The battle for your home entertainment dollars is heating up as three industry giants are going head-to-head to dominate the market. At the forefront we have Apple’s iTunes Store, which has offered video downloads of popular movies and TV shows for a fee since 2005. Apple currently has the lion’s share of the market with millions of satisfied customers worldwide.
The runner-up is UltraViolet, which went live in October 2011. The UltraViolet format combines physical products such as DVD and Blu-ray movies with an online, cloud-based “storage locker” system that will allow consumers to “buy once, play anywhere.”
Read More: Disney Remains Ambiguous About UltraViolet Partnership
We’ve written several articles during the past year about the rise of the UltraViolet format. Since it went live in November 2011, there have been a lot of questions about the format such as:
- How will the online, cloud-based “storage locker” work for watching movies?
- Can movie studios, content producers, and hardware manufacturers work together to build a successful platform?
- Will consumers find the format easy to use and worth paying for?
- Does UltraViolet have the potential to become a serious competitor to Apple’s iTunes monopoly on premium, downloadable content?
Read More: UltraViolet Announces Big Plans for 2012
Three Korean executives of Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. have agreed to plead guilty, pay a $25,000 criminal fine, and serve prison sentences from seven to eight months in the United States for participating in bid-rigging and price-fixing for the sale of optical disc drives. This the second round of antitrust charges. In the first round, Hitachi-LG agreed to pay a $21 million criminal fine for 14 counts of antitrust violations and one count of wire fraud.
According to the US Justice Department’s press release, Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim, and Sik Hur (aka Daniel Hur) conspired with others (yet to be specified) “to suppress and eliminate competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) and/or fixing prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft Corporation” between November 2005 and September 2009.
Read More: Three Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty to Antitrust Charges
For all our lives, we’ve been told that the best way to view a movie is the traditional way – on large silver screens with awesome sound for that moving experience inside a dark cinema. We were told that DVDs are meant for those who miss the showing of movies, for renting whenever we’re bored, and for having a copy so that we could treasure our own favorite movies.
Then there was not only Blu-ray (BD-R), but also digital streaming and everyone started to re-think the purpose of discs. However, we cannot help but think of how this new disc technology can capture the experience that we’re used to getting only from the big screen: the musical score, the right colors, the aspect ratio, and the clarity of images.
Read More: Blu-ray Sales, Popularity on Upswing for 2012
While nobody thought Netflix’s release of its Q3 financial results was going to be great, it was worse than predicted. The company announced that it lost a net 810,000 domestic subscribers and will be in the red by 2012, which precipitated stock free fall.
After the announcement, Netflix’s stock dropped by $32 from $120, making Apple’s significant $23.62 stock drop on Thursday look much less substantial. Overall, Netflix’s stock value has dropped 72 percent (about $10.5 billion) in the past three months, leading to questions if Netflix CEO Reed Hastings should resign.
Read More: Netflix Loses 810K Subscribers, Precipitating Stock Decline
