University Researchers Proclaim Compression Breakthrough

Engineers at the University of Rochester are now sharing details on a new compression concept, one that has achieved interesting early results. The team managed to squeeze a 20-second clarinet solo into roughly 1 kilobyte, or 1/1000th the equivalent capacity of an MP3. The researchers disclosed the accomplishment Wednesday at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing in Las Vegas. (Digital Music News, Geek.com)

Spotlight: Recorded Music Gets Smoked

ast week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to listen to a play back of what is believed to be the earliest mechanical sound recording. Made in 1860 by the French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the "phonautogram" features the voice of a woman, believed to be Scott's daughter, singing a line from the French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." (Digital Media Wire)

Adobe Releases DRM for Flash Video Downloads

Adobe on Wednesday released Flash Media Rights Management Server, a DRM server for the Flash and H.264 video formats that works with Adobe's new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application development environment as well as the Adobe Media Player, a media player application for Windows and Mac OS that is currently in beta. (DRM Watch, PR)

Imeem Makes Its Own Platform Play For Music Apps. Who’s OpenSocial?

For those of you who thought OpenSocial was going to make things easy for developers who want to create social networking apps once and deploy them everywhere, think again. More splintering is occurring. Tonight, rising music social network imeem (an original member of OpenSocial) is releasing its own software development kit for programmers to create applications on imeem. Imeem is not abandoning OpenSocial, it is just that programmers will be able to build a lot cooler apps using the new imeem Media Platform. But don’t worry, support for OpenSocial is “coming soon.” (TechCrunch, PaidContent, News.com)

Toshiba counts cost of HD defeat

Toshiba, the Japanese electronics group, expects to lose Y110bn ($1.1bn) this year on its now-defunct HD-DVD business after conceding defeat to rival Sony in the battle to create a standard for high-definition discs. Toshiba said it would also take a Y45bn charge to account for the depreciation of obsolete manufacturing equipment and the scrapping of piled-up inventory. (Financial Times, AP)

Adobe CEO says Flash apps coming to iPhone

Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said the company intends to bring its Flash Player to Apple's iPhone. Whether and how Flash applications would run on Apple's iPhone has been an open question since the device's launch. Narayen's comments indicate that Adobe will be able to create a version of Flash Lite for the iPhone by using the iPhone software developers kit (SDK) which was released earlier this month. (News.com, Seeking Alpha)

Microsoft says no Blu-ray for Xbox

Microsoft Corp is not in talks to include Sony Corp's Blu-ray high-definition DVD technology in its Xbox 360 video game console, an executive said on Wednesday. The comments by Aaron Greenberg, group product manager for Xbox 360, poured cold water on recent speculation that Microsoft could support Blu-ray after Toshiba Corp, backer of the rival HD DVD format, gave up when key movie studios and retailers abandoned the technology. (Reuters)

iPhone SDK downloaded by 100,000 developers

Despite some early problems managing the flood of developers seeking access to the iPhone software development kit (SDK), Apple reported 100,000 developers have downloaded the kit as of Sunday 9 March. In the latest update Apple quoted a number of third-party developers to give a pretty clear signal of what types of applications are already in development. (Silicon.com)

BBC releases fix for iPlayer hack

The BBC has issued a fix to stop people downloading programmes from the iPlayer website that were intended for streaming on an iPhone or iPod only. The content for the phones and iPod is streamed as an MP4 file without copy protection and hackers quickly realised that they could access the file using a simple plug in for Firefox. (BBC News)

Another DVD Format, but This One Says It’s Cheaper

A new system that is incompatible with Blu-ray, called HD VMD, for versatile multilayer disc, is trying to find a niche. New Medium Enterprises, the London company behind HD VMD, says its system’s quality is equal to Blu-ray’s but it costs less. (NY Times, DigitalMediaWire)

RIM Co-CEO to Music Industry Execs: “Don’t Disintermediate Yourselves As Hit-Makers”

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion, maker and developer of Blackberry devices, outlined his vision for the company as leveraging the convergence of social networking and multimedia in a morning keynote at the Canadian Music Week's digital music & media summit. He also challenged the music industry to embrace social networking to reach fans of all genres and sub-genres of music: "Don't disintermediate yourselves as hit machines", Balsillie said to the room of music industry professionals. (Digital Media Wire)

Downlovers Parent Plugs Into Flash Memory Biz

Kiver, the Milan-based digital content provider, has launched a new division, Flashport, which will specialize in preloading content for digital flash memory cards. In a statement Kiver's CEO Gianluca Perrelli says: "This new division will enable us to integrate content with technologically advanced digital support systems and this will help increase our supply for both mainstream businesses and record labels." (Billboard)

DoubleTwist Launches DRM-Stripping Applications

DoubleTwist, the company founded by famed DRM hacker "DVD Jon" Lech Johansen and Monique Farantzos in late 2006, came out of the shadows this week with announcements of venture capital investment and of the launch of its first products: doubleTwist desktop, a personal media sharing application for PCs, and Twist Me! Both products are currently in beta. They enable sharing of media files in a variety of formats and DRM schemes, including Microsoft Windows Media as well as Apple's FairPlay for iTunes, and syncing of media among multiple devices. (DRM Watch)

Paramount seals Blu-ray sweep

All six major Hollywood studios are now in the Blu-ray Disc camp, a day after Toshiba has pulled the plug on HD DVD and Blu-ray became effectively the only next-gen game in town. Paramount Home Entertainment quietly came onboard via a statement sent exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday: "We are pleased that the industry is moving to a single high-definition format, as we believe it is in the best interest of the consumer," the statement reads. (Hollywood Reporter)

Review : Upgraded Apple TV is one-stop movie box, but rental terms rankle

The latest software update, which arrived last week, takes Apple TV to a whole new level: It can now download rented movies directly from iTunes, with no need to involve the home computer. Some of the movies are even in high definition, finally providing a picture that's a match for our flat-panel sets. (AP)

DoubleTwist wins venture capital backing

A San Francisco start-up that helps Apple iTunes users to circumvent encryption and share their music more easily has won venture capital backing and launched its first products. DoubleTwist has the controversial “DVD Jon” as a co-founder. Jon Lech Johansen, 24, earned notoriety at the age of 15 for co-authoring software that unscrambled encryption on DVDs. He has also, over the past four years, reverse engineered Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management technology used in iTunes. His new venture will announce it has secured funding from Index Ventures, the European venture capital firm that has backed start-ups including Skype, Betfair and last.fm. (Financial Times, Cnet)

Intertrust Announces Patent License Agreement with Motorola

Intertrust Technologies Corporation announced that they have signed a long-term patent license that grants Motorola global rights to practice Intertrust's broad inventions in trusted distributed computing and digital rights management. Motorola's license covers all products, including mobile and digital television devices. (PR)

Wii Expected To Take Installed-Base Lead From Xbox

The popularity of Nintendo's Wii among casual gamers is expected to power the video game console's installed base this year ahead of current leaderMicrosoft Xbox 360, a market research firm said Thursday. The installed base of the Wii is expected to rise to 30.2 million units in 2008, up from 18 million last year, iSuppli said. This will take the Wii beyond the Xbox 360's projected total of 25.7 million this year. By 2011, the PlayStation 3 is expected to have an installed-base of 38.4 million units, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 39% from 10.3 million units last year. (Information Week, Forbes)

Thoma Cressey Bravo to Acquire Macrovision's Software Business

Private equity investment firm Thoma Cressey Bravo (TCB) has entered into a definitive agreement with Macrovision Corporation to acquire Macrovision’s Software Business Unit in a cash transaction valued at approximately $200 million. Macrovision provides a broad set of solutions that enable businesses to protect, enhance and distribute their digital goods to consumers across multiple channels. (PR)

Digital watermarking worth $500m by 2012

MultiMedia Intelligence has reported that applications leveraging content identification technologies such as digital watermarking and fingerprinting are growing rapidly and could surpass $500 million worldwide by 2012. Key applications include Internet and broadcast content monitoring, metadata association, copyright control, content protection and forensics, and interactive advertising. (Advanced-Television)