LATEST ADDITIONS

On May&#160;18,&#160;James D. Dunning, Jr., Chairman and CEO of the Petersen Companies, Inc., announced an agreement to acquire <I>Stereophile Magazine</I> and <I>Stereophile Guide to Home Theater</I>---two of this country's leading high-end audio and home-theater publications---as well as HI-FI '98, The Home theater & Specialty Audio Show.

Several manufacturers will be demonstrating state-of-the-art home-theater products at <A HREF="http://www.hifishow.com">HI-FI '98</A>, some of which have never been seen by the public before.

Plans by the NBC and CBS networks to transmit 1080i HDTV this fall are "suicidal," according to John Malone, chairman of <A HREF="http://www.tci.com/">Tele-Communications, Inc.</A> On May 5, at the <A HREF="http://www.ncta.com/">National Cable Television Association's</A> annual convention in Atlanta, Malone vowed that TCI won't carry HDTV in its ultimate form. A single channel of full-bore HDTV occupies the same transmission bandwidth as 12 low-resolution channels or several standard-resolution channels.

Merger news: <A HREF="http://www.IMDb.com">IMDb</A> to <A HREF="http://amazon.com">Amazon.com</A>. If this sounds like a chess move, it certainly is for a few folks at the top of the Web's food chain. On April 27, the Internet Movie Database became part of Amazon.com, the world's largest online bookseller.