Weekly Audio News for Feb. 9, 2005

by | Feb 9, 2005 | Audio News | 0 comments

A Universal Copy-Protection System? – An alliance of Sony,
Phillips, Samsung and Matsushita has been formed to deal with the
continuing issue of downloading rights. They want to make sure that
consumers are using only properly licensed video and music media. Their
joint effort has been named Marlin Joint Development Association, and
the idea is to create a copy-protection system that would work for
everything from cell phones and digital music players to video
recorders, rather than the several different and incompatible
approaches used by different manufacturers at present. The alliance
feels that the division among approaches to rights protection is
weakening the success of securing digital entertainment. Interestingly,
neither Apple nor Microsoft are involved in the talks; both have their
own systems.

Threat to Rights/Privacy from New Technology
– Something called HOTLLAMA Media has been launched with a four-DVD
gaming agreement with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The HOTLLAMA
player software interface technology offers an all-in-one, customizable
multimedia player merging DVD video, Internet, high-end graphics, Flash
content, games, promotions, marketing, and third party applications.
And thru its backend data collection engine the new player also allows
DVD producers to anonymously track the end user’s actual use of the
features being accessed on both DVD and DVD-ROM – every single click
and all in real time. Sound a bit scary? Not being a gamer myself I
could care less, but if you expect to be playing The Day After Tomorrow
or Alien vs. Predator in the near future be prepared to have a stranger
watching your every move over your shoulder…

Sonos Digital Music System Now Shipping
– The networked audio system allows users to play digital music files
stored on any networked Mac, PC or other storage device. It consists of
a Zone player connected to an Ethernet, Wi-Fi or Airport network, has a
50-watt built-in amp, and a wireless control pad with color screen
giving the user access to the interface. The unit can play back AAC,
MP3, WMA, WAV and Internet radio stations, and each Zone player can
play different music if you wish. Two Zone players and one controller
go for SRP: $1199.

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