The New York Times experimented with paid content before, without much success, but that’s not stopping them from giving it a go again. This time, however, the paid-to-free content changeover might coincide with a certain unconfirmed mystery tablet.
Samsung’s Spinpoint M6 is the world’s first 2.5-inch, 500GB HDD. Standing in at 9.5mm tall, the M6 will easily fit most existing laptop hard drive bays. For those of you worried about sloth like performance, the Spinpoint M6 has a 5400rpm spindle speed, an 8MB cache, as well as a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. A Free-Fall Sensor can be added as an optional extra. Not content with breaking the world record for the HDD with the smallest size / biggest capacity, Samsung are also introducing the industry’s fastest DVD burner.
Everybody clamouring for a cheap Blu-ray player now that the format war is over might wanna bide their time with a sweet DVD upconverter—the US$200-player Blu-ray cavalry is at least a year away, according to Sony Electronics CEO Stan Glasgow, who we talked to today in New York. “I don’t think US$200 is going to happen this year. Next year US$200 could happen. We’ll be at a US$300 rate this year. US$299 will happen this year.”
The day when the watch is once again a useful piece of technology is looming over us. For proof, check out Chinavasion’s Multimedia Watch, which packs in a 1.8-inch LCD (160 x 128), voice recorder, in-built loudspeaker, 8GB flash, as well as support for pretty much every media codec ever conceived. (AVI, MP4, WMV, MOV, MP3, WMA, JPEG and the list goes on.)
Nokia has committed to bring Microsoft Silverlight video services to its S60 devices. Further, Nokia will also add support for the video content to its S40-based handsets at later stages. Given the immense market penetration of Nokia’s Symbian- based mobiles, this partnering will have a large effect on mobile content support, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Adobe is feeling a little sick right now. [Reuters]
Content filter version one: A massive, network-wide dragnet. Not really feeling that Big Bro deal, even though RIAA chief Cary Sherman says it “doesn’t give rise…to any privacy concerns because it can operate automatically and anonymously”? It’s cool, there’s a better approach: A locally installed filter on your computer.
Hollywood wants ISPs such as Verizon to help filter and block the illegal transfer of copyrighted content. Unlike AT&T, Verizon is telling Hollywood to kiss its ass. Verizon EVP of Public Affairs Tom Tauke says they won’t consider Hollywood’s call to action for three reasons.
We’ve mentioned the recent local price drops for HD DVD. Now Toshiba has added more discs to their redemption deals to sweeten the deal further, with as many as ten discs now heading your way when you send off the voucher (or whatever it is you need to do to redeem). That’s on top of one disc in the box (no idea what, sorry). But caveat emptor, friends. The word ‘Norbit’ appears on the list… isn’t that more dealbreaker than dealmaker?
Nearly two months after the fizzle out between NBC Universal and Apple during contract negotiations, NBC U CEO Jeff Zucker spills what some of the contested terms were. Most surprising is that NBC asked for a cut of hardware sales. Not the fact that they wanted a cut, but that they actually asked for it—they’d have more luck asking the devil himself to reverse whatever deal Steve inked with him. (Though handing content providers a slice isn’t unprecedented.) Also, that pricing “flexibility” NBC pissed and moaned so loudly about was what we all expected: “”We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99.” So in short, it was all about money.
“We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analogue world with pennies on the digital side.” Given that NBC apparently only netted $15 million in the last year of its deal with Apple despite accounting for 30-40 percent of video content sold (depending on whether you ask NBC or Apple), all the other contract sniggles aside, it’s no wonder they bolted for Amazon—who probably ponied up a sweeter revenue sharing deal—and Hulu, where they’ll have a sizable chunk of ad revenue. [Variety, Thanks John]
