Audio/Video

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator, said it would be stripping digital-rights management software from its music subscription service for cell phones and desktop computers.

The company on Thursday said more than a million tracks from Vodafone Music can be purchased and freely transferred between devices. Previously, Vodafone restricted how many times a song could be transferred and limited the types of devices the music could be played on. The deal includes music from EMI, Universal, and Sony, and Vodafone said it's still negotiating with Warner.

Musicians including Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, Billy Bragg, Blur's David Rowntree and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien said last night that the public should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the internet.

The Featured Artists Coalition, which consists of 140 of Britain's biggest rock and pop stars, said at its inaugural meeting that companies such as MySpace and YouTube should be required to remunerate the artists when they use their music for advertising.

A Spanish teenager ran up a phone bill of nearly €40,000 by downloading all the episodes of US television drama Lost.

Blanca Rosa Alcántara - the 14 year old daughter of a councillor in Getafe, Madrid - managed to run up the bill last year using the 3G mobile internet card which the council had assigned to her mother, reports Typicallyspanish.com.

The economy is in the toilet, and I know I'm not the only person in America who is looking for ways to cut costs. Top on my list in 2009 is finding a way to eliminate my $100 a month cable TV bill. Up until very recently, the idea of cutting off subscription TV would have meant skimping on a whole lot of good quality entertainment. I must admit, I don't watch a lot of TV. But I watch enough that I would be very sad if I had to give up HBO's "Flight of the Conchords" or NBC's "30 Rock."

Do you like ping-pong? The incessant back-and-forth, the staccato sound of hollow plastic ball against rubberized paddle? The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat? Did you know you can get the same enjoyment following the tug-of-war between online video site Hulu and software developer Boxee?

Will the Internet destroy cable television? The question, which would have seemed absurd only a couple of years ago, is suddenly being taken very seriously, especially by the cable companies. The barrier to Internet-based television once seemed to be mainly technological. Increasingly, it is just a matter of working out some business issues.

Cable TV will be around for a long time, as will satellite and cable-like services from Verizon Communications (VZ) and AT&T (T). But all of them will soon start to feel competitive pressure from the Net.

Skype will license a high-quality audio codec in its latest VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) software to any developer or vendor free of charge, the eBay subsidiary announced Tuesday.

The codec, called Silk, can deliver sound quality that captures the full sound of the human voice, according to Jonathan Christensen, Skype's general manager of audio and video. This "super-wideband" codec was introduced with the Skype 4.0 for Windows client, announced last month. Christensen unveiled the licensing program, which is live now, at the eComm conference in Burlingame, California.

Thomson Reuters is preparing to launch a multi-million-dollar online video platform, in an attempt to differentiate its multimedia offering to professional traders and investors by integrating it with the group’s existing editorial output and financial data.

About 130 people in New York, London and Hong Kong are being recruited for the launch this summer of a service that will both showcase an expanded video offering from Reuters News and provide a platform for partners such as research providers and other media groups.

Full CD-quality copies of every song on U2's upcoming album, No Line On The Horizon, have been leaked on to the web after Universal Music Australia accidentally put it up for sale on its online music store two weeks early.

The album - U2's 12th - goes on sale on March 3 but it was available to download for a brief period this week on getmusic.com.au, run by Universal Music Australia. The U2 fan blog, U2log.com, published a screenshot showing it had bought the album for $19.80.

U2's long-awaited new album has been leaked online and is being downloaded by thousands of fans on the file sharing site Pirate Bay.

As four men behind the website appear in court in Sweden for assisting the illegal downloading of copyrighted music and films, high quality copies of the upcoming No Line on the Horizon album were being gleefully snapped up.