entertainment

Both companies are to collaborate on using DTS’s popular Digital Surround in Samsung’s Digital TV products. DTS Coherent Acoustics provides a range of audio codecs supporting television, radio and internet broadcasting. The DTS Surround is already used in Samsung’s BD-P1400 Blu-ray disk player. DTS Coherent Acoustics offers technology solutions for terrestrial (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S), cable (DVB-C), Video on Demand, and IP deployment.

A year after the joint marketing partnership between TiVo and Best Buy, TiVo this week announced the released of their TiVo Premiere and TiVo Premiere XL set-top boxes. The new set of Digital Video Recorder (DVR) combines access to cable programming, on-demand movies, music and web videos all in the same box.

This is the year for 3D entertainment and at the front are two of the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers, Samsung and Sony.  At the beginning of this year both companies made some major announcements concerning their 3D HDTV and other home entertainment systems.  Sony has grown their BRAVIA range to include the X900 Series and Samsung is offering their most sophisticated 9000 series along with their 3D Blu-ray players.

Gigle announced that Spanish company Blusens international is to use its MediaXtream Homeplug AV chip in the BluBrain Entertainment Center.  The BluBrain Entertainment Center has integrated Gigle’s GGL541, a single chip solution that offers the highest performance of any wireline IC, with both a 1Gbps any wire channel and 200 Mbps over Powerline using Homeplug AV standard.

Sonic solutions, the supplier of the Roxio CinemaNow™ platform and DivX, announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress that they have expanded their mobile device partnership.  According to Sonic and DivX the partnership will enable the digital distribution of an extensive catalogue of premium titles on DivX Certified® mobile devices.

ZiiLABS and ARM have teamed up to develop a new digital home platform called SiVO.  The processor was released at last month’s Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and features a combination of ZiiLABS StemCell Computing Array and ARM’s 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor.  The SiVO platform is a single System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture that offers 1080p Blu-ray quality HDTV and 3D graphics from low-power connected home devices.

The canvas project is in its final stage of consultation and has been given a provisional approval by the BBC Trust. Project Canvas was setup to allow UK viewers with broadband connection to watch on their Television set on-demand TV such as BBC iPlayer and ITV Player.  Homes with compatible set-top box connected to the internet could access content provision through Canvas without needing to pay for the content.

Within the next few weeks or months the BBC Trust will announce their decision of whether the BBC should go ahead with canvas project.  In the meantime Pace, a Digital TV technology supplier announced that they have released a new set-top box called “Vision+” for BT Vision IPTV customers.

MIPS and Yahoo have partnered to develop a platform with Yahoo Widgets already integrated. The agreement is that MIPS will develop an optimised reference platform running the Yahoo Widget Engine for digital TV and set-top box applications.  This partnership will enable vendors to develop consumer solutions based on the MIPS architecture incorporating Yahoo Widget Engine.

Packet Video the company that gave us TwonkyMedia Server is at it again.  This time with the release of TwonkyServer Mobile, Design specifically for Android handsets, TwonkyServer Mobile transforms your handset into a media sharing server.