Monday, 7 March 2005

Sony's board taps British exec for CEO . .  Board of directors unanimously selects a Briton as the company's new CEO and chairman amid a management shake-up. [Via CNET News.com] "Stringer's election is expected to lead to more cooperation between Sony's disparate electronics and entertainment divisions. The company has been trying to take advantage of its position as one of the leading companies in the entertainment and electronics industries--getting its music and movies onto its gadgets. However, that strategy has been slow in developing. Stringer is expected to push that strategy harder. In a recent interview with News.com, Stringer was adamant that change had to occur faster. "Without content, most devices are junk," Stringer said in late January. " I wonder what Stringer's take on SACD is. Patent Issues “resolved” as DualDisc gets the ‘OK’ for Mainstream European Release… . .  While the specification itself does not presently demand inclusion of DVD-Audio (MLP), it does mandate the level of the quality of sound. “We want the audio quality of the DVD side to be no less than the CD side. In reality labels are going much higher than that. What we didn’t want to do was to create a specification which fundamentally restricted people’s ability to put discs out, yet at the same time we recognised the need to have some basic parameters to maintain the integrity of the brand,” he says. Interestingly, when asked, Trickett did acknowledge that all but one of the DualDisc founding partners are releasing DualDiscs with high-resolution DVD-Audio MLP surround-sound content as standard. Lots of interesting info in this article. A Sony plant will be the first to manufacture DualDisc in Europe. The first Platinum surround sound release is a DualDisc by a punk band from Montreal! CBC Radio's podcasting page now online . .  You can now follow CBC Radio's podcasts at the CBC Radio Podcasting web page. I'll be doing live interviews on most regional afternoon shows across the country tomorrow about our podcasting pilot. [Via I Love Radio .org] Are You Buying It? . .  "Souped-up CD releases are being viewed as the future of record retailing. (Paid downloads is a whole other sphere.) The new orthodoxy, repeatedly heard last week at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto, is that CDs need even more content to entice record buyers. Besides bonus DVDs and enhanced CDs, these also include new dual discs: a single disc with a regular CD on one side and a DVD on the other. Record labels say they like the initial response. Montreal pop-punk band Simple Plan's dual disc Still Not Getting Any went platinum in the United States, selling more than one million copies in its first 10 weeks." Unfortunately the author focuses on the issue of repackaging of old content and therefor detracts from the main point which I've highlighted here. The record industry is looking for a way to make the product they sell at retail more attractive by making it something more than an easily clone-able CD and by improving the sound quality of the product. This is news. What I did learn from the article is that there truly is some momentum and that the number of releases is increasing. Avril Lavigne in surround anyone?

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