Monday, December 31, 2007

High Def DVD stalemate

by alec on December 31, 2007

Despite the rhetoric from both sides, neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray is a clear winner in the high definition video format wars, according to the New York Times. It's a stalemate.

We bought an HD DVD player when they were on sale earlier this year.  Even so, we've only seen two HD DVD titles since that time, opting for the most part for ordinary DVD.  Why?

  1. Cost.  Ordinary DVDs are available for anywhere from $6 to $20, depending on how old the release is.  HD DVD releases are generally $30 and up. 
  2. Selection.  There really isn't much of a selection.  One or two shelf units at Best Buy versus the thousands of titles available in regular DVD format.
  3. Rental.  Our local video store doesn't carry either Blu-Ray or HD DVD.

As a result, of the dozen or so DVD's we purchased at Christmas, only one was an HD DVD.  It looks great, but until there are more titles available at a more reasonable price, I don't expect to be getting a lot of use out of our fancy new HD DVD player.

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Staying home on New Years Eve.

by alec on December 31, 2007

As a nation, we Canadians aren't party animals.  According to the paper this morning, just 6% of us will be going out for the all-out New Years party this evening, and fully 40% of us aren't planning to party at all… not even at someone's house!  Me, well… I'll be hosting our fabulous North America wide New Years Countdown call… with a glass of champagne in hand. 380 people have RSVP'd across 3 time zones.

Hope to see you there!

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End of standalone IP telephony? Hogwash!

December 31, 2007

New Telephony’s Kelly Teal writes: VoIP clearly has moved into the mainstream, but 2007 marked a year of high-profile stumbles that appear to signal the end of standalone IP telephony. The rest of the article talks about the stumbles of Vonage, SunRocket and Ebay / Skype, concluding with this quote from Infonetics Research analyst Stéphane [...]

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First New Years sighting!

December 31, 2007

This is a fabulous picture of the tail end of the fireworks in Sydney Australia, shot just a few hours ago by Warren Howard, brother of iotum’s Chairman Randall Howard.  In his email, he writes: "I ended up in an area called "the Rocks’ which is more downtown and virtually under the Harbour Bridge.  The [...]

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