According to the FT, the “full-featured” tablet is being prepped to launch alongside a next-generation digital album format Apple (AAPL) is cooking up with the four largest recording companies, one designed to gin up sales of CD-length music.

“Cocktail,” as the project is known, is a new music format that will gather songs, photos, lyrics sheets, video clips and liner notes into a sort of interactive booklet. Said one executive familiar with the effort: “It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music.”

…skipping through nine middling-to-lousy songs to reach that one that inspired you to shell out for the album.

Which begs the question: Can that heyday ever be recreated? Now that we’re accustomed to purchasing only the music we want via the thin-margin, 99-cent-song-by-song downloads that iTunes pioneered, can we ever be convinced to pay a premium for bundled music, cluttered up with a bunch of liner notes, wacky band photos and throw away filler songs?

[Image Credit: Apple Insider]

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a little lighter in the wallet today–about $2 billion lighter–thanks to a third quarter sales miss that sent the company’s shares down some 8% in after-hours trading.

Oracle (ORCL) posted a 30% increase in profits and a 21% increase in revenue, both in line with expectations. But a 16% rise in sales of new software that came in on the low end of its January forecast spooked investors who believed Oracle to be immune to the economic slowdown.

“A lot of investors had bought the stock in anticipation of a strong quarter,” said Avian Securities analyst Jeff Gaggin. “The applications business was definitely disappointing.”

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Sony paid Warner Bros. as much as $400 million to throw its support behind Blu-ray and abandon HD-DVD. An interesting little footnote to the DVD format war, since Warner’s decision all but sealed HD DVD’s fate.

So it was a reported $400 million well spent, then. For the time being, anyway. “People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares,” Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said last year. “The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that. In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost.”

“The high-definition landscape is rapidly changing, and consumers are looking for guidance on how to make the best high-definition buying decisions,” said Peter Faricy, vice president of movies and music at Amazon.com, who apparently didn’t receive Toshiba’s HD DVD press release until early this morning. “Our customers have clearly voiced their support for the Blu-ray format. … In order to best serve our customers, Amazon is recommending Blu-ray as the preferred digital format and will continue to carry the ‘Earth’s Largest Selection’ of Blu-ray products.”

“This was a very difficult decision to make … but when we thought about the trouble we would cause to consumers and our partners, we decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence,” Toshiba Chief Executive Atsutoshi Nishida told a news conference, adding that Warner Bros.’ decision to back Blu-ray had made the move inevitable. “That had tremendous impact,” he said. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Investors: We Come Not to Bury HD DVD, but to Celebrate Over Its Lifeless Body
• Bring Out Yer HD DVDead
• Will the Last Person to Leave the HD DVD Camp Please Turn Off the Blu-ray Player?
• There’s a Singing Fat Lady Here to See You, Sir.
• Ah Yes, a $2.7 Million Super Bowl Ad Will Fix Everything …
• Mistah HD DVD–He Dead …

Shares in Toshiba (6502.TO) moved sharply higher in early trading today as investors welcomed reports that the HD DVD champion is itself planning on abandoning the format and throwing its support behind Blu-ray. “We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,” a nameless source inside Toshiba told Reuters over the weekend.

Publicly, however, Toshiba claims it’s still considering its options. “Toshiba has not made any announcement or decision,” a company representative told the BBC. “We are currently assessing our business strategies, but nothing has been decided at the moment.”

Well, perhaps not at this particular moment, but certainly at one in the near future. As Koichi Ogawa, a chief portfolio manager at Daiwa SB Investments, notes, the consumer electronic industry has been echoing with HD DVD’s death rattles for quite a while. It’s time to put the old boy out of his misery: “It doesn’t make sense for Toshiba to continue putting effort into this,” said Ogawa, “It needs to cut its losses and focus its resources on promising businesses.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Bring Out Yer HD DVDead
• Will the Last Person to Leave the HD DVD Camp Please Turn Off the Blu-ray Player?
• There’s a Singing Fat Lady Here to See You, Sir.
• Ah Yes, a $2.7 Million Super Bowl Ad Will Fix Everything …
• Mistah HD DVD–He Dead …

By June, Wal-Mart will only be carrying Blu-ray movies and hardware machines and, of course, standard-def movies, DVD players, and up-convert players.”

–Susan Chronister of Wal-Mart sticks a fork in HD DVD.

HD DVD may soon join Betamax in the consumer electronics industry’s Museum of Failed Formats. Though publicly HD DVD champion Toshiba professes its commitment to the next generation DVD standard, privately it’s plotting its demise. Sources close to the company tell the Hollywood Reporter that the continued marginalization of HD DVD by movie studios and big box retailers like Wal-Mart has driven Toshiba to concede defeat in the DVD format war. The company plans to pull the plug on HD DVD in a matter of weeks. “An announcement is coming soon,” said one source close to the HD DVD camp.

But not soon enough for some, who are finally seeing their predictions of an HD DVD rout borne out. “Blu-ray’s better, and I told everyone,” said film director Michael Bay. “I was very vocal about it. I knew HD [DVD] was not going to make it. Am I thrilled? It really wasn’t my fight, but remember what I said in the press? I was kind of saying HD [DVD]’s going to lose… No one believed me.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Will the Last Person to Leave the HD DVD Camp Please Turn Off the Blu-ray Player?
• There’s a Singing Fat Lady Here to See You, Sir.
• Ah Yes, a $2.7 Million Super Bowl Ad Will Fix Everything …
• Mistah HD DVD–He Dead …