Audio Video News

Gary Shapiro is after the US Congress to reconcile House and Senate versions of the Satellite Home Viewer Act (SHVA). Shapiro, president of the <A HREF="http://www.cemacity.org/">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A> (CEMA), has asked legislators to incorporate provisions of a recent agreement between direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service <A HREF="http://www.directv.com/">DirecTV</A> and the <A HREF="http://www.nab.org/">National Association of Broadcasters</A>, allowing DBS services to transmit local TV signals&mdash;a practice known as local-into-local&mdash;as cable companies have always done.

T<I>he following review was scheduled for publication in the print edition of </I>SGHT<I>, but we were recently told by Sony that the VPH-20U has been discontinued. Although this review won't run in </I>SGHT<I>, we thought some of you might find it useful if you're interested in purchasing a projector soon, as there will undoubtedly be some VPH-20Us in stores for a few weeks.&mdash;Ed.</I>

Curiouser and curiouser. Wonderland's Alice would feel right at home in the topsy-turvy world of Silicon Valley, where companies never have to show a profit to make their founders wealthy, and where probable courtroom adversaries invest in each others' businesses. That's exactly what happened August 17 at <A HREF="http://www.replaytv.com/">RePlay Networks</A>, which received a whopping $57 million in financing from a group of investors including Time Warner Inc., The Walt Disney Co., Liberty Media Group, United Television Inc., Showtime Networks Inc., and a division of industrial giant Matsushita, whose Panasonic company makes one version of the RePlay hard-disk-based video recorder.

Fans of <A HREF="http://www.disney.com">Disney</A>'s animated films are about to finally get what they've been asking for this past year. Nine films are scheduled for release on DVD, starting October 26 with <I>Pinocchio</I>&mdash;which was also the studio's first animated classic to be released on video, back in 1985. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Disney's home-video division, will release the remaining eight features on DVD over the next four months as part of what the company calls a "once-in-a-millennium celebration."

M<I>el Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hunts. Directed by Peter Weir. Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 (letterbox). Dolby Digital 5.1. 115 minutes. 1982. MGM/UA Home Video 906638. Rated R. $24.95.</I>

Recently, <A HREF="http://www.cahnersinstat.com">Cahners In-Stat Group</A> released their forecasts of annual growth rates for digital direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) systems, which they claim will be in excess of 10% through 2003. Shipments are expected to exceed 30 million units by that time.

Digital TV might have reached only a few couch potatoes so far, but it is the hot ticket for computer-graphics and video-editing professionals, who converged in Los Angeles last week for SIGGraph '99, the annual convention of the <A HREF="http://www.acm.org/">Association for Computer Machinery</A>'s <A HREF="http://www.siggraph.org/">Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics</A>. All-format editing and design software was among the most newsworthy items on the convention floor.