Virgin Preps TiVo Box For BBC Sport & News Apps & Red Button

An announcement has been made by British entertainment giant Virgin Media with regards to bringing enhanced BBC TV services to its TiVo boxes. The enhancements are planned for 2012, which will enable viewers to enjoy next-generation BBC content via the Virgin Media TiVo service.

This new deal between Virgin Media and the BBC will allow subscribers to look forward to great quality interactive news and sports coverage next year as well as BBC Sport and News apps, which means that there will be new user experiences and applications on offer from 2012.

With some major sporting events set to take place next year, the deal couldn’t have come at a better time. With access to these new experiences and applications, users will be able to enjoy interactive coverage of these sporting events via a new Red Button experience, which means interactive access to the Euro 2012 football tournament, the London 2012 Olympics, and the Wimbledon tennis championships amongst others.

These Red Button services will be bolstered by the up-and-coming BBC Sports app to enable enhanced viewing on internet-connected HDTV sets in 2012. This will bring together live streams from the existing Red Button service from the UK public service broadcaster, as well as on-demand video streams and other content from BBC Online.

Following the announcement of the deal, BBC Future Media’s controller of business development Jane Weedon said that the BBC iPlayer service is now available on hundreds of web-enabled TV devices, and has resulted in catch-up TV being taken “beyond the PC and into the living room”.

The Beeb partnered with Virgin back in 2008 in order to bring BBC iPlayer to the latter’s cable television platform. Virgin Media said that the addition of the BBC News app and enhanced BBC Sport services, which will be accessible via the Red Button, will build upon and further expand the collaboration between the two organizations.

Source is
http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/virgin-tivo-bbc-apps-201112211581.htm

Why today's living room doesn't need DVDs or Blu-Rays

There will come a day, I suspect, when you walk into the average Canadian’s living room, gander over at the entertainment centre and find nothing there that can play a DVD. The optical disc format we’re so used to is on the way out. Like the music CD, advancements in digital technology make accessing and playing digital files easier and more convenient than using a physical format. Electronics makers and tech companies know this and all of them have getting into your living room at the top of their agendas. Delivering entertainment directly to your big screen TV over the Internet is the golden ticket.

Already we’re seeing a steadily growing number of devices and smart TVs that are fighting for a foothold. Apple TV and Boxee Box are two popular TV-connected devices that allow you to access media on your various computers and storage drives, plus scroll through online libraries of content to stream or download. Another popular name in this category, especially among over-the-air TV enthusiasts, is Western Digital’s WD TV series of media boxes. Their newest product, the WD TV Live, just launched in October and packs a wealth of features.

However, all of those products lack one thing: an internal storage drive.
Western Digital’s WD TV Live Hub ($199) is a set-top box that can connect to your network, stream content from various online services and also contains a massive 1 terabyte hard drive. Why is that important? Many people stream downloaded content from a PC or a network attached storage (NAS) drive to a game console or set-top box attached to their TV. That’s a great way to access content from the living room, but in my experience some 1080p video files can hitch and freeze when they’re streamed. Scrolling forward or backward can sometimes cause the video to lock up. Plus, I’ve got to constantly manage my PC hard drive to clear up space. Not big deals, but these issues all disappear with the WD TV Live Hub.

The WD TV Live Hub stores, streams and plays movies and music, displays photos and streams video from such internet services as Netflix. The Live Hub can smoothly play 1080p video files in a wide variety of formats, including Xvid and h264, and can access files that have embedded subtitles or multiple audio tracks. Ripped DVDs can play as well. Content can be dropped onto the Hub through one of the two USB ports or over the network. Or you can scan media folders on any other NAS drives or PCs and index them. As long as those other sources are up and running, you can access those files, too. On the back of the device there’s an Ethernet port, which you'll need because the live hub does not connect wirelessly. You'll need to connect it directly to your network, which will be a problem for many users. 

Connecting to a HD TV proved simple. Although Western Digital does not include HDMI, component or composite cords in the box, all of those options are available on the back of the device. Plus, the two USB ports allow you can connect a wireless keyboard to one and a portable hard drive to another. Western Digital’s home screen is attractive and easy to navigate with jump options for video, music, files and so on. Some of the setup options are not especially intuitive. It took me a little while, through trial and error, to access and index media files on other drives. And while I found the remote simple to use, it reminded me of a kid’s toy with its rounded edges and big rubber buttons.

One of the benefits of a set-top box is access to subscription music and video services. The WD TV Live products have several built-in apps that launch Netflix, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube as well as Pandora and Blockbuster, but those last two are only available in the U.S. Western Digital also has a new content deal with music streaming service Spotify, which is heavily promoted in their marketing. A lot of good that does you here. Licensing and distribution rights means services such as these take a lot longer to get to Canada. However, as we’ve seen with Netflix and Rdio, some of them eventually do make it here. The more services that do make set-top boxes all the more attractive. So while the WD TV Live Hub may be an imperfect TV companion today because of the limited range of content and inability to connect to a Wi-Fi network, it’s rock solid in every other way.

Source is
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/2011-tech-gift-guide/home-entertainment/why-todays-living-room-doesnt-need-dvds-or-blu-rays/article2265348/

Blu-ray Disc Sales up 35% in 2011

Sales of Blu-ray Disc movies in the last four months of the year have skyrocketed, eclipsing what had been a sluggish year for the high-definition packaged media format, an analyst said.

BD disc sales in the United States will reach about 115 million units in 2011, compared with 85 million units in 2010 — spearheaded by the Star Wars: The Complete Saga boxed set release, Jim Bottoms, analyst with Futuresource in London, told Home Media Magazine.

In Europe, BD disc sales will balloon 42% to 63 million units, compared with 44 million units last year — driven by strong adoption in Germany.

Global BD disc sales will increase to 234 million units, up 45% from 161 million units in 2010.

Bottoms said that in addition to growing appeal for catalog titles in Blu-ray, consumers are less resistant to purchasing content in HD, despite the higher price compared with DVD.

“Blu-ray buy rates are starting to nudge up here in the United States and in Europe,” he said, adding that premium pricing on BD titles declining more quickly in Europe than in the United States.

Futuresource found a 50% price premium compared with DVD on the top 10 releases in the United States. The average new-release BD title sold for $25, compared with $16 for DVD. In France, the price difference between BD and DVD new releases is about 20% — a level Bottoms said needs to be emulated domestically.

By comparison, German retailers charge 36% more for BD titles compared with DVD — a benchmark Bottoms said underscores the country’s strong market for high-definition packaged media.

“Sales of discs in Germany are outstripping sales in the U.K., which is almost unheard of,” he said.

Bottoms said a mixture of scant HD programming on German TV combined with strong retail support have pushed BD sales.

Meanwhile, price reductions on Blu-ray Disc players, including a $39 player sold by Best Buy on Black Friday (and British e-commerce retailer Asda, which is owned by Walmart, sold a player for $59) have prompted consumers to revisit the format.

“We’re getting to the price point now where CE manufacturers won’t make a DVD player and a Blu-ray player,” Bottoms said. “There’s no point in having double inventory.”

The analyst said that while media hype about streaming and subscription VOD services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime won’t abate anytime soon, 80% of consumer spending on video entertainment in the United States ($17 billion) is being spent on packaged media.

Non-packaged media revenue of $4 billion includes online video and pay-TV, Bottoms said.

“That pendulum will swing, but outside of big cities like Los Angeles and New York, the whole middle of America still finds disc distribution important,” he said.

Bottoms said Hollywood has to realize that the margins generated by packaged media greatly exceed margins derived through streaming and transactional VOD.

He said efforts to launch digital locker UltraViolet, whereby consumers can own both physical and digital copies of a movie, are imperative.

“It’s important that the industry keeps that alive for as long as possible,” Bottoms said.

Indeed, Futuresource projects that by 2015, 30% of video consumption will occur online, followed by Blu-ray Disc (29%), transactional VOD (21%) and DVD (20%).

Source is
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/blu-ray-disc/blu-ray-disc-sales-35-2011-25811

Xbox 360 Dashboard gets a major update with movie and TV focus

Switch on your Xbox 360 tomorrow and accept the update: it's an Xmas gift from Microsoft and changes your Dashboard experience entirely. In addition to giving the Dashboard and its various sections a completely new look and feel, the December update adds a wave of new TV and video services as well as cloud-based storage of a limited number of game save files.

Xbox Live Gold subscribers will be able to use up to 500MB of cloud storage (per Gamertag) to save their games in. Most games only require a few hundred kilobytes to a few megabytes per save file, so this should be more than enough for most people in their daily gaming. It will also allow you to access your saved gamers on your friends' Xboxes. (By comparison, PlayStation Plus offers PS3 owners a less capacious 150MB of cloud love.)

But the big new features concern TV, movies and entertainment. Though to begin with that aforementioned wave is more of a ripple. UK users actually only get access to Lovefilm and its streaming library (as part of a Lovefilm subscription), and must wait until later this month to get some of the other services scheduled to land on your Xbox. These include Channel 4's 4oD, YouTube, Vevo, Dailymotion, Blinkbox and Muzu. The BBC was scheduled to be on-board for this update, but El Beeb won't join the Xbox party until "early 2012". We asked why, but Microsoft didn't know. Likely, it's a rights issue. It usually is.

Anyway, we had a hands-on play with the new Dashboard last week. Overall we felt the updates were worth the wait (we first talked about them in June, six months ago). Microsoft has given the Xbox a unified design aesthetic to all of its entertainment portals. For example, if you've ever cringed as you went to rent a movie only to be faced with having to load the clunky, slow Zune application, you can put your hands in the air like you just don't care -- that obnoxious experience has taken an axe right to the face. That is to say, it's very much dead. Instead, the movie and TV rental experience is faster and more refined -- it's a beautiful foal finally born from a bloated horse on its way to the glue factory, quite frankly.

Source is
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/05/xbox-dashboard-update

Blu-ray is here to stay, but do you have the technology for it

The idea of being reliant on physical media such as tapes and discs to store music, videos and computer software is fast evaporating, as more and more people turn to the internet as a way to (legally or otherwise) download the latest tunes, movies and programs.

Even so, the Blu-ray disc format is finding a fair few fans. Intended to usurp the ever-present DVD format, Blu-ray discs can store the vast quantities of data demanded by high-definition (HD) movies and games. But is the Blu-ray format useful to PC owners? Read on to find out.

Blu-ray for PCs

Although home Blu-ray players for HD movies are the most popular use of the format, Blu-ray disc drives are also available for PCs. Both internal and external drives are available, with BD-Rom (read-only) models costing around £50 and BD-RE (recordable) around £65.

Internal drives are no more difficult to install than DVD or hard disk drives but older PCs may lack the necessary Sata connection used by newer drives and will instead require a model with an IDE port.

External drives obviously require no installation at all. A similar proviso applies though, since some external drives are available with faster USB3 ports – something that’s still far from standard on new PCs.

A USB3 drive will still work when connected to a USB2 or USB1 port, but just won’t be as quick at transferring data. It’s also worth noting that a BD drive will still read (and write, if it’s BD-RE) CDs and DVDs, so it can replace an existing disc drive.

The speed of the connection makes little difference to a BD-Rom drive that’s only used for reading discs (which usually means playing movies) but it can be an issue for burning them
.
As with CDs and DVDs, BD burning is rated at different speeds and a single-speed drive writes data at 36Mbit/sec. In lay terms, that means a single-layer 25GB Blu-ray disc will take around 90 minutes to fill, while a double-speed drive would do the same job in 45 minutes – and so on.

What do I need?

Windows 7 and Vista (with Service Pack 2 installed) include the necessary driver for reading and writing Blu-ray data discs with a BD drive, but both require the appropriate codec to be installed before they can play BD movies. This will usually be supplied with a BD drive as part of the accompanying disc-burning software and allows you to watch movies using Windows Media Player.

Windows XP, on the other hand, has no built-in knowledge of Blu-ray; though again, the BD driver and codec will be supplied with a new drive, so XP computers can make use of Blu-ray.

Any computer with a Pentium 4 processor – the chip that acts as the brain of the PC – or better should be powerful enough to play Blu-ray movies, but desktop PCs must have a graphics card that supports High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection if they’re connected to a monitor via a DVI cable.

Otherwise, a HDMI connection between the desktop graphics card and the display is required, or a low-quality VGA connection be used. These issues shouldn’t concern laptop owners, unless they wish to output the content of a Blu-ray to an external monitor or TV.

Burning computer data to Blu-ray discs is straightforward but making your own Blu-ray movies is a processor-intensive task that could take a long time, even with a modern computer – and beyond our scope here.

Stay cost-effective

When it comes to PCs, the Blu-ray format is still best considered as a way to play movie discs, as blank media is still comparatively expensive (even bought in bulk, single-layer 25GB discs cost upwards of £2 each, compared to just a few pence for blank DVDs).

Source is

http://www.computeractive.co.uk/ca/pc-help/2111231/blu-ray-stay-technology

I Was Wrong About HD-DVDs

I remember the good old college days in my dorm room, watching Dumb and Dumber on VHS instead of studying.

That was 2004, and I knew the decade-old VHS was on its last legs, but I had yet to switch over to the mainstream DVD world. Sure enough, the spool of film started to unravel mid-movie one night, and I was cradling the broken plastic tape much like the blind boy held his lifeless, broken-necked bird in the movie.

I looked at the crate of VHS tapes I brought to college that year and wondered in horror which one would be next. Ironically, life imitated art and my Jurassic Park tape died out next -- just like the film's dinosaur stars -- and I soon threw out my entire obtrusive and outdated VHS collection.

I learned that dying technology is similar to nature's survival of the fittest: Anything that's faster and sleeker is going to eat up all other competition. So was the case with the demise of VHS, which was wiped out by the thinner, quicker DVD. Now the DVD is the endangered species, thanks to the dawn of the high-definition Blu-ray disc.

With more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs, Blu-ray currently sits at the top of the food chain.

Blu-ray's crystal-clear images, room for added features, and decrease in price over the years have all caused more Americans to jump onboard. About 15% of all consumers used a Blu-ray player in the six months ending in March, up from 9% last year, according to market research firm NPD Group, and 22% of all disc buyers bought at least one Blu-ray title.

Most of the major movie studios, including Disney (NYSE: DIS  ) , Paramount, and Sony (NYSE: SNE  ) , salivate at the chance to show off their explosions and beautiful actors in high-def and have released titles in the Blu-ray format.

But just a few years ago, it was unclear whether Toshiba's HD-DVD or Sony's Blu-ray format would succeed.

The Blu-ray-vs.-HD-DVD format fight reminded consumers of the 1970s and 80s war waged between videotape rivals VHS and BetaMax -- and we all know who won that one.

Everyone -- including me -- was unsure whether to stick with the familiar DVD format or to invest in a high-definition disc format, along with all the accompanying hardware. The entertainment industry was just as hesitant, wanting to choose the format that would become victorious.

Game-console makers also made bets on the dueling technologies. Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT  ) Xbox360, which could read only DVDs, banked on a separate peripheral to play HD-DVDs. Sony's PlayStation 3 was able to play both DVDs and Blu-ray discs. To satisfy the consumers who didn't want a console, a new species of standalone high-def movie players emerged.

The movie studios, which were split between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray camps, eventually sided with Blu-ray. That sealed HD-DVD's fate and Toshiba surrendered, ceasing production of HD-DVDs in 2008.

Those who purchased Microsoft's $199 HD-DVD peripheral, HD-DVD movies and HD-DVD players, watched their investment value drop to zero overnight.

Despite the complete disappearance of HD-DVD technology from store shelves, DVDs still remain popular. Until high-definition TVs become more mainstream, DVDs and Blu-ray discs will continue to co-exist. Apple has yet to release a computer with a Blu-ray drive.

Now I'm looking ahead and sense that the next technology to replace Blu-ray could be invisible. My Apple-obsessed friend is a pioneer in the movement to eliminate all physical discs, and in doing so, he has freed up a lot of cabinet space. He downloads and streams everything through an older Mac he transformed into a media server. Now he can access all his music, movies, and podcasts from his TV, using his iPhone or iPad as a remote. (Con: That method is harder for people to set up, and the quality isn't as great as Blu-ray.)‪

"I can't remember the last time I bought a DVD," he said, "and I used to buy tons of them!"

That's a fact -- just a few months ago he had a 4-inch-thick case jampacked with DVDs. He sold a few, gave a few away, and donated others.

He did hang on to some Oscar-winning discs, for good reason -- in a few decades they will be the new collectable version of today's Grammy-winning vinyl records, and antique hunters will pay up big bucks. I suppose that will make a VHS tape the equivalent of a gramophone record.

Source is
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/11/30/i-was-wrong-about-hd-dvds.aspx

Researchers Crack Blu-Ray Encryption With Cheap Hardware

How much does it cost to crack Blu-ray encryption? Not much, apparently: Researchers at the Secure Hardware Group of Germany's Ruhr University of Bochum (RUB) have cracked Intel’s encryption protocol protecting Blu-ray discs and other HD media using a $267 custom board.

When you watch a Blu-ray on your TV or computer, Intel’s High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) protocol is there to encrypt and copy-protect the HD channel. The entertainment industry has used the protocol for nearly a decade to prevent users from copying and pirating movies and games. The technology also found its way to any display that uses a DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other connections.

Hackers cracked the HDCP master key in September 2010; at the time, Intel wrote it off as a minor threat, as a person would have to "make a computer chip of their own" to actually use the code, according to Fox News. Well, the RUB researchers found another way.

To crack Intel’s HDCP encryption, the researchers used a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack with an inexpensive field programmable gate array (FPGA) board. The build used an ATLYS board from Digilent, a HDMI port equipped Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA, and a serial RS232 port for communication. The board was able to manipulate and decode the communication between the Blu-ray player and the HDTV without being detected.

There may be legal implications to circumventing copyright protection, but the researchers' intent was never to create a pirating process, because the pirates already have figured out much simpler methods.

“Rather, our intention was to fundamentally investigate the safety of the HDCP system and to financially assess the actual cost for the complete knockout,” said Tim Güneysu, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at RUB, in a press release. “The fact that we have achieved our goal in a degree thesis and with material costs of approximately 200 Euro[s] definitely does not speak for the safety of the current HDCP system.”

Source is
http://www.pcworld.com/article/245033/researchers_crack_bluray_encryption_with_cheap_hardware.html