MCV is reporting today that the BBC is actively trying to get back into gaming, looking to turn intellectual properties into DS, Wii and iPhone games. The company is also looking to turn the properties into games that can be played online via social networking sites such as Facebook.
Of the popular properties the BBC is looking to convert, Doctor Who, Top Gear, and In The Night Garden are the most popular.
“We are open to conversations with anybody in games about all kinds of business models to see how we can extract more value,” said Neil Ross Russell, MD of licensing. “Outside of Disney we have the most well-known line-up of children’s characters around the world.”
“We’ve been reactive to the market in the last few years,” adds Dave Anderson, head of multimedia development at BBC Worldwide, noting that the company closed its gaming division in 2005. “There were a few opportunistic licensing deals, but we were largely aggregating and holding on to our properties to wait and see how the market developed.”
Result for: Convert
Today at the CES 2010 event, Toshiba showed off their ZX900 Cell TV, using the Cell processing engine found in the powerful PlayStation 3.
The player will come as either 46-inch, 55-inch or 65-inch models and the company says each will include a 3.2GHz Cell chip with eight cores. Each core will upscale SD content into 1080p HD content using “smart” pixel generation that Toshiba says will leave upscaled images almost “indistinguishable” from Blu-ray and other legitimate HD content. The same technology will reduce noise and remove artifacts, all on the fly.
The processor is so powerful that it can also convert 2D content into stereoscopic 3D, all on the fly as well.
Heading over to the actual display, the ZX900 will have 512 separate backlight zones, about five times the amount current top-end LED-backlit TVs have. The screen will also “adjust the picture’s color temperature to compensation for each environment it’s placed in, using a sensor to measure light and color levels around it,” says Reghardware.
The Cell TV has a contrast ratio of 9,000,000:1 and brightness of 1000cd/m².
Additionally, the TV has a 1TB HDD built-in to the set’s control box, which is linked to the Cell TV by Wireless HD technology. 802.11n Wi-Fi is standard. The TV has a built-in upscaling DVD player, and the screen has a built-in surround sound bar.
Although pricing was not made available, Scott Ramirez, Toshiba America Consumer Products marketing chief frankly said the price will not be cheap.
Result for: Convert
The popular e-reader, the Amazon Kindle has been hacked this week, allowing for all purchased content to be transferred off the device via a PDF file.
Kindle e-books are sold as .AZW files which have DRM that stops users from transferring the purchased books to other devices that are not Kindles.
That should no longer be a problem thanks to Israeli hacker “Labba” who has cracked the DRM. A second hacker, “I <3 cabbages,” has released the “Unswindle” program, which will reformat digital content downloaded and stored on the Kindle for PC app, converting it to easily movable formats, such as PDF.
“Cabbages” did note that Amazon’s DRM process was tough to crack, although ultimately Amazon’s work was in vain. “Amazon actually put a bit of effort behind the DRM obfuscation in their Kindle for PC application. And they seem to have done a reasonable job on the obfuscation. Way to go Amazon! It’s good enough that I got bored unwinding it all and just got lazy with the Windows debugging APIs instead,” he said.
