HI-FI Show management announced October 22 that <A HREF="http://www.avacademy.com/">The Academy Advancing High Performance Audio and Video</A> will be sponsoring Trade Days at <A HREF="http://www.hifishow.com">HI-FI '99</A>, The Home Theater and Specialty Audio Show, taking place at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago from May 11-13, 1999. This marks the fourth consecutive year that The Academy has sponsored Trade Days at the HI-FI Shows. Show management and The Academy also announced today that the Music and Film Seminar Series will be expanded in 1999 to a two-track educational program. Each track will consist of the five disciplines showcased at the Seminar Series in 1998: Sales Techniques, Digital Technologies, Room Acoustics, Video Technologies, and Multi-room Design and Installation.

There's nothing else in home theater like a cinematically stunning film transferred to HDTV videotape and displayed at 720p or 1080i/p. The only problem is that the frame rates for the two formats are not the same, creating a syncing nightmare for the transfer studio. Solutions have involved running a single film frame through more than one scan of the faster DTV format to create a seamless presentation. As networks begin DTV transmission this fall, the ability to transfer film---a major source of primetime programming---and to create original high-definition content in a variety of DTV formats has become even more critical.

Last week, IBM announced the introduction of its <A HREF="http://www.ibm.com/homedirector">IBM Home Director</A> home networking system, controllable from a PC or television screen. Although initially targeted at the new-home construction market, IBM says that Home Director can be retrofitted to most existing homes.

Less than four years old, <A HREF="http://www.directv.com">DirecTV</A> announced last week that it has hit the four million subscriber mark, a number that the company says puts it in one of every 25 TV households in the US. Other interesting statistics about DirecTV: 120 million pay-per-view movies and special event purchases have been made; A total of approximately 200,000 hours of professional and collegiate sporting events have been broadcast; Maintained a monthly churn rate (percentage of subscribers who disconnect) of 1 percent (DirecTV claims that this is the lowest in the multichannel video industry. )