Turns out RealNetworks Inc.’s new DVD ripper RealDVD is as legal as its creator is litigious. Real debuted RealDVD this morning and along with it a preemptive lawsuit against the Hollywood interests that will inevitably attempt to litigate it into oblivion. Brought against the DVD Copy Control Association and a who’s-who of major studios, the suit asks the court to rule that RealDVD complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.
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Looks like Netflix’s video-streaming business is developing quite nicely. On Tuesday the DVD-by-mail pioneer said it has signed deals with CBS and Walt Disney that will add some of those networks’ most popular shows to the Netflix streaming library.
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RealNetworks Inc. CEO Rob Glaser calls RealDVD, the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper, “a compelling and very responsible product that gives consumers a way to do something they have always wanted to do.” But really what it’s giving them is a more cumbersome way of doing something that they’ve already been doing for years now with DVD Decrypter, AnyDVD, Handbrake, MacTheRipper, RipIt and the like.
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Blu-ray will be obsolete in five years. That’s not exactly the endorsement the consumer electronics industry needs as it heads into the holiday shopping season. But it’s the one Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK, has given. In an interview with Pocket-lint, Griffiths said longevity isn’t one of Blu-ray’s strong suits.
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Notflix is Netflix once more. The company finally resolved the technology problem that crippled its ability to mail DVDs to members for most of this week. As of this morning, all Netflix distribution centers are operating normally, and the backlog of DVDs that should have been shipped earlier is finding its way into the mail.
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Netflix’s March 2008 outage is back, this time in wide theatrical release. A serious disruption to the company’s distribution systems has prevented it from mailing DVDs to many of its customers for the better part of this week. “Our engineers continue to work around the clock to restore normal operations,” Netflix said in a post [...]
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Steve Jobs has apparently accepted the unacceptable: Things don’t always go Steve’s way. The mercurial Apple CEO has been notoriously intransigent when it comes to matters of variable pricing on iTunes, arguing that charging higher prices for more popular content might backfire, sending customers off to the file-sharing networks.
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Hollywood is finally embracing day-and-date film releases.
Yesterday, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeffrey Bewkes said that Warner Bros. plans to experiment with VOD releases day-and-date with DVD later this year. And now this morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that a number of major and independent movie studios have agreed to make their films available on iTunes day-and-date [...]
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I hope DVD-D Germany Ltd. has a nice big landfill out behind its corporate offices, because it’s going to need it if its new disposable DVD technology takes off.
Produced with a chemical coating that renders them unreadable after 48 hours or so, the company’s Einmal (German for “once”) discs posit a play-once-and-toss model that, at [...]
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A brassy little outfit called Psystar is getting a lot of attention today for peddling Leopard-compatible desktops. These “OpenMacs,” as the company’s named them, run on Intel (INTC) chips and feature 2GB of memory, a DVD drive and whatnot. They’re built from PC parts and, if you’d like, Psystar will even outfit them with [...]
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Hollywood has finally begun sniffing at the long tail.
Paramount Pictures (VIA) and application developer FanRocket this week debuted a new service for Facebook users that will enable them to send each other movie clips. A combination media player and clip library, the service called VooZoo aims to exploit the Hey-Remember-That-Funny-Scene-From-”Nacho Libre” phenomenon by providing users [...]
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