In North America and Japan, Sony's best-selling regions in global terms, the company has as of now ceased to market monitors and at the end of the year the Japanese group will also terminate its monitor business in Europe - which at 30 percent is also an important market for the company.

LG.Philips LCD has announced that it has forged a strategic alliance with Toshiba to jointly develop their positions in the growing European LCD TV market.

News has come across from Taiwan that there are increasing cases of 8x and 4x DVD+R/-R discs being passed off as 16x and 8x, respectively.

A partnership between Sonic Solutions and Macrovision may help pave the way for people to be able to walk into a store, order a movie and have it burned onto a DVD in 10 minutes.

Giving the Keynote address at Mipcom, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney has broken with studio convention and recognised piracy as a business model to compete with, as opposed to simply an illegal threat to be battled.

Taiwan-based CyberHome Entertainment (once known as Protop Innotech), a maker of DVD players an recorders, has decided to stop producing DVD players mainly due to that Philips demands royalty payment, according to industry sources.

Sony does not expect to cut the U.S. price of its PSP handheld game system for the rest of 2006, and the number of available games will nearly double to about 230 in that time, Sony said on Thursday.

Creative has unveiled a new device called the Xmod, which is based upon the company's X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio platform and promises to improve the audio quality of compressed music, such as that purchased from Apple's iTunes or any MP3 files.

Erstwhile Blu-ray Disc backer HP is preparing an external HD DVD drive, it has emerged. The company's also equipping two of its consumer-oriented notebook and media centre systems with drives that support the next-gen optical disc format.

US online DVD rental service Netflix Inc has announced a version of the Longitude prize for film geeks - a $1m (£529.6m) bounty to the first person to develop software to improve its movie recommendation system by 10%.

Troubled manufacturer Sony is to start selling two Blu-ray recorders in Japan this December, according to nikkei.net.

A Fagin-style crook who ran a pirate DVD racket has been jailed for almost three years. Glasgow-based Donald Daisley used teenage girls to help him peddle counterfeit films and football DVDs.

Although advanced technology attachment packet interface (ATAPI) is the mainstream interface standard for optical disc drives (ODDs) currently, serial ATA (SATA) stands a chance of replacing the former in the second half of 2007, according to sources in Taiwan's ODD manufacturing industry.

DivX have released version 6.4 of their software suite that includes new players and codecs offering play-back and encoding of full HD (1,920x1,080 pixel) DivX video files.

The first Multi-Drive Blu-Ray system with both duplication and recording functionality has begun shipping from Microboards Technology.

DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights - the company behind the propietary format and DRM loving iTunes and iPod. He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices.

Toshiba has launched a slimline HD DVD drive for notebook computers in a bid to boost support for the next-generation optical disc format. The drawer-mechanism unit not only reads and writes all ther usual DVD and CD formats, but also HD DVD recordable and rewriteable media.

Lite-On IT plans to begin volume production later this quarter, according to industry sources.

The leader of the pro-filesharing Swedish Pirate Party is co-ordinating a pan-European electoral assault for 2009's European Elections.

Apple is apparently leaning on Hollywood studios telling them to co-operate better with its plans for global domination of online distribution of flicks.