entertainment

Netflix customers can now watch movies released by Universal Studios Home Entertainment 28 days after their release. Universal Studios Home Entertainment made the announcement today. In the deal new releases on DVD and Blu-ray will have a four weeks period by which time Universal should make enough sales of its physical and digital offerings. After this window Netflix customers will be able to stream the latest Universal releases from Netflix to their TVs and computers.

Panasonic and Best Buy have joined to offer a new range of full HD 3D capable VIERA Plasma HDTVs and a fully-featured 2D Blu-ray Disc Player.  The range will deliver full 1080p resolution images to each eye by creating a 3D experience that easily rivals the best that can be seen in the cinemas. The systems will be sold exclusively at selected Best Buy stores via Magnolia Home Theater.

Web content and services have become more accessible with the release of the new ARCHOS Android Tablets.  Designed to enhance your digital lifestyle the ‘Home Tablet’ as they are called fill the gap between the Smartphone and the desktop PC to provide always on access to the internet.  The two devices ARCHOS 7 and ARCHOS 8 Home Tablets are flexible, accessible and interactive. They can be placed almost anywhere in the home to provide access to news and keep you in touch with your friends and family.

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.