Norway was among the world’s first countries to take issue with Apple’s FairPlay DRM, which while protecting music, also created a tie between hardware made by Apple and digital downloads it sells.
Apple responded to the pressure by providing certain information to its customers including a workaround that includes burning copy protected music to a CD with iTunes and then ripping to standard unprotected digital audio, which will work with pretty much all MP3 players on the market.
“iTunes maintains its previous views in its response to the Consumer Ombudsman. The company is in other words unwilling to make changes to make music in the iTunes Store available to all music players,” the agency said in its statement. Whether or not Apple will cave to the pressure remains to be seen.
SanDisk’s ExtremeFSS will boost SSD performance significantly
SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.
Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.
They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn’t very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.
As an example, a drive with a value of 40 TBW (terabytes written) would last for 11 years at an average of 10GB per day. Barnetson suggested that an LDE measure would be similar to an MPG (miles-per-gallon) measure for a car. A second metric SanDisk proposes is “virtual rpm,” which would measure how well the SSD compares to a mechanical drive at a certain speed (measured in revolutions per minute, or RPM).
[More]>>
Illegal discs seized at Brazilian border
Uruguayan Customs officials worked with Apdif Uruguay (local industry anti-piracy group) in an investigation which led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of pirated music and movie products. Officials discovered a smuggling ring that imports CDs from Uruguay to sell in the pirate markets of Brazil. The smugglers sourced blank discs from the free port of Montevideo and used the duty free shops as distribution points.
This allowed the pirates to evade import duties on both sides of the border and increase their profits by at least 50%. Apdif Uruguay and Uruguayan Customs officials raided the shops during October. The raids led to the seizure of a shipment of 750,000 blank DVD-Rs which had left Montevideo without proper documentation about its destination and content.
A further raid, carried out in conjunction with the Brazilian authorities, in the city of Santana do Livramento across the border, led to the seizure of 257,000 blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The blank discs were destined for the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in a touring bus belonging to the musical Brazilian group “Toque Fandangueiro”. Documents seized along with the cargo indicated that these discs allegedly originated in Miami.
Console multimedia guides updated for Wii, Xbox 360, PS3
We have updated several guides that deal with the multimedia capabilities of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii consoles. The updates include guides for streaming content through a network to Xbox 360 or Wii, creating MP4 files for Xbox 360 or PS3, creating AVCHD for PS3 & Blu-ray players and using online TV sharing programs with Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii console.
AC/DC available to download legally in Australia
One of the most recognizable names in music entertainment has maintained a “No Downloads” policy ever since Apple’s iTunes revolutionized purchasing music on the Internet. AC/DC does not support the download format, and definitely not Apple’s iTunes service. In Australia however, BigPond has added 16 AC/DC albums to its line-up, available in MP3 and WMA formats (some sell as WMA only).
“Since iTunes came into existence, we’ve actually increased our back catalogue sales without being on the site. We were sternly warned by our management team and our record label that the complete opposite would be the case,” Angus Young said in a recent interview.
“Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless ‘em, it’s going to kill music if they’re not careful,” Brian Johnson told Reuters. “It’s a…monster, this thing. It just worries me. And I’m sure they’re just doing it all in the interest of making as much…cash as possible. Let’s put it this way, it’s certainly not for the…love, let’s get that out of the way, right away.”
According to AC/DC representatives, the “No Downloads” policy does not just apply to Apple, but to all other companies selling music on the Internet. BigPond music is selling 16 AC/DC albums at $16.50 a piece, but the new album will not be available on the service and no single tracks are available to download. “AC/DC Live” is the number 17 album for BigPond this week.
UK download sites back new ‘MP3 Compatible’ logo
HMV, Woolworths, 7digital, Digitalstores, Tescodigital, Tunetribe, and Play.com have all agreed to promote a new “MP3 compatible” logo that they hope will raise the profile of the open MP3 music format and inform users on what they can do with their DRM-free downloads.
The logo should also help consumers identify legal music stores from P2P.
The Entertainment Retailers Association created the logo and says it will emphasize that MP3s can be played in all media players.
7digital’s Ben Drury added that digital sales “have been booming because users love the freedom of MP3″.
“The beauty of an MP3 file is that once you have bought it, you don’t need to be a computer genius or a lawyer to make it work and you are not locked in to a relationship with a single retailer or hardware manufacturer,” he said.
The BPI is also standing behind the new proposal.
“This logo will not only help give consumers confidence that the music files they are buying will play on a wide range of devices, but will also help them know that they are legal and that artists are getting paid,” noted Geoff Taylor, BPI chief executive.
AT&T starts testing bandwidth caps
Just one month after Comcast began imposing a bandwidth cap of 250 GB on all of its subscribers, AT&T has begun testing a cap of their own, however with a much smaller limit, 150 GB.
The cap will have tiers as well depending on how fast your connection is, slower users will only get 20 GB limit while the fastest users will get the 150 GB cap.
The test, beginning in Reno, Nevada today, will “evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today’s trend of explosive bandwidth usage, [and] may be extended to one other market by the end of the year,” said AT&T.
Anyone in Reno who uses over 150 GB per month will automatically be enrolled in the full bandwidth trial at the end of the year.
Any trial participant that exceeds the limit will be given a one-month grace period but if they do it again they will be fined $1 for every GB over they go.
Unlike Comcast however, AT&T will provide all customers with a “bandwidth measuring tool” and will also notify customers when they have hit 80 percent of their limit.
“A small group of customers are using the majority of bandwidth on our network,” added AT&T. “In fact, almost 50 percent of total bandwidth is used by just five percent of customers – customers, for example, who are uploading and downloading the equivalent of more than 40,000 YouTube videos or 40 million e-mails a month. This kind of heavy usage has an impact on all of our customers.”
Zune to finally make it to Europe?
According to the French newspaper Les Echos, Microsoft officials have suggested that a third generation of its popular Zune media player is in the works and that a European launch of the player is coming in 2009.
The Zune, available since late 2006, has been a North American-only product so far despite repeated news reports and rumors that a launch in Europe is coming.
The new rumor, fueled by Microsoft France executive François Ruault, says the company will be releasing the Zune in France in 2009.
We will keep you updated.
YouTube to begin offering HD videos
Back in November, YouTube boss Steve Chen promised that the popular video sharing site would begin giving viewers the option to watch some videos in High Definition beginning in March.
As promised, the site has now begun to offer higher definition streams based upon the source file uploaded. The site also promises more videos coming over time.
Users have the option to see the higher definition streams by checking an option in their Account page. Select “always show me higher quality when available” or “never show me higher quality” depending on your personal choice.
The official YouTube blog had this to say about the new video quality. “Our philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly”.
“That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this ‘Super Duper YouTube HD’ because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.”
