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Will France beat America in the download race? A France Télécom project wiring 100 Parisian homes with fiber optics will reach blazing-fast speeds of 2.5 gigabits per second downstream and 1.2gbps upstream. That beats our best contender, Verizon FiOS, which is being marketed at a maximum of 50 megabits per second. However, there's a catch. Verizon FiOS is a real-world product rolling out in the field, whereas the France Télécom project is merely experimental. Also, France is using GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology. Verizon will eventually add GPON to its own system, raising download (and upload) speeds into the same range as the French. But there remains one area where the French may remain way out front: price. The experimental service costs €70, or about $88, per month for combined TV, phone, and net access—less than American cable and telcos are charging for their triple-play packages.

There's an interesting story behind the photo of the Samsung rear projection set that appears on the home page and in the product review. As most of you know, such photos are almost never taken directly from a television showing an actual image. Instead, the image is inserted later into a blank screen photo of the set using a computer program, most often Photoshop. This program allows nearly any photo to be resized and reconfigured to fit a television screen originally shot at any angle.

Live music broadcasts go all the way back to the golden age of radio—to the very first broadcast, in fact, when the first broadcaster played his fiddle. And concert halls are again becoming studios. Live Nation, the world's largest operator of concert venues, has already wired 36 major venues and festival sites and plans to bring the number up to 120 by year-end. The result, for viewers, will be sizzling live music delivered to your TV, PC, cellphone, FM or satellite radio—any program provider willing to do business with Live Nation, a new company spun off from Clear Channel. The project is already pretty busy, having broadcast 250 shows from 50 artists in 2005. Given that LN stages 29,000 events per year, there's plenty of room for growth. What I'm hoping is that LN will discover how dull stadium performances can be, visually and sonically, and concentrate instead on bringing home music from the sweaty little clubs, where the real excitement is. Like, say, the House of Blues, which LN recently acquired. Oh, and please, record in 5.1. (PS: Readers have the right to know that I am a Live Nation stockholder.)