Following on from the news that Memorex are to bump up CD-R prices by 10 to 15% in the new year, Moser Baer India Ltd, the world's third-largest producer of recordable compact discs, plans to lift prices by up to 10 percent after a sharp rise in global demand, executive director Ratul Puri has said.

Sony's widely anticipated PSX, based on the popular Playstation 2 platform, will include audio and video functions but will not support DVD+RW recording in its initial incarnation. That capability will be added later, Sony said at Ceatec, Japan's largest electronics show.

Imagine if your stereo were linked directly to an online music store. Four major Japanese electronics makers on Tuesday unveiled a prototype of an audiovisual system that can download song files from an online store without a PC and is expected to go on sale early next year.

Encouraged by the recent surge in popularity of DVD music video discs, music labels will offer dozens of special packages this autumn that combine a CD with a DVD.

Sony will launch a new optical-disc format in November that allows for storage of up to 23.3GB per disc, the company said today. The format, called Professional Disc for Data, is being positioned by the Tokyo company as a replacement for the 5.25-inch MO (Magneto-Optical) disc format that it currently sells in the professional data storage space. MO has been on the market for around 15 years and the highest-capacity version sold by Sony can store 9.1GB per disc.

Our regular contributor Flash has been in touch with good news for owners of Pioneer clone drives from Asus, Acer & TEAC. Flash says, "I have succesfully modified the firmware for the following Pioneer DVR-106D OEM clones to flash them into true Pioneer Drives: Asus DRW-0402PD, Acer OEM Pioneer DVR-106RD and the TEAC DV-W50D. The drives once flashed to TRUE Pioneer can then be flashed to any firmware of your choice." Excellent! You can download the firmware from our download section.

The specifications of Sony's new 8x DVD writer are now listed on SonyStyle's website. We brought you news of Sony's latest internal drive offering last month but now we have more detailed specs and an image.

Press Release from Memorex: "Due to supply shortages, rising costs from overseas disc manufacturers and the stringent enforcement of patent royalties, Memorex is forced to increase CD-R and CD-RW media prices 10 to 15 percent beginning January 2004. The incremental increase in product pricing is intended to enable Memorex to continue to deliver the industry's leading blank CD media and still cooperate with its retail partners to actively market the products to consumers."

Recording industry investigators said on Friday they have begun asking suspected Internet song-swappers to settle copyright-infringement charges before taking them to court.

The fallout of the Motion Picture Association of America's controversial decision to ban studios from sending out "screeners" of their films to Oscar voters and other film and critics groups continues with the cancellation of a major awards presentation.

Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp. plans to eliminate up to 20,000 jobs, or more than 12 percent of its work force, by March 2006 in a major restructuring, a Japanese newspaper has reported.

Strong demand for notebooks, monitors and TVs with LCD panels means price increases for the festive season. Surging demand for notebook computers, televisions and desktop PC monitors have spurred a shortage for the most popular sizes of liquid-crystal display panels.

Global demand for DVD+R/-R discs will more than double to 1.5 billion units in 2004 from an estimated 700 million units in 2003, buoyed by fast-growing sales of DVD drives and recorders, said Gordon Yeh, CEO of Ritek.

Two major scientific research centres said on Wednesday that they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, with a transmission equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds between Geneva and California.

Press Release: Verbatim have announced a new family of DigitalMovie 1x-4x speed DVD Recordable media with the unique look of a movie reel. Like Verbatim's popular Digital Vinyl CD-R discs that look like 45-rpm records, the new movie reel DVD discs bring smiles to the faces of everyone who sees them. Verbatim DigitalMovie discs are available in 3-packs with a choice of 4.7GB DVD-R or DVD+R media packaged in clear DVD Super Jewel Box cases.

Coming soon to a Windows PC near you: Apple's popular iTunes online music store, which analysts say will join an already crowded market that could mute its chances of repeating the success of the Macintosh-only version.

The global recordable DVD drive market will become volatile in the fourth quarter of 2003 as makers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are ramping up outputs aimed at grabbing a bigger share in the world market amid the improvement in the supply of pick-up heads—a major part of the optical storage drive, according to sources at Taiwanese makers in the line.

Microsoft started selling an updated version of its Plus Digital Media Edition entertainment software on Tuesday that now lets people create digital-photo slideshows on the PC and watch them on a DVD player. The software, which sells for $19.95 (£12), is designed for people using Windows XP who want more features for editing and playing media files such as digital photos, music and home movies.

U.S. consumers are planning to buy plenty of electronic gadgets this holiday season. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. households said they are likely to buy at least one consumer electronics product as a gift this holiday season, according to a survey the Consumer Electronics Association and for the third consecutive year, DVD players topped the list. Thirty-one percent of consumers who responded to the survey said they will probably purchase DVD players, the association said.

While FastTrack-based file sharing applications like KaZaA continue to dominate in North America, Europeans are evincing their own unique patterns and preferences, both in terms of their favorite peer-to-peer (P2P) clients and the types of content they choose to share. A new study by Sandvine Incorporated shows that P2P is now a multi-application reality, debunking the presumed dominance of FastTrack across the globe.