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Webcasts are finding an audience with everyone from basketball fans to churchgoers to music lovers. Now, record companies are beginning to wake up to the possibilities of webcasting as a scouting tool. RCA/Sony BMG has signed a little-known British singer to a record deal after watching live perform...

Hardware and electronics makers are carrying on what has become a heated format fight as they ready new, high-definition DVD players for the market, choosing to build hardware for either the Sony-backed Blu-ray discs or rival Toshiba-supported HD DVD format. While there have been some demonstrations...

Internet giant Google is teaming with athletic shoe titan Nike to prepare the field for soccer fans worldwide with a new multi-language site that coincides with this summer's World Cup competition in Germany. Dubbed "joga.com," joga being Portuguese for "play," the new site will allow players and fa...

Moving closer to the long-expected smackdown between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD high definition product standards, Sony has announced several new product releases designed to support the Blu-ray camp. The company plans to ship its new Bravia flat-panel televisions with full high-definition capabilities ...

The battle over the next generation of DVD players just got another entrant: the virtual multilayer disc. VMD is a high quality format with built-in copyright protection designed for next-generation optical media. New Medium Enterprises demonstrated its VMD technology at the CeBIT trade show in Germ...

With Apple adding video to its iPod line of digital media players, the scramble is on to provide watchers with content to occupy their eyeballs. One way to obtain content is to pay for it. Since the introduction of its "vidpod," Apple has been steadily adding to the video library at its iTunes store...

More mobile video is slated to come to the consumer marketplace via a service dubbed "Mobizzo" announced by News Corp.'s Fox Mobile Entertainment this week. The service will offer games, music, mobile phone wallpaper and ringtones, including Fox programming such as episodes of "Family Guy" and films...

Is it a digital music player? A smartphone? A new PDA? For some time, Microsoft has been seeding expectations of a new device, code-named Project Origami, that would combine some or all of the functionality of these popular products. Now, the emergence of a video clip purporting to shed light on th...

America Online on Monday announced that it has teamed up with Mark Burnett Productions, the company that propelled the concept of reality television into the mainstream. The companies have signed a major production deal to develop a real-life treasure hunt airing exclusively on the AOL.com Web site....

Sony is telling its robotic dog Aibo, as well as the rest of its robotics program, to lie down and play dead as the electronics giant continues to cut projects and products in search of profitability. Although the robot dog and Sony's bi-pedal Qrio robots gained some traction among consumers, mostly...

Apple Computer's introduction of its video iPod set off a big bang that will fuel phenomenal market growth for years, according to a report released Monday by ABI Research. While the push to video online started well before the launch of the video iPod, ABI acknowledged, Apple's announcement trigger...

This is the final installment of my three-part series covering this year's Consumer Electronics Show, so this week let's focus on the future. There are only a few companies I see as having the breadth to succeed in the battle for the digital home, among them HP and Sony. HP stands out slightly ahead...

The Blu-ray Disc Association announced that the format specification for this standard is now complete, and it is ready to begin BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R licensing. Blu-ray Disc single (25 GB) and dual (50 GB) layer specifications have been approved. The bottom line for consumers is that they can expe...

CONFERENCE REPORT

CES: Showcasing the Battle for Content

As the first of my three-part report on this year's Consumer Electronics Show, I'll focus on the big companies and a number of the cool products that were announced early in the show. Next week, Part Two will loop in the late announcements and contrast what happened at MacWorld the following week. I...

Verizon will soon launch V Cast Music, a new service that will enable wireless customers to download tunes to their mobile phones and PCs, the company said at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The V Cast service, which follows similar offerings from wireless rivals Cingular and Spr...

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