According to the annual financial report for EMI, smallest of the Big 4 record labels, the company lost 624 million euros (just over $800 million using today’s conversion rates) in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010.
The report is prepared each year by EMI’s owner, Terra Firma owned Maltby Capital, a Terra Firma owned company which purchased EMI in 2007.
Maltby Capital Chairman Stephen Alexander began the report by addressing developments in recent months suggesting Citigroup, the principal lender in Terra Firma’s acquisition of EMI, might take over the company due to an alleged breach of lending terms.
Alexander wrote, “despite the issues around the financing structure and the related public speculation, both divisions of EMI have shown marked progress in their underlying performance during the course of the last twelve months.”
This translates into losing less money than the previous year, which saw a loss of more than 1.7 billion euros. He also admitted having no actual first hand knowledge of the legal proceedings between Citigroup and Terra Firma.
There is a glimmer of hope for the future if they can survive long enough. EMI’s goal, it says, is becoming “a comprehensive rights management company that can take full advantage of global opportunities in all markets for music to the maximum benefit of its artists and songwriters.”
But are they doing enough to make that a reality? The report’s section on EMI’s recorded music division focused almost entirely on a handful of best selling artists. Diversification into new areas like merchandise distribution and their live recording/distribution service, Abbey Road Live, were almost a footnote.
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Result for: distribution service
Sharp has announced today that they plan to enter the crowded e-reader/e-book market, hoping to take a piece while the market is still in its toddler years.
The company will offer an e-book distribution service by the end of the year, and a reader that will allow users to playback audio and video content.
Sharp has confirmed publisher backing in Japan “and overseas.”
The market has grown crowded over the past 24 months, with the launch of the iPad, Nook and updated Sony and Amazon devices.
Just in the last month, Barnes & Noble and Amazon slashed the prices on their popular devices to under $200.
Earlier in the month, search giant Google announced it was planning on launching an e-book service in Japan, as well.
Result for: distribution service
NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can “detect illegal copies” uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.
The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.
NEC says “these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment.”
Among the features of the video content identification technology are:
Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
A high detection rate and low false positive rate for all video contents
By estimating confidence of signatures generated from each frame and using the confidence for sequence identification, the technology achieves a high detection rate (*6) with a very low false positive rate (*7). These technologies achieved an average detection rate of 96% at a very low false alarm rate of 5ppm (5 in one million) through tests conducted by the international standardization organization.
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