Audio Video News
Digital Set-Top Box Market Ready to Roll
 |  Sep 12, 1999

According to a report issued last week by <A HREF="http://www.alliedworld.com">Allied Business Intelligence</A>, a worldwide conversion from traditional analog broadcasts to digital images is creating a windfall for those producing consumer set-top boxes. Findings in the report, "Digital Set-Top Boxes: World Markets, Architectures, and Vendors," also indicate that the global installed base of digital set-top boxes will reach 252 million units by the end of 2004. The report states that two key factors driving the demand will be the use of digital set-top boxes by both DBS and cable subscribers. Growth in terrestrial digital TV decoder boxes is likely to be significantly slower, according to the research.

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Audio Video News
CEMA Pushes for New Action on Satellite Act
 |  Aug 29, 1999

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.

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Audio Video News
New Line Cinema Goes Interactive
 |  Aug 22, 1999

Digital technology is changing everything&mdash;especially the marketing of entertainment. DVD-Audio has the music industry excited about interactive features like artists' bios, still pictures, and other as-yet unimagined marketing opportunities. Free MP3 audio files are being used by some music companies as promotional tools for new releases.

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Audio Video News
Direct Broadcast Satellite Set-Top Box Market Full Steam Ahead
 |  Aug 15, 1999

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.

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Audio Video News
HDTV Editing Tools Big News at SIGGraph '99
 |  Aug 15, 1999

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.

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Audio Video News
More Good News for Time-Shifting TV Viewers
 |  Aug 08, 1999

Early last week, <A HREF="http://www.burst.com">Instant Video Technologies</A> announced that it has acquired Delaware-based Timeshift-TV, a developer of digital-video technology that allows users to "personalize their TV viewing experience by adding VCR functionality to live broadcasts." Similar in concept to recent products released by TiVo and RePlay, these digital recording devices are aimed at giving consumers more control over when and how they watch their favorite TV shows.

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Audio Video News
Schwann Announces New DVD Movie Publication
 |  Aug 08, 1999

Early last week, <A HREF="http://www.valley-media.com">Valley Media</A>'s <A HREF="http://www.schwann.com">Schwann Publications</A> announced that they are introducing a new publication, <I>Schwann DVD Advance</I>. The company says the first issue of the bimonthly publication, dated September/October 1999, will list more than 3500 DVDs, sport an initial circulation of 10,000, and be available in retail stories and by subscription.

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Audio Video News
Coming Soon: 500 Channels of Satellite TV
 |  Aug 01, 1999

Five hundred channels of television will soon be available to <A HREF="http://www.echostar.com/">EchoStar</A>'s DISH Network subscribers. On July 19, EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen demonstrated DISH 500, a pizza-sized dish antenna capable of receiving signals from satellites in two locations. The demo took place at the <A HREF="http://www.sbca.org/">Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association</A>'s national exposition in Las Vegas.

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Audio Video News
NASA Takes HDTV into Space
 |  Aug 01, 1999

Last week, the 26th mission of the Space Shuttle <I>Columbia</I> touched down with a payload of high-definition footage, taken with an HD camcorder. The mission, which lasted five days and concluded last week, was the 95th so far. <A HREF="http://www.nasa.gov">NASA</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/professional">Sony</A> will research these high-resolution images of Shuttle mission STS-93, including footage of the deployment of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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Audio Video News
Phantom Menaces Tricom Global Restaurants
 |  Jul 25, 1999

We've all seen the TV commercials: KFC's Colonel Sanders, Taco Bell's little sad-eyed Chihuahua, and a warrior princess from Pizza Hut fighting hordes of robot invaders from George Lucas' <I>The Phantom Menace</I>. But the blitzkrieg of clever <I>Star Wars</I>-theme ads for Tricom Global Restaurants, released just prior to the film's debut, has fallen flat. A marketing deal Tricom signed with <A HREF="http://www.lucasfilm.com/">Lucasfilm</A> has proven "surprisingly ineffective at driving sales," according to the company's chairman and CEO, Andrall E. Pearson.

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