By Erik Gruenwedel | Posted: 22 Jan 2009
egruenwedel@questex.com
Spurred by continued strong video game sales, global packaged media sales are expected to increase 4% to $64 billion in 2009, according to a new report.
Media Control GfK International said the DVD/Blu-ray market is projected to drop 4% to $27 billion (from $28 billion), despite a 150% increase in Blu-ray sales to $2.9 billion from $1.1 billion in 2008. Read More »
Coremetrics, a provider of digital marketing solutions, recently revealed that Australian and New Zealand online consumers are slowing spending and preferring to shop on home-grown sites, as the local dollar plunged during the quarter ending December 2008.
The conversion rate for online sales in Australia and New Zealand has dropped to just 2.9 and 2.5 orders per 100 online sessions respectively, compared with 4.4 and four respectively between the months of April and June 2008. Read More »
Ustream May Be First To Broadcast Video From Unhacked iPhone
Posted: 16 Jan 2009 04:51 PM PST
U-Stream www.ustream.com is anticipating Apple’s approval of the first non-jailbroken iPhone application that will let users record and broadcast live video from the device. Last month MobileCrunch obtained a picture www.mobilecrunch.com/2008/12/16/looks-like-ustream-is-headed-for-the-iphone-as-well of the application running on a test phone. Yesterday, co-founder John Ham demo’d the product for me here at TechCrunch.
The application lets users broadcast live video from the phone, as well as read and participate in user comments.
Posted: 15 Jan 2009 11:20 AM PST
YouTube wants to be on your TV set bad. It’s squeezing its way in through Apple TV, TiVo, and now videogame consoles: the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3. Just point those videogame browsers to www.youtube.com/tv and you can now watch a customized version of YouTube from your couch. The YouTube Blog reports www.youtube.com/blog: Read More »
January 19, 2009 - 11:41AM
www.smh.com.au
The global music industry is making progress in clamping down on online piracy by evolving radical new ways of selling tunes, but 95 per cent of downloads remain illegal, a report said.
New business models helped the legal online music sector balloon for a sixth straight year in 2008, growing by 25 per cent to $US3.7 billion dollars in trade value, it said.
But some 40 billion music files were still illicitly shared last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in its annual report on the state of digital music.
“The music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online,” it said, citing studies in 16 countries showing that only one in 20 downloads are via legal channels. Read More »