Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily

The problem is caused by a glitch with the image sensor, which may mean the screen does not display images correctly, Sony said.

The recall applies to models sold worldwide between September 2003 and January 2005.

The electronics giant will repair for free only cameras that show signs of the problems, according to Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa.

This is a research paper from Jupiter Research, Interesting view point... i can only watch low quality  web type footage of a short time. Normally you can get away with poor sound or poor visuals but not both. I doubt i could stand watching a hour of poor footage.

Jeff Jarvis provides more evidence that the future of "television" is being remade on the web, mostly by amateurs, hackers, and struggling artists.

Online video in 2006 feels like the Web in 1994. It's all pretty rough, but a lot of it is very creative. Much of the stuff that's being created for the web by the mainstream media has a raw, experimental quality that we're not used to from big organizations.

Jeff's story of producing his segment for CBS versus producing a segment for Amanda Congdon's webcast hints that the eventual impact of web video on television will be greater than the impact of the Web on print.

One of the most significant parts of all of this is that amateurs can produce higher-quality video than is possible with standard Grown-Up TV production techniques. The technology is necessary but not sufficient. Production processes have to be re-invented for the low-overhead, small-screen, short-subject, random-access, bandwidth-thrifty web. We're still in inventing a new grammar of online video, just as Desi Arnaz (yes, Desi!) invented multi-camera production techniques late in the early days of television.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/01/ce_giants_punt_wihd/

Six big-name consumer electronics companies have come together to thrash out a wireless alternative to the HDMI cabling standard that may also tread on the toes of next-generation Wi-Fi technology.

The WirelessHD specification is described as a "high-speed wireless, multi-gigabit technology in the unlicensed 60GHz band [with] smart antenna technology to overcome line-of-sight constraints", co-founders Sony, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, NEC, Toshiba and SiBEAM said. Connections will be secure to keep content safe from duplication, and while the technology will be capable of supporting uncompressed HD video and audio, it will also host device-control data. Initial versions of the WiHD specification will support data rates of 2-5Gbps, but the technology will be capable of pushing 20Gbps, the founders said.

The consortium's members want to get a spec in place by Spring 2007, at which point companies will be able to build modules to allow their HD TVs, DVD players, Blu-ray Disc machines, HD DVD units, DVRs, camcorders etc to beam content back and forth.

Right now, the focus is very much "wireless display connectivity", as the WiHD group puts it. That's exactly what HDMI is about, albeit in a wired context. The founders didn't indicate the technology's range, but there's surely the potential for streaming from, say, a player to a screen in another room. If WiHD can do that, it stands as a rival to 802.11n Wi-Fi. ®

HMDI Evolves : http://blog.kking.co.uk/blog/_archives/2006/7/31/2181105.html

Microsoft's Zune music player and online content store combo is "way off launch" in Europe and the UK, the company has admitted. The "earliest date" it might appear here? The end of 2007, or possibly even 2008, a Microsoft executive has revealed.

"The earliest date it will be in the UK is towards the end of 2007. However, it could easily be 2008," Microsoft media and entertainment alliance manager Dene Schonknecht said, according to UK trade paper New Media Age.

----

I'm so glad I ordered mine from the US I'll have it by the 20th :-)

UK copyright law should be changed to include a ‘private right to copy’ that protects users of ipod and other MP3 players, according to a new report published today (Sunday) by the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr). The UK’s current copyright laws mean that millions of Brits break the law each year when they copy their CDs onto their computers.

ippr says that the forthcoming review of Intellectual Property, set up by Chancellor Gordon Brown and chaired by Andrew Gowers, should update the 300-year-old copyright laws to take account of the changes in the way people want to listen to music, watch films and read books.

ippr recommends a legal ‘private right to copy’ that would allow people to make copies of CDs, or DVDs for personal us. The report says a new right would legalise the actions of millions of Britons without any significant harm to the copyright holders.

The report, Public Innovation: Intellectual property in a digital age, also recommends that: