Newmark this week announced its iDJ two-channel mixer, which can turn an everyday dual-iPod owner into Sir Digital-Mix-A-Lot. But in doing so, the company triggered an online debate about deejaying between the vinyl purists and those more apt to embrace technology. "Digital turntables are just stupid. If you're going to DJ digitally, just bring a laptop. If you can't scratch, what's the point of having turntables?" wrote one Engadget reader.
Last month, a student at the University of Arizona was sentenced to three years probation and a $5,400 fine for illegally distributing music and movies on the Internet. A spokesman for the recording industry claims investigators found more than $50 million worth of pirated material on his computer. That seems like an awful lot of money. How much is stolen music worth?
In the coming months, Real Networks plans to float a new version of its media player for the Linux operating system that includes more of the features found in the standard player. This "experiment" will give Real an idea as to how practical its fully-fledged media services can be on the open source OS.
Technology researcher Michael Cai saw the promise of media convergence firsthand more than two years ago, when a friend treated him to a home viewing of the hit movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
"The film was pirated off the Internet and broadcast from a PC to a big-screen TV using wireless technology from X10," the Parks Associates senior analyst laughed, referring to the maker of tiny wireless video cameras whose pop-up ads once blanketed the Web. "It worked pretty well."
Soon audiophiles may be listening to their music in surround sound thanks to a new standard released by the creators of MP3. Scientists and engineers from Fraunhofer IIS, Thomson, and Agere Systems have released an encoder and decoder to the public which they claim produces files half the size of currently released formats.
The Twentieth Century Fox studio, a veteran of the big screen and the TV screen, is about to break into an entirely new realm: the really little screen, the kind that comes on a cell phone.
In what appeared to be the first arrangement of its kind, Twentieth Century Fox said Wednesday it would create a unique series of one-minute dramas based on its hit show "24" exclusively for a new high-speed wireless service being offered by Vodafone PLC, the world's biggest cell phone company.
Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket chain, is launching an online music service on Monday which it hopes will rival Apple's market-leading iTunes.
Demand has grown for music available over the internet and Tesco estimates the UK market is now worth £25m.
Tesco said its digital music store will use Microsoft's Windows Media Player and will charge 79 pence per song.
It plans to offer more than 500,000 tracks and says its system will give users improved sound quality.
"Music buying is changing," said Laura Wade Gery, chief executive of Tesco.com.
The two companies will announce on Thursday a joint marketing campaign for television, print, cinema and online advertising aimed at showing consumers what they can do with their digital entertainment technologies.
Those technologies might include Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Expenses for the campaign are estimated to be in the low tens of millions of dollars and will be split between the two companies. It will run from Nov. 7 until late January.
Rumors that Netflix and TiVo executives are close to shaking hands on a deal to deliver films over the Internet may be premature, but they've once again galvanized a seemingly irresistible dream of instant entertainment gratification.
Nearly six years after it was filmed, Hollywood's trouble-plagued movie version of the hunt for hacker Kevin Mitnick is headed for video stores in the U.S.
Originally titled "Takedown," then "Cybertraque," the film is set for a September 28th U.S. release on DVD with the new title, "Track Down."
