Category: Technology

New ‘Indiana Jones’ trailer gets a widget
NEW YORK — When a second trailer for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” premieres online, it should spread as fast as the first thanks to a widget.
While Paramount plans to launch the widget this week, the studio declined to state when the new trailer will debut.
Paramount is counting on the small, portable applications that can be posted on blogs and social networks to maximize the exposure for its trailers. The first “Skull” trailer, released in March, has racked up millions of views.
Paramount turned to widget provider Clearspring for “Skull,” which will include a contest with the release of the second trailer. The two fans who manage to distribute their “Skull” widgets most will win trips to the world premiere of the movie and the chance to be red-carpet correspondents in footage that will be streamed onto the “Skull” widgets following the premiere.
“I think the reason that studios are excited about widgets is that word-of-mouth and buzz is what Hollywood is after all the time,” said Peggy Fry, senior vp sales and client services at Clearspring. “If you think about it, what a widget is, it’s a digital version of word-of-mouth.”
Clearspring also is creating widgets for Paramount’s Mike Myers comedy “The Love Guru,” which will include exclusive viral videos of Myers in character. The widgets, which launched Tuesday, will live on Myers’ Guru Pitka MySpace page, where his character will blog about love advice, as well as on Facebook, YouTube and other social networking sites.
Amy Powell, senior vp interactive marketing at Paramount, credited Clearspring with sophisticated backend technology that allows the studio to track its widgets wherever they lived so it wouldn’t have to limit its promotions to a single platform such as MySpace or Facebook.
“We pushed Clearspring to create new technological advances for us to fit our long list of requests for our out-of-the-box thinking,” Powell said.
Every week Paramount will add a new viral video to the widget, for a total of about eight to 10 videos. The widgets also will include other exclusive content including a “Love Guru” trailer, clips and behind-the-scenes footage.
Paramount’s first foray into the widget space with Clearspring was with J.J. Abrams’ “Cloverfield,” which benefited at the boxoffice from a successful online and widget campaign. The studio also has worked with Clearspring on a daily fortune cookie widget for DreamWorks Animation’s upcoming “Kung Fu Panda” and a “Bee Movie” widget.
Other studios that have worked with Clearspring to promote their movies are Warner Bros. for “10,000 BC” and “Fred Claus,” Sony for “Superbad,” Universal for its upcoming “Leatherheads” and Fox for “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!”

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war: source
TOKYO (Reuters) – Toshiba Corp is planning to give up on its HD DVD format for high definition DVDs, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp, a company source said on Saturday.
The move will likely put an end to a battle that has gone on for several years between consortiums led by Toshiba and Sony vying to set the standard for the next-generation DVD and compatible video equipment.
The format war, often compared to the Betamax-VHS battle in the 1980s, has confused consumers unsure of which DVD or player to buy, slowing the development what is expected to be a multibillion dollar high definition DVD industry.
Toshiba’s cause has suffered several setbacks in recent weeks including Friday’s announcement by U.S. retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc that it would abandon the HD DVD format and only stock its shelves with Blu-ray movies.
A source at Toshiba confirmed an earlier report by public broadcaster NHK that it was getting ready to pull the plug.
“We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. He added that an official announcement could come as early as next week.
No one answered the phone at Toshiba’s public relations office in Tokyo.
NHK said Toshiba would suffer losses running to tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) to scrap production of HD DVD players and recorders and other steps to withdraw from the business.
Hollywood studios had initially split their alliances between the two camps, meaning only certain films would play on any one DVD machine.
The balance of power tipped decisively toward the Sony camp in January after Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros studio said it would only release high-definition DVDs in Blu-ray format. With that, studios behind some three-quarters of DVDs are backing Blu-ray, although some release in both formats.
Toshiba responded by slashing prices of HD DVD players, but the loss of retail support has hurt.
In addition to Wal-Mart, consumer electronics chain Best Buy Co Inc and online video rental company Netflix Inc also recently signed up to the Blu-ray camp.
The exclusive backing of Microsoft Corp was also put in doubt when the software giant said in January that it could consider supporting Blu-ray technology for its Xbox 360 video game machine, which currently works only with HD DVD.
Sony has spent large sums of money to promote Blu-ray in tandem with its flat screen TVs and its PlayStation 3 game console, which can play Blu-ray movies.
The Toshiba source said the experience would not be a total loss for the sprawling conglomerate, whose products range from refrigerators to power plants, which would learn valuable lessons.
“Marketing was a weak point for Toshiba. We learned a lot from HD DVD. Strengthening marketing will continue to be an issue for us going forward,” the source said.

YouTube Canada launches
Popular video-sharing website YouTube launched a Canadian version at an event in Toronto on Tuesday. Company officials said the new site will give Canadian users the chance to increase their exposure.
“We’re very excited to bring a local version of YouTube to Canada, and are committed to continuing to improve the YouTube experience for our Canadian users,” YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley said in a release. “Our goal is to satisfy the unique needs of the local users and to further strengthen Canada’s vibrant YouTube community.”
In a blog entry, titled “Hello, Canada!,” the YouTube team wrote that some of the site’s top users are Canadian, and “in developing a territory-specific YouTube site, we wanted to bring YouTube to you, in your language, while making local talent more visible and getting closer to our users around the world.”
Luis Garcia, international product manager for YouTube, said the content on both YouTube.com and YouTube.ca will be the same, but the new site will promote Canadian submissions.
“The only thing that’s different is that this is just a Canadian lens into that content, so if a user wants to get the Canada point of view into that global body of content, then they’re able to do that,” he said.
For launch day, the company asked Canadian user TheWineKone to make a video promoting Canada. The welcome video, boasting a mere 39 views at announcement time and labelled with a “YouTube is now in Canada!” banner, documents TheWineKone’s failed search for Canadian flags waving in the wind. Instead, he finds them hanging limply, and after a minute-and-a-half declares, “YouTube Canada’s the place to be!”
Other featured videos include “Canada vs. America: who has cuter kittens?,” a music video from Vancouver indie-rock band Said the Whale and a submission called “Canada Ö What does it mean to you?” where a user asked 18 people around the world what they thought about Canada.
In addition to allowing Canadian users the chance to increase their exposure, the site will enable them to better connect with one another, Garcia said.
“Connectivity is another great benefit,” said Garcia. “Users who have garnered a worldwide audience on YouTube sometimes have gotten lost in terms of being able to find like-minded users or like-minded content providers who are geographically close,” he said.
YouTube has already signed agreements with Canadian content partners including the CBC, the CFL, Dose.ca, NewsCanada and Sony BMG Canada.
The Canadian site is one of 15 country-specific YouTube sites.

CD celebrates 25th anniversary
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (AP) – It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.
An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday – and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland’s Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.
The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry’s recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.
Yet it had been a risky technical endeavour to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips’ labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
“When we started there was nothing in place,” he said in an interview at Philips’ corporate museum in Eindhoven.
The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.
In 1980, researchers published what became known as the “Red Book” containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.
Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.
The CD’s design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser – the equivalent of a record player’s needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.
Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser’s light doesn’t wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.
Legends abound about how the size of the CD was chosen: Some said it matched a Dutch beer coaster; others believe a famous conductor or Sony executive wanted it just long enough for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Kramer said the decision evolved from “long conversations around the table” about which play length made the most sense.
The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit U.S. markets the following spring.
Sony sold the first player in Japan on Oct. 1, with the CBS label supplying Billy Joel’s “52nd Street” as its first album.
The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its “Discman” series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group.
The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe’s largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp. in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.
“The CD was in itself an easy product to market,” said Philips’ current marketing chief for consumer electronics, Lucas Covers. It wasn’t just the sound quality – discs looked like jewelry in comparison to LPs.
By 1986, CD players were outselling record players, and by 1988 CDs outsold records.
“It was a massive turnaround for the whole market,” Covers said.
Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.
CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 per cent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple’s iPods and other digital players.
“The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets … can replace it, absolutely,” said Kramer, the retired engineer.
CDs won’t disappear overnight, but its years may be numbered.
Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers.
The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.
Kramer said it has been satisfying to witness the CD’s long run at the top and know he had a small hand in its creation.
“You never know how long a standard will last,” he said. “But it was a solid, good standard and still is.”

BitTorrent launches legit service
LOS ANGELES (AP) – BitTorrent Inc., makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, is launching a website that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.
The BitTorrent Entertainment Network was set to launch Monday with films from Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate and episodes of TV shows such as “24” and “Punk’d.”
The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films and who more often watch such files on their computer, instead of on a big screen TV in the living room.
The San Francisco-based company is betting at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content, rather than take their chances with pirated fare.
“The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content,” Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent, said.
“Now we have to program for that audience and create a better experience for that content so the audience converts to the service that makes the studios money.”
To help wean users to paying for content, BitTorrent is featuring content and pricing that appeal to its target demographic – males between the ages of 15 and 35.
TV episodes are US$1.99 to download to own, which is typical for competitor sites such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes.
The new site will rent movies for a 24-hour viewing period for $3.99 for new titles and $2.99 for older films but the site has decided not to sell films for now because the prices demanded by the studios are too high.
“We’re really hammering the studios to say: ‘Go easy on this audience,”‘ Navin said.
“We need to give them a price that feels like a good value relative to what they were getting for free.”
The service also will offer Japanese anime and high-definition video, which is popular with its users. Individuals will be able to publish their works to the site, which will compete for attention beside studio content.
The BitTorrent technology pioneered by Bram Cohen assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet. Its decentralized nature makes downloading more efficient, meaning a full-length movie should download in about a half-hour, about twice as fast as some other sites.
Navin said TV episodes should download in about one-third that time.
BitTorrent’s decentralized structure also frustrated the entertainment industry’s efforts to find and identify movie pirates.
In 2005, after the studios won a key legal decision against another pirate software company, Grokster, Cohen agreed to remove links to pirated files and start talks to licence legitimate content.
Studios also were more comfortable with the idea of distributing content over peer-to-peer networks after they adopted strong digital rights management safeguards created by Microsoft Corp.
BitTorrent’s content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play back using Windows Media Player.
Studios striking deals with peer-to-peer networks is a good first step toward allowing users to more freely distribute films and TV shows on the Internet but it may take another five years or more for Hollywood to become completely comfortable with that, one analyst said.
“Their biggest concern is that an anonymous person passes it to an anonymous person,” said Les Ottolenghi, chairman and president of Intent Mediaworks Inc., a company that helps content owners protect their works on peer-to-peer networks.
Ottolenghi recently chaired a task force that looked at digital watermarking, a technology that helps content owners track the route of its files as they make they way around the Internet.
“Their greatest hope is that someone at home passes it on to someone at home, from one device to the next and that becomes a value to the consumer,” he said.

Wal-Mart entry to video downloads a ‘game changer’
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s entry into movie downloading should have a bigger impact on the growth of digital video distribution in the near term than on the ultimate decline in DVD sales.
Media industry experts say Wal-Mart, whose stores make an estimated 40 percent of annual U.S. DVD sales, will introduce millions of its customers to the practice of downloading movies to their computers or portable media players.
The world’s largest retailer unveiled on Tuesday the first download-to-own service to offer movies from all major Hollywood studios, at a price comparable to Wal-Mart’s retail prices for DVDs.
Last year, media reports said Wal-Mart and other “big-box” retailers had threatened to retaliate against studios offering films for download at prices that undercut the stores, which rely on new DVD releases to drive traffic.
Wal-Mart’s embrace of movie downloading comes about two years after it pulled out of online DVD rental and directed its subscribers to Netflix Inc., and months after it protested Walt Disney Co.’s move to sell movies on Apple Inc.’s iTunes online music store at below-retail prices.
Industry experts said the move was natural for the retail giant.
“They are doing an internal analysis and saying, ‘We jumped into DVD rental late and Netflix and others got entrenched.”‘ a media industry source said.
“A lot of experts this year expect DVD sales to be flat,” said James McQuivey, principal analyst with Forrester Research. “There is a fear … we’ll see a reduction in DVD sales (from downloads). We’re seeing Wal-Mart respond in advance to that threat, not that downloads is a threat to DVD sales because not many people are downloading.”
Download sales equaled about 1 percent of the $24.5 billion in DVD and home video sales and rentals in 2006, but industry experts expect downloads to grow to 10 percent within a decade.
About 100 million U.S. households have DVD players, and an estimated 46.7 million households had access in 2006 to broadband Internet services needed to access video content.
Industry analysts said Wal-Mart’s move into downloads was unlikely to dent DVD sales in the short term, but could remove barriers to digital growth, such as the limited number of movie titles now available and the inability of most customers to transfer movies easily from the Internet to the TV.
“They are able to say (to the studios), ‘We are going to do this and you are going to do it with us,”‘ McQuivey said. “My hope is that movie studios will now say, ‘We’ve got the Wal-Mart thing taken care of, we can move really aggressively.”
Rob Enderle, an independent analyst at the Enderle Group, said Wal-Mart’s download offering is a “game changer” that will help set off “a long decline” for DVD sales.
“The need to buy discs will not go away, but it will cut into any growth the market has,” Enderle said. “We are talking about the beginning of the end for DVDs.”

LG offers dual-format DVD
LAS VEGAS — A new high-definition DVD player is offering a glimmer of hope for those hopelessly confused by the Betamax-vs.-VHS-style format war currently being waged in the arena of next-generation living room entertainment.
But the hope comes at a steep price.
At the kickoff of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG Electronics announced it will be releasing a high-definition DVD player that will play both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, meaning film fans will be able to buy movies in either of the competing formats and have them play on a single device.
“Through the dual-format HD player, LG has eliminated the fear of having to commit to one technology and made this innovation accessible to everyone,” LG Electronics Canada spokesman Frank Lee said yesterday.
The LG SMB-007 — Super Multi Blue player — will be available this spring for $1,499.
While the cost of the all-in-one player will certainly cause some eyes to water, Lee said it’s not uncommon for a new technology to come at a premium price. “We need to remind ourselves that no more than 20 years ago an entry-level mono VCR was being sold at $1,199,” he said.
Apart from the sticker shock, the Super Multi Blue player comes with another caveat — it’s less a perfect melding of the two technologies than it is a Blu-ray player that also happens to support HD DVD playback. The much-touted interactive menu features of the next-gen DVD formats will be functional only for Blu-ray movies played on the device, not HD DVD flicks.
The ongoing format war between the Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies has been compared to the Betamax versus VHS dust-up of the late ’70s and early ’80s. So far, HD DVD players have seen better sales, although the Blu-ray format enjoys greater support from the major Hollywood studios.
Lee said the consumer will ultimately decide whether Blu-ray or HD DVD emerges triumphant in the format war, but that the new hybrid player will serve the needs of those who want to cover both bases without buying two devices.
The sprawling LG booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center drew throngs of curious onlookers yesterday, many of whom were gathered around a Super Multi Blue display showing a Blu-ray movie running on one of the new players and an HD DVD movie on another. Even Hollywood megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer stopped by briefly to check the device out.

Web watchers and Wall Street await revamped Disney.com
The stakes could scarcely be bigger for Walt Disney Co. as it unveils a revamped flagship Web site Monday.
Reversing the company’s past Internet stumbles is a top priority for Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger, whose reputation as a new-media leader in an old-media business could be tarnished if the site fails to attract more viewers.
Disney.com is already among the most popular sites with kids, so company executives have tried to convey modest goals. They say Disney simply wants the current 25 million monthly visitors to stay longer, watch more ads and deepen their connections to the company’s characters.
But investors will be looking for more dramatic results.
“We’ve seen a lot of announcements out of Disney with respect to the Net. Now the expectations are higher,” UBS analyst Aryeh Bourkoff said. “This year, the focus has to be on execution.”
Since assuming the top Disney job from Michael Eisner 15 months ago, Iger has dropped Disney’s previous antagonism toward Web innovations and struck such pioneering deals as the first one to sell prime-time television shows and movies over Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store.
But Disney’s own Web site has changed little, and the zealous policing of its creations has limited the environments kids can create using its characters.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday, Iger will give a preview of the overhauled site that will be accessible to the public later this month.
“I believe we successfully strike the right balance between the huge strength of the existing business and the potential of new media,” Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group, said in an interview.
More than any other big media company, family-oriented Disney must worry about navigating between the strict controls that appeal to parents and children’s increasing expectations of freedom.
The new Disney.com will present itself differently to various age groups, although all will get expanded video, games and other interaction. As on MySpace, visitors will be able to create their own Web sites, communicate with each other and mash together and share music and videos — as long as it’s Disney music and videos.
Parents will have to use their credit cards to register their children as regular site visitors and will get detailed options for limiting what their kids can do.
Although Iger has predicted a substantial gain in Disney’s digital revenue in the current fiscal year, he isn’t predicting any meaningful increase in profit.
Disney’s current Web revenue of more than $500 million comes in roughly equal parts from product sales, advertising and subscriptions to such premium services as the multiplayer kids game Toontown Online, in which the virtual world’s characters team to play practical jokes on humorless robots.
Now is a time for more Internet investment, analysts said — as long as it is better managed than the more than $800 million Disney blew during the dot-com bubble on the failed Web portal Go.com.
As for the concept of controlled creativity, probably the clearest precedent for the new Disney.com is Toontown, Wadsworth said.
Kids who play there can chat with each other with pre-approved phrases, unless they show that they know each other in real life. In that case, they can converse normally. Disney based Toontown on a theme-park attraction.
“It’s a good analogy, and we’ve been quite successful even though Toontown is not a major franchise,” Wadsworth said.
Imagine, he suggested, what could happen with an immersive environment stemming from hit movies such as “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which will spawn a multiplayer online game on Disney.com within a few months.
Analyst Li Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said other Disney.com mini-worlds could please kids, too.
“If they can write anything they want on the homepage and if the interactions themselves have a safe environment, I think it will work pretty well,” Li said. “It definitely draws an affinity to the brand, and branding in the end produces commerce.”

New media not hurting traditional broadcasting: CRTC
New media technologies are not yet having significant impact on traditional radio and television broadcasting, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said in a report released Thursday.
But Canadians are moving toward adopting video and audio streamed over the internet and mobile networks and Canada’s regulatory environment will have to adapt, the federal regulator said.
In the report, titled The Future Environment Facing the Canadian Broadcasting System, it noted that both private broadcasters and the CBC had urged initiatives to regulate new media.
But the CRTC rejected those calls, saying the time was not yet right to create new rules that would force internet and wireless broadcasters to include Canadian content or meet other standards it demands from conventional broadcasters.
Most Canadians continue to listen to conventional AM and FM radio and get most of their TV from conventional broadcasters, the CTRC found.
It estimates it will be another 10 years before a significant number of Canadians want “on-demand” media, such as video downloads and podcasting.
Young people stimulating change
Statistics gathered by the CRTC show younger generations are taking to these technologies in large numbers and the number of hours they spend listening to radio and watching TV is declining.
Canadians aged 12 to 14 and 15 to 19 listened to an average of 13 hours of radio weekly in 2005, but in just one year they had reduced their radio listening by up to three hours.
In 2006, the 12 to 14-year olds were listening to just 10 hours and the 15 to 19-year-olds 12 hours.
Yet average hours spent listening to radio have remained constant since 2000, with FM radio gaining ground against AM radio, which is losing listeners.
Private radio continues to make money, but digital radio seems to be stalled in Canada with Canadians unwilling to buy receivers with little new content and broadcasters unwilling to invest in content without ready listeners, the report said.
While podcasting is available, only eight per cent of Canadians had listened to a podcast within the past month.
Teenagers were watching less TV than they did three years ago and were more likely to have downloaded a TV show from the internet than any other demographic.
Most Canadians still watch traditional television
But the majority of Canadians still watch conventional TV, with half of households receiving cable and 29 per cent getting digital cable.
The CRTC pointed to the financial health of private TV companies and said they did not appear to have been hurt by new media.
Canadians have been slower than Americans to adopt Personal Video Recorders, or PVRs. Their technology allows the downloading of programs. Candians have expressed interest in PVRs, however.
Canada also lags the U.S. in introducing digital TV and high-definition TV.
The CRTC acknowledged in its report that all emerging technologies in broadcasting need close monitoring to determine their long-term impact on the sector and what role public policy might play.
“The Canadian broadcasting system must remain relevant in a global digital environment and must meet the diverse needs of Canadians of all cultures,” said CRTC chairman Charles Dalfen.
The report is just one step in an ongoing review by the CRTC of its regulatory frameworks for radio, television and broadcasting distribution.
A report on high-definition TV is scheduled to come out next February and the regulation throughout the television broadcasting is also under review.

BitTorrent Goes Legit
Paramount, Lionsgate and 20th Century Fox are expected to join Warner Bros. in providing movies over the Internet via BitTorrent, the video web service that they once universally scorned, the Los Angeles Times Times reported on Wednesday.
As part of the deal, BitTorrent has agreed to use filtering software to prevent pirated content from going out over its service.
However, the newspaper indicated, analysts generally believe that the switch-over from an outlet for pirated versions of movies to one where users must pay a fee to receive them is likely to fail; it noted that similar Internet-based movie-download services are struggling.
Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, told the Times: “The problem is consumers are not convinced that paying for and downloading video is worth it. … The other problem is it doesn’t end up on the TV set. The mechanisms that do get it to the TV, like DVD burning, are not quite what they need to be.”
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart on Tuesday launched a new service that allows anyone who buys a DVD copy of certain features to download a copy of it onto their computer or portable digital device. The additional charge will be $2-4 dollars.