Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Trying to lure in customers to replace their DVDs or HD DVDs with Blu-rays, Paramount is offering ten bucks per title to do just that. Although Paramount and Dreamwork titles are involved in the offer, it isn’t good for just any Paramount movie.

According to HighDefDigest, the promotion will start with the release of Transformers on Blu-ray coming in just a few days on September 2nd. Hopefully you won’t mind messing up those boxes a bit though, since you need to include the proof-of-purchase tabs from both the DVD and the Blu-ray disk, along with the promotional certificate from inside eligible Blu-ray movies.  You also have to buy your Blu-rays before December 31, 2009 and have your rebate envelope postmarked before January 31, 2010.

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In an attempt to be more proactive rather than simply reactive, the MPAA has recently approved the DreamStream system and its 2048-bit “military strength” anti-piracy encryption technology to protect content streamed to viewers online.

First introduced to the MPAA in March of 2008 by Laura Tunberg, MGM’s former vice president of intellectual property enforcement, it was since reviewed by the MPAA and found it to be a viable means for securing digital content. Chief development officer for DreamStream, Ulf Diebel, is excited by this acknowledgment of their product.

“We are very excited to have the MPAA stand behind our technology.”

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Vudu first began showing up in Best Buy locations back in late-March and at the time it was just 24 locations, all of which were located in California. The limited availability was thought to be a testing period to make sure the devices would be able to sell as expected.

Well, jump forward a little over a month and it looks like it must have been successful because Vudu and Best Buy have just announced a little more widespread availability, however it is still not nationwide.

They have remained in California, but also expanded to Arizona and Illinois, all in all it looks like they are now available in almost 70 Best Buy locations. In addition to the move into Best Buy locations in other states, Vudu has also recently added 35 new movies to own and 30 new movies to rent.

Via [CrunchGear]

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/07/02/vudu-continues-to-infiltrate-best-buy/

Optoma announced their groundbreaking handheld projector.  Smaller than your average smartphone, the Optoma Pico projector utilizes Texas Instruments DLP Pico chipset.  The unit can be used with iPods, smartphones and digital cameras.

Imagine projecting your movies for all to enjoy or showing off your amazing vacation photos to the teeming masses.  Or perhaps you’re tired of lugging around a laptop and giant projector for business presentations.  Now you can do it all from this tiny projector. 

The product will be first shown at Texas Instrument’s InfoComm 2008 booth C909 and will be available in limited distribution in Europe and Asia in late 2008, with a worldwide launch in 2009.

No pricing notice yet.

press release [Virtual Press Office] Company site [Optoma]

Vudu, while maybe not attracting quite as much attention as originally hoped, are proving they are still alive in the small but welcomed movie set-top-box market. The Vudu box was originally launched back in the Fall of 2007, but sales may have been slow because of the limited availability, up till now it could only be found directly with Vudu or with Amazon.com.

However customers can now purchase the Vudu box in one of 24 Best Buy outlets in California, which should help overall sales and awareness of the product. While the management from Vudu would not comment on the strategy behind the limited availability of Best Buy locations, its safe to assume that they are most likely looking to see just how well they will sell. 

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It’s a different kind of web that has snared Indiana Jones in his latest cinematic adventure. In his first three films, he was always lurking through some spiderweb-draped cavern of one sort or another, and he managed to survive each one. But now (cue John Williams music)...will he live through the danger that is the World Wide Web?

Its US premiere is May 22nd, but “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is screened at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend and the high-speed lines will be on fire as soon as the last credit rolls on the screen at the Salle Lumiere Palais. It’s the latest example of media conglomerates vs. the 21st century as they find themselves once again at the mercy of anonymous bloggers and web-based critics. Already there have been several traditional-media stories about negative early reviews of “Indy 4” at Harry Knowles’ Ain’t It Cool News website - the pioneer in Internet influence on the media - and how those reviews may have influenced Paramount’s Cannes plans for its Steven Spielberg blockbuster. 

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Here’s a cool service that shows how the union of mobile technology and entertainment industries can bring benefit to each other and ultimately to consumers. CinemaNow, and uVuMobile are making this possible with a new service that lets consumers preview movies on their mobile phones and then remotely download them to an internet connected device at home. I don’t know about you, but having this feature on my mobile phone is my idea of cool. 

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If you’ve ever wanted to bring your collection of digital files with you wherever you go, the Mvix MVU-2500U portable media player might be the answer to your needs. ThMVU-2500U uses 2.5-inch PATA / IDE hard drives with support for up to 250GB, which is actually more than enough to contain 100 DVD quality movies. Mvix is touting their new media decoder as a perfect media device for people on the move, giving them the ability to bring their entire collection of HD-quality movies.

The MVU-2500U measure in at 5 x 3 x 0.5-inches and works like an external USB 2.0 hard drive when connected to a PC. The MVU2500U can store digital video in 480p, 720p and 1080i standards, as well as support files encoded in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, DVD, DivX, Xvid, BivX, and VCD in both NTSC and PAL systems. As an added convenience, the media decoder comes with an IR remote control. The Mvix MVU-2500U will be available in the US beginning this month.

Product [MvixUSA] Read [PR Web]

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]

Spring has arrived in the Eastern United States, and rumors are in the air. One of which is that Blockbuster is working on a Vudu like set top box to get movies out to consumers, without having them leave their homes.  As the story goes, Blockbuster will be working with Movielink, a company that Blockbuster purchased a while back, to provide the service. Movielink already has a similar service in place.

A spokesperson, for the brick and mortar grandpa of the movie game, stated that the company wants to push out movies through, “mail, through kiosks, through downloading, and through portable content-enabled devices.” With the last bit in mind, it seems Blockbuster is attempting to compete with the Apple TV and Vudu. My fanboy status aside, I find it hard to believe that a company which focuses on entertainment, can put out a quality hardware rivaling that of a computer consumer electronics company like Apple. Stay tuned to Gadgetell for more as it develops.

Read [SlashGear]