News for Thursday, 1 March 2007

The website www.variety.com reported that an small film producer known as Forum Snowboards made a deal with Apple in order to have some of their movies made for DVD available on iTunes Store in the iTunes' TV section. This first movie is entitled "That", a 30-minutes long snowboarding film. Being in iTS' TV section; its price is US$1.99 instead of US$9.99 for movies found in Film section.
But beside the price difference, this news might be a first step from Apple to open iTunes Store to a larger extend to independent film producers, and one could even imagine that music indies would follow this story too. It would also imply that Apple, via its iTS would become the unique and central interface for movie and/or music artists who are not signed or under a contract with a Major.
Imagine what would happen if a popular band or singer, who can not find a decent agreement with its Music Major when renewing his contract decides to go directly to the iTS... a revolution? It might well be.
Many Indies are already on the iTS, such as Spectral, Karat or Circus company, and the Forum Snowboards' story could push more independents to sign up with Apple.
Of course, such a move would probably make music and cinema Majors unhappy, as they would request a different treatment than Indies. Next negotiations will be tough, given Apple's dominance in the nascent download market, they will probably think twice before removing their catalog from the iTS as it would imply being away from most of consumers. A new monopoly?

Even if HD-DVD had a head start on Blu-ray in the HD movies format race, mainly due to the lower price of HD-DVD players and also to lower manufacturing costs for the discs, the Microsoft-backed format is now lagging behind.
For the first time since the launch of both formats, last month saw more sales of Blu-ray movies than HD-DVD.
This shift is supposed to be related with the wide availability of the PlayStation3, which sports a Blu-ray drive. And that represents a couple million units out there, probably more than what HD-DVD can claim, even with the late release of an add-on HD-DVD player for the XBox360.
Maybe Sony will finally realise their dream: wining a format war (remember Betamax? MiniDisc? Atrac? Memory Stick?).

As you probably remember, iPod clones and counterfeits appear relatively quickly after Apple introduces a new model to the iPod family.
The new Shuffle being out for couple of months, one of our source sent us photos of one of the first Shuffle 2G clones.

This clone is identical to the Shuffle, including the built-in clip. regarding capabilities, it plays MP3 and WMA audio files and will be available with storage capacity ranging from 128MB to 4GB!Its price will of course be lower than the original, and the 2GB model will be 50% cheaper than a 1GB iPod Shuffle 2G.
For sure, this clone will be a hit in countries or geographic areas where intellectual property is not of interest or not efficiently protected.

While the HD-DVD was initially leading the race concerning the catalog of movies and video available on this format, thanks to cheaper standalone player, its adoption rate seems to slow down significantly.
According to Nielsen VideoScan, Blu-ray-based movie sales surpassed HD-DVD ones for the first time.
The launch of the PlayStation 3 could be the explanation for such results. Despite the lower than expected sales, the new SONY game console will dramatically increase the number of BD players.
SONY already won the battle concerning the availability and performance of blue laser-based drives for our computers; mostly because manufacturers released BD burners much faster than for HD-DVD format.
SONY might successfully develop a format that will be fully adopted by the consumer electronic market, after its previous failure in this quest with Betamax and Mini Disc.