Kodachrome retirement

The Eastman Kodak Company announced it would retire Kodachrome, its oldest film stock, because of declining customer demand in a digital age. The company, which is based in Rochester, now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business as far into the future as possible.

DVB Internet TV questionnaire

The DVB Project recently initiated a study mission on Internet TV Content Delivery to investigate technology options to deliver DVB-type content over the Internet to a large number of CE devices (including game consoles), PCs or mobile devices. The study mission focuses on content delivery, but other functions such as codecs, security, or metadata are also considered.

To address these objectives, the study mission starts with a questionnaire to collect information on existing technologies in the respective area. DVB members and non-DVB members alike are encouraged to respond to the questionnaire.

You can find the questionnaire at this link.

HD TV channel and streaming service

Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM have joined forces to launch Epix, an HD television channel and accompanying online 720p streaming service.

The Epix TV network will air movies that are in the "pay-TV" window, those weeks before a film appears on DVD in which it is available on pay-per-view or HBO, among others.

Epix viewers can access the same material online, on demand, at Epixhd.com. The video is offered through Flash and is multi-bitrate enabled; the player checks the available bandwidth every ten seconds to see if a larger or smaller stream is required. Epix currently creates six different encodings of each film which range from HD 720p support all the way down to 500Kbps (cell phone quality).

Source: ars technica.

GPU acceleration for Flash

NVIDIA and Adobe Systems recently announced that they are collaborating as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices, including netbooks, tablets, mobile phones and other on-the-go media devices.

NVIDIA is also participating in the Open Screen Project, a broad initiative of 25 industry leaders to deliver a consistent runtime environment across devices. Led by Adobe, the Open Screen Project is dedicated to enable Web content and standalone applications across desktops, netbooks, mobile devices, televisions, and other consumer electronics that take advantage of Adobe Flash Platform capabilities.

For more information, visit www.openscreenproject.org.

No controller required

Microsoft introduced a prototype camera that can be used as a controller for the Xbox 360. Codenamed “Project Natal” the camera eliminates the need for a hand-held input device — instead, the camera can track a player’s full body movement, recognize their face and voice, scan images of real items and respond to both physical and vocal commands. Microsoft also debuted 10 exclusive new games and several additions to the Xbox Live online service.