Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Netflix claims that its online DVD rental business can peak within 5 to 10 years. Reed Hastings, CEO of the company claims that even if DVD rentals are still way ahead of online rentals, their business can still be expected to reach its peak. “Everybody peaks sometime,” he claimed.

The company also aims to shift to streaming television and movies online. They have recently introduced the Roku, a Netflix-enabled set-top box that make video-to-television transfer possible. Hopefully, by next year Netflix will be able to get into future game consoles, Internet-enabled televisions, and high-definition DVD players in the future.

Currently, Netflix has 10,000 titles that are available for online streaming. Most of these however, are older and independent films. None are high-definition films, yet. They are working on having the studios provide the rights so the business can have more films to offer moving forward.

They believe that offering a combined online DVD rental and a streaming service for a monthly fee is the right model to compete against the video streaming giants like YouTube, Apple, Amazon, etc. Netflix believes that they can reach up to 20 million subscribers through streaming.

The company stands firm in not getting into advertising for finance, and download fees. It promises to allow their consumers to watch videos, any time of the day, as well. However, Netflix is not bound to introduce a stand-alone streaming service as of the moment.

Read [SFGate]

Although Apple started offering customers movie rentals through iTunes back in January, some customers have found the service less than appealing because most of the movie titles, both from major film studios and independently produced titles, took much longer to be released as compared to DVD’s. Normally these new titles are released in iTunes 30-days after their DVD release. But Apple is pretty determined to get a sizeable share of the movie download market and possibly do what it was able to do with music downloads. Thus, it has officially announced that new movie releases can now be downloaded from iTunes on the same day that their DVD counterpart.

So, now we are talking. With the new service, iTunes customers would have access to new releases and catalog titles from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount and more. Customers can purchase new releases for $14.99 and most catalog titles for $9.99.

To kick off this service, iTunes has announced some new titles available for purchase this week, coming from its collection of around 1,500 high-quality films. These new titles include recently released in DVD formats - Juno, Cloverfield, I Am Legend and more.

Read [Apple]

A German company has recently released a new style of DVD, one that will delete all of the data after (up to) 48 hours has passed. While this technology is not entirely new, we have seen Flexplay in the past that saw limited use as ez-D under Disney’s Buena Vista, this is a new format with a few new options.

To begin with the new DVD’s are more appropriately named and are being called the DVD-D. Where the “D” could easily lend itself to a variety of names that fit to include delete, destruct or even destroy.

The DVD-D’s are packaged in a sealed cardboard sleeve and the countdown will begin once you open up the package, which means left un-opened and un-touched the DVD could retain the data for years. The DVD-D comes in three varieties; a single view, 8 hour or 48 hour disc. The DVD-D’s can be used for just about anything a regular DVD could to include movies, games and also burning data.

While this sounds like a great idea, and could potentially be a huge money saver in terms of shipping charges for by-mail game and movie rental companies like Netflix and Blockbuster, we can only imagine the extra waste that would occur from the expired “D” discs.

Via [I4U News]

The courtship began in December with heady bids, chocolate kisses, and flowers. Blockbuster, the movie rental leader was set to hitch Circuit City to it’s star. Making its overtures public on Monday with an offering reportedly worth nearly 1 billion dollars. There were talks of crossing platforms with Circuit City renting movies and Blockbuster selling home electronics. And a day later there were talks that it would never happen. According to published reports, questions about how Blockbuster, a company valued at less then their initial offer to Circuit City would finance such a deal arose. My guess was late fees (I swear I returned that copy of A New Hope and I will fight those charges to the death!) but apparently the pot just didn’t have the gold. So in this post possible merger world how will these companies survive?

MORE »

Universal Studios is preparing for its entry to the Blu-ray market with a plan to release 40 movies during the second half of 2008. The first Blu-ray titles from Universal will be available on July 22 and include “The Mummy,” “The Mummy Returns” and “Scorpion King.” After which they plan to follow up with “The Incredible Hulk,” “Wanted,” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”; “Mamma Mia” and “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” during the summer.

Along with the current and new releases, Universal will also release some of their back catalog on Blu-ray, which will include such titles as “American Gangster,” “Knocked Up,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Miami Vice,” “End of Days,” “U571” and “Land of the Dead.” Prior to the demise, Universal had been the biggest backer of the HD DVD format, they will of course continue to release titles on standard DVD as well.

Read [Reuters]

Just in time for the conclusion of the DVD format wars with Blu-ray disc finally emerging as the new standard disc format, Plextor has decided to finally release its two new Blu-ray drives – the PX-B920SA and PX-B300SA. But to give customers the freedom to choose which format they would want to use when viewing high-definition video, Plextor has kept the HD DVD support.

The PX-B920SA being the high-end model of the two drives support fast Blu-Ray recording with a speed of 4X BD-R. That is equivalent to 18 MB/sec transfer rate. For single layer and double-layer media, the PX-B920SA runs on 2X BD-RE or 9 MB/sec transfer rate.  For DVD purposes, the PX-B920SA runs at 16X on single-layer media and 4X on both double-layer and dual-layer media with 5X DVD-RAM. The PX-B920SA also support various models of DVD+RW, DVD-ROM, CD-RW and even CD-ROM. This drive also comes with Lightscribe for direct disc laser printing and some other software.

MORE »

Following the decision to stop the production of its HD DVD product line, Toshiba is about to declare a $986 million loss (100 billion yen). Declaring the said amount as loss will pull down the company’s full-year operating profit to $2.43 billion (250 billion yen) which is short of its projected profit for this year.

When Toshiba decided to pull the plug on its HD DVD production, the company was not expecting that it would be force to implement changes in its production line. Neither did the company expect that it would incur other charges that would multiply the $486 million (50 billion yen) that it previously expected to lose.

MORE »

Lionsgate recently closed a deal with Apple to deliver digital versions of the movies to be played in iTunes. As a leading independent film studio, Lionsgate, is set to make iTunes transfer and iPod viewing a cinch for those who buy their DVD and Blu-ray movies.

The first movies in line from Lionsgate to be distributed with iTunes Digital Copy is the latest Sylvester Stallone installment of Rambo, which is set to be released on May 27 and Jessica Alba’s The Eye which is set to be released later this summer. 

MORE »

We saw the drive change to an officially dead product and now it seems Microsoft is just trying to get rid of them. For anyone still willing to purchase a drive that belongs to the now dead HD DVD format, Best Buy is currently selling the Xbox 360 drive for just $50.

While it may not be a good next generation disc player, for $50 this could still make a nice addition to an Xbox, depending on where the game system lives. In a room with little space such as a college dorm, this could still make a nice replacement to a regular sized DVD player.

Via [Wired]

While Microsoft desperately bargains off their $49 HD DVD players for Xbox, a new Blu-ray player has been released for an enormous sum by Goldmund. The Swiss based company have always produced higher-priced devices but at $16,900 this one takes the biscuit.

The Eidos 20 BD model includes an AC-Curator power supply circuit, and an excluive Magnetic Dampner for reducing DVD read errors. Although the casing may look slightly plain, it is a powerful machine. However, I would still safely say this is for people with more money than sense.

Via [Crave]