Two big Japanese electronics companies, namely Hitachi and Mitsubishi, are to stop producing parts of their product portfolio domestically: Hitachi announced [JP] it will end production of plasma and LCD TVs in Japan, marketed under the Wooo brand, by September this year.

The company owns a plant in Gifu prefecture in central Japan that churns out about 100,000 TVs per month (pictured: a Hitachi Wooo plasma from 2009). Citing price competition in the TV business as the main reason for the move, Hitachi said the plant will be used to produce projectors and chips instead.

The company will continue to offer Wooo TVs made by non-Japanese contractors.

On the same day as the Hitachi announcement, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun is reporting that Mitsubishi has decided to stop the domestic production of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

According to the report, the main reasons for the decision are declining DVD sales and (still) weak Blu-ray sales. The company has been producing these discs in its own plants in Singapore and Okayama prefecture in Western Japan for years. Now Mitsubishi is planning to outsource optical disc production to partner companies in India and Taiwan in the future.

The move to all-digital distribution is already well under way, and it poses a problem for businesses that have based themselves around the sale of shiny plastic discs. That, combined with the rampant piracy of these discs when they’re released has particularly hurt independent pro-wrestling organizations (to pick something out of thin air). Gabe Sapolsky, vice-president of Dragon Gate USA, owner of Evolve, and former head booker of Ring of Honor, was recently interviewed on Figure Four Daily, a podcast dedicated to pro-wrestling and MMA news, and said that the only way these companies will survive is if a new technology, Internet Pay-Per-View, becomes viable.

A little background. Companies like Dragon Gate USA and Evolve survive almost entirely on DVD sales. If the DVDs don’t sell, then the companies, frankly, run the risk of going out of business. For a little while there, say from 2004 to 2006 or 2007, everything was smooth as you like. But then a few things happened.

One, as broadband speeds increased, it became significantly easier to pirate the DVDs on specialist Web sites, sites usually dedicated to sports, MMA, pro-wrestling, etc. If too many people pirate these shows, then how can the companies survive?

Piracy may not exactly put the likes Taylor Swift or Katy Perry in the poor house, but for smaller organizations, yeah, it hurts.

Illegal streams are another problem that these guys have to deal with. UFC sues people all the time for providing streams, but it’s fair to say UFC has far more resources to litigate this type of thing than Dragon Gate USA or Evolve.

Two, DVD sales just aren’t what they used to be. Remember how massive the DVD section in Best Buy was in the early 2000s? It was like walking into the library at Alexandria. Now? Ha! You’re lucky to find last season of The Office in there.

The decline in sales could be explained a few different ways. You could look at the growth of services like Netflix that instantly stream plenty of stuff to your TV. Google TV hopes to make streaming all the more easy.

There was also a study a few weeks ago that said, because there’s so many entertainment options out there—Netflix, iTunes, Steam, Facebook games, etc.—that people simply spend less time in front of their TV than they used to.

It’s a problem facing the whole entertainment industry, trying to figure out how to get people to pay any sort of attention to what they’re selling.

The next great hope, Sapolsky said in the interview, is Internet Pay-Pew-View, or iPPV. The big iPPV provider right now is GoFightLive.tv, which hosts various combat sport shows. There’s pro-wrestling (in fact, Dragon Gate USA’s first iPPV occurs tonight at 8pm ET), mixed martial arts, boxing, judo, etc. Prices are much cheaper than traditional Pay-Per-View. A UFC event in high-definition costs $55 on DirecTV (I love how UFC charges an additional $10 for the HD feed!), and while GoFightLive.tv isn’t exactly high-definition it’s only $15 for the Dragon Gate USA iPPV. It’s also available all over the world; there’s no territorial restrictions.

You’re free, of course, to hook your computer to your TV if your computer monitor is on the small side.

“Frankly, we need this iPPV money,” said Sapolsky. “This needs to become a money-generator for us. DVD sales, that whole market, is not what it used to be… The economy’s really hurt live ticket sales, so that’s been tough. This live iPPV is the way of the future,” he added.

Sapolsky explained the grander theory behind the Dragon Gate USA iPPV on Paul Heyman‘s Web site, the Heyman Hustle.

So we’re looking at a situation where a relatively new technology, Internet Pay-Per-View, has become vital to the success of an entire industry.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Having essentially liveblogged the iLife ’11 presentation yesterday, one thing that struck me: where’s the love for iDVD? Apple‘s DVD authoring suite hasn’t seen any new features since iLife ’08, and it’s beginning to look long in the tooth. But does it even matter? Given that Apple has thrown so much weight behind the MacBook Air, which doesn’t have an optical drive, and the Mac App Store, which delivers and installs software through the magic of the Internet, we have to ask ourselves: is the DVD well and truly on its way out?

On the surface, and knowing nothing else, it’s pretty easy to say yes. Apple likes to think of itself on the computing vanguard, and if it’s showing less and less love to its main DVD authoring suite that has to say something about its stance on the DVD as a medium.

And let’s not forget Apple’s newfound interest in Apple TV, which relies entirely on streaming content to your TV screen.

Will Apple be brave enough to drop optical drive support from its “professional” computers? Hmm.

On the other hand, I seem to recall Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray a “bag of hurt,” and the medium has done fine in the interim. We’re still some way away from being able to stream a 1080p video with high resolution and/or lossless audio over the Internet. I doubt your ISP is looking forward to that day, by the way. So the perhaps the disc itself isn’t dead, but it will live a far more specialized life in the future? Because we’re clearly at the point where it’s easy to stream a DVD-ish quality version of Toy Story over the Internet, and you can download and install Pages over the Internet, no DVD required.

[via Zatz Not Funny]

We have numerous super-light laptops, a plethora of netbooks, and the iPad to choose from. But some companies still produce portable DVD players. One example is Sony, which yesterday in Japan announced [JP] just that, the DVP-FX950. The player has two selling points: a 9-inch LCD screen that features an LED backlight and a battery life of 7.5 hours (up 25% from the previous model).

Other than the LED backlight, the screen features a resolution of 800×480 and a viewing angle of 180 degrees. Next to DVDs and CDs, the player also has a USB port, meaning you can plug in a USB stick to view JPEGs or listen to MP3s (other formats aren’t supported through USB). The player, which is sized at 227×170.8×34.4mm and weighs 0.88kg, also has an internal speaker.

Sony plans to start selling the DVP-FX950 in Japan on June 16 (price: $390). The company hasn’t said yet whether the device will go on sale in other markets as well.

Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD. It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless—too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now, for RealNetworks has settled with the six “major” Hollywood studios to the sum of $4.5 million. Ouch.

The deal sees RealNetworks, yes, cough up $4.5 million for “costs and fees in connection with the litigation.” Some deal: you bring someone else to court, then make them pay all your bills. RealNetworks will also stop supporting RealDVD, and is in the process of refunding the purchase price to the 2,700 people who bought the thing.

The company’s statement is sad:

We are pleased to put this litigation behind us. This is another step toward fulfilling our commitment to simplify our company and focus on our core businesses. Until this dispute, Real had always enjoyed a productive working relationship with Hollywood. With this litigation resolved, I hope that in the future we can find mutually beneficial ways to use Real technology to bring Hollywood’s great work to consumers.

“Core business”? Hasn’t Flash (and hopefully HTML5) made RealVideo irrelevant?

I liked RealDVD, if only because it demonstrated quite clearly that Hollywood has no intention of letting you use the items you buy for your own ends. DVDs copied using RealDVD could only be played on that computer where it was ripped. It’s not like I could have borrowed Doug’s copy of Movie, then shared the resulting file with the other guys or anything.

The point is, RealDVD is now dead as disco, but RealNetworks may have earned itself a little bit of geek cred in trying to stand up to big, bad Hollywood.

Teenage movie sensations Twilight and New Moon have grossed over $1 billion at box offices worldwide so far (New Moon is still in theaters), and both movies have proven to be extremely successful in the world’s second biggest movie market, Japan, too. That’s perhaps the reason why the second movie (New Moon) gets a special treatment in this country, namely a huge and Japan-only DVD premium box.

The so-called New Moon / Twilight Saga Premium Box – “Always” Edition will be limited to just 2,000 units and includes:

• New Moon movie DVD (130 min.)

• Special features DVD (170 min.)

• New Moon photo cards

• A photo stand

• Mini stickers/ film stripes

• A microSD card containing Twilight

The DVDs will be bilingual (English and Japanese) and region 2-coded, meaning you’ll need a region-free player to view them. Needless to say the real collector’s item here is the microSD card, which lets you watch the complete first movie (Twilight) on your cell phone (the Japanese do that sometimes).

But beware, as that movie will probably be dubbed in Japanese (unclear at this point). And you’ll probably need a special, 1Seg TV-enabled phone to use the card.

If all of these factors and the high price ($90) don’t scare you, I suggest contacting import/export specialist CD Japan if you want to pre-order the box (they’re listing it already). It will go on sale in Japan on March 26.

Via AV Watch [JP]

Now there’s nothing. If you’re down with old-school movies, though, Hammacher’s selling 100 – count ‘em – 100 action films spanning 24 double-sided DVDs for $45.

These are movies from the 1920s through the 1990s, when men were men and the women were too. There’s also a collection of 100 Westerns available for $45 as well.

The 100 Classic Action Films [Hammacher Schlemmer]

And what is Redbox doing that is so heinous you ask? Well, according to the study, renting DVD’s for a buck is cannibalizing sales, making customers want other outlets to offer similar deals, and harming the “perceived value” of movies in general. As an example of this, Blockbuster recently started their own kiosk system to try and muscle in on Redbox.

On top of these crimes, Redbox is also making quite the killing in the aftermarket sales area. Of course, Redbox claims that what they are doing it’s that bad, and they contest some of the data that the study collected.

[Via NewTeeVee]

Seriously though, I can see this as being a good thing at the corporate level. The DiamonDisc is a standard capacity DVD that can be read with a normal drive. Where it gets interesting is that the disc is resistant to heat (up to 176 degrees), UV, and normal material degradation. No word on if it will survive being microwaved though.

Don’t expect the technology to be cheap though. The discs will cost you $35 each, but the price does go down for larger quantities. You have to send your information to Cranberry to be written to the disc, and then they ship the discs to you. It is possible to buy one of the special burners required to write to the discs yourself, but that drive will set you back a cool $4995.

[via Computerworld]

So why by all that’s holy, is “Transformers 2″ the best selling DVD/Blu-ray (in first week sales) of 2009? I think the issue is that this year has been somewhat dry as far as good movies go. “Transformers 2″ does appeal to a wider audience, and that’s why Paramount has sold 7.5 million copies in the first week that it’s been available. “Transformers 2″ did fall short of the 8.3 million discs sold in the first week by the original Transformers film.

According to Hammacher Schlemmer, this is “The First Portable HDTV And DVD Player.”

Will it be the last? Probably not.

This one, however, costs a whopping $300 and features two hours of battery life for HDTV watching or 2.5 hours for DVD playback. You can also view pictures and video files using the built-in memory card reader.

The digital tuner supports broadcasts in 720p and you’ll have to bring along the included “sensitive external antenna” in order to reel them in.

The First Portable HDTV And DVD Player [Hammacher Schlemmer]

Some Netflix news for you this morning. It looks like a 49-year-old post office worker is facing a maximum of five years in federal prison after having plead guilty to federal theft charges. What was he stealing? Oh, you know, some 3,000 Netflix DVDs over the years.

The man, one Myles Weathers, was nabbed after surveillance footage found him taking DVDs from the little sleeves. Netflix itself had become suspicious when it received an unusually high number of complaints saying, “Hey, we never got our DVD~! What’s up?”

Yup, that’s because Mr. Weathers was stealing them all at a Massachusetts distribution facility.

In the chat room, Scott came up with an idea, if you were to do such a scam: instead of stealing the DVDs and never returning them, why not steal ‘em, rip ‘em, then send them on their way? What are the odds that someone is going to notice an extra day in mail delivery time?

One more notch in Netflix streaming‘s belt, though.

$1 if you can figure out what DVD that is in the logo. (Note: Offer not valid on Planet Earth.)

Amazon’s lopped over $60 off the 22-disc “Total World Domination Collection” of Family Guy episodes, bringing the total price to just $75 (good today only).

You get everything from seasons 1 through 6, plus Blue Harvest, Stewie Griffin — The Untold Story, and a bunch of extra behind-the-scenes stuff. Oh, and that giant Stewie head there. This box set is apparently exclusive to Amazon and oughta keep you occupied for most of a weekend.

Family Guy — The Total World Domination Collection [Amazon]

The most interesting model is the RD-X9 (pictured above), which not only boasts a 2TB HDD but also supports external HDDs (via USB) in case you have that many video files to handle. The usual DVD formats are supported, too. There is another USB port, which is reserved for USB keyboards, Toshiba says. The RD-X9 will be available in Japan starting next month (price: $1,300).

The RD-S1004K (see above) is one of two “standard” DVRs Toshiba unveiled today. It features a 1TB HDD and lets you store video on DVDs and an external USB HDD, too (price: $950). The RD-S304K features an HDD that stores just 320GB, but it also comes with a USB port, just in case. This model costs $750 and is pictured below.

Both the S1004K and the S304 are available in Japan from next month. Toshiba is yet to say if these DVRs will ever be sold outside this country, too.

A Utah company claims to have developed a DVD that will last 1,000 years under normal, everyday conditions. (You don’t have to be a professional archivist [PDF alert!], in other words.) And while that’s an impressive achievement, if it is indeed true, there’s one small problem: what are the odds that, 1,000 years from now, Future People will derive any value at all from said discs?

I’d do a full-on rant, but this comment from Slashdot pretty much sums everything up:

And this assumes that in 1000 years there will be:

1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they’re watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of “fiction” may well not exist, in which case an episode of “Friends” or “Seinfeld” become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat’s ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD – just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.

I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.

Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won’t really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).

RS

And there you have it. My personal favorite is number seven, that Future People will give a rat’s ass about what we burned onto DVD in the year 2009. You can never judge a culture based entirely on its frivolities—Future People won’t necessarily condemn us for having more votes in American Idol than in a presidential election, though they’d have every right to—but there’s really not too much going on right now that would warrant 1,000 year long appreciation. Perhaps if scientists cured a pesky disease, but that’s about all I can think of.

Will the iPhone be a big deal in the year 3009? (Will it be a big in the year 2010? Who knows.) Will Future People be impressed that your Chevy Cruze got a whopping 30 miles to the gallon? (Will Future People even know what a “gallon” is?) Will Twitter be seen as Man’s Salvation and the “pulse of the planet”? (Will Future People even speak English, or Spanish, or German, or Japanese, to be able to read your Tweets?)

That’s provided we don’t all kill each other by then.

One model features a 320GB HDD (RD-E304K), while the other boasts a 1TB hard disk (RD-E1004K/pictured above). Both recorders feature a super-slim body (253mm) and come with one HDMI and one LAN port.

The recorders will be available in Japan at the beginning of next month and prices are pretty decent: $500 for the 320GB model and $650 for the 1GB model. But Toshiba hasn’t said yet if these recorders will be sold outside Japan as well.

RealNetworks is currently entangled in a legal case over a prototype hardware DVD ripper called “Facet.” Described as “TiVo for DVDs,” the $300 box aims to replace set-top DVD players by allowing owners to rip their movie collections directly to a 500GB hard drive for quick and easy access and playback.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is less than thrilled about the prospect of a machine thats sole defense against the copying of rented or borrowed movies is a nag screen that advises the owner to only copy legally-owned DVDs.

Aside from copying rented or borrowed DVDs, the MPAA asserts that consumers shouldn’t even be able to make a digital copy of a DVD they legally own in the first place, insisting that an additional fee must be paid for a hard drive-based copy of the content found on a physical disc.

The case is currently in US District Court, where RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser gave over four hours of testimony yesterday with more to go today. According to CNET:

Real began work on Facet with the hope of building the next-generation DVD player, Glaser told before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel. Glaser argued that consumers are clamoring for a better way to manage their DVD collections and that Facet and similar products, such as DVD players from Kaleidescape, do exactly that. In addition to building its own box, Real could conceivably generate income by licensing Facet’s software to consumer electronic makers.

The major film studios perhaps view Facet as a device that could do to DVDs what the iPod did to recorded music. Facet owners could rent or borrow films and then copy and store them without ever having to pay a cent. It’s been widely reported that most of the music on iPods was ripped from CDs or illegally downloaded.

The studios maintain that consumers don’t have the right to copy films they already own, according to statements made by MPAA lawyers during the hearing, which started Friday and will continue Wednesday. Hollywood contends that if, for example, consumers want to download a copy of a movie they already own, then they must pay additional fees for the digital version…

…During Glaser’s demonstration of Facet, he showed how the box made the process of scanning, selecting, and pulling up digital DVD copies as simple as managing an iTunes music library.

In addition, the box could instantly provide a synopsis about a film or the movie’s cover art, as well as enable a user who interrupts the playback for whatever reason to instantly return to the spot where it left off. Glaser used a copy of a box set from the show “The Sopranos” to demonstrate how a Facet owner could begin playing any episode within the set almost instantly.

Copied DVDs would only be playable on the particular box to which they were copied in order to prevent illegal sharing. There’s also the question of how the technology handles bypassing CSS encryption. The company behind the $10,000 Kaleidescape system won a legal battle in a similar lawsuit brought about by the DVD Copy Control Association, which handles CSS encryption technology, and RealNetworks’ defense team alluded to the rather large selection of software-based DVD ripping programs currently available on the market.

Whatever the outcome of the current case, though, will consumers really go for a $300 set top box that rips DVDs when there are already plenty of streaming and OnDemand options available for much cheaper? People with disc-destroying toddlers and/or large DVD collections who don’t like swapping discs in and out of their DVD players all the time might go for something like Facet, but will there be enough of them to make the entire project worthwhile?

[via CNET]

The Kids in the Hall Megaset [Amazon.com via dealspl.us]

This is tremendous. It’s an application for Android called BarTor that you use to automatically download movies using BitTorrent. You simply hold the G1′s camera to a movie’s barcode, presumably while at Best Buy or something, then the software sends the movie title to your computer, which you’ve already set up to run uTorrent or Vuze. And off it goes!

The piracy uses are obvious, but can you imagine if, say, the Hollywood studios developed an application like this? I’m not saying they should change their entire business model to support this basic concept—tagging real-world DVDs for download—but what a progressive idea it’d be. You’re standing in Best Buy or Wal-Mart or whatever, shopping for a new digital camera, when you see This Great Movie staring at you. Too bad they want $20 at retail! Why, you could scan the movie using your phone, and it’ll automatically set it to download from a Hollywood-approved Web site or service, for less than you’d pay at retail. Again, the underlying idea here is what’s most interesting, something to show that Hollywood is thinking “outside the box,” as it were, not the specifically detailed implementation; that can be worked out at a later date.

So yeah, the application can be found on the Android Market for $2.99. If I had a G1—I use a BlackBerry right now—I’d probably be all over this. You should be, too.

via Wired’s Threat Level