GigaOM Pro

Like Amazon, Apple is not asserting that its users have a right independent of their being Apple customers to resell digital goods, as they would with physical goods. It's describing a service that allows them to transfer digital goods among themselves under Apple's supervision. Read more »

The running battle over who has the rights to do what online with TV content took another turn this week when Fox Broadcasting asked a federal court in California for an injunction barring Dish Network from marketing and selling the Hopper with Sling DVR, also called Dish Anywhere. Introduced at CES in January, the new [...] Read more »

The steps Sony has taken to take cost and development time out of the PlayStation 4 are not without a price of their own. And the trade-offs involved speak directly to Sony's high-stakes effort to balance the game industry's past and future. Read more »

The OTT video service being planned by Intel sure sounds like it meets the legal definition of a "multichannel video program distributor," which means it will likely have to comply with the terms of the Communications Act and be subject to regulation and oversight by the FCC. Read more »

The contrast between the ReDigi system and the system described in Amazon's patent highlights a subtle but potentially crucial question for the future of the used-digital market: On what basis should "used" digital goods be valued relative to their "new" state? Read more »

The swapped-out Apple TV components suggest Apple expects to be cranking out more or less the same set-top box for some time yet. The new components consist of chips it is already buying in bulk for other products. It’s a cost-savings move, in other words, aimed at making the manufacturing and supply chain of the current Apple TV set-top a little more efficient. Read more »

The launch of DIAL could represent a major step toward turning second-screen mobile devices into a primary means of discovering and accessing content for the first screen. That has the potential to be far more disruptive to traditional linear TV platforms than are mere over-the-top channels because it promises to deliver a qualitatively different viewing experience in a user interface not modeled on or controlled by any of the traditional gatekeepers. Read more »

This month, Netflix began offering streaming 3D content for the first time, along with something it calls "Super HD" video, which is says is superior to "full 1080p" video. The catch is that Netflix claims it can only deliver the new services to subscribers' whose ISPs have configured their network to interoperate with Netflix's own CDN due to the high bandwidth requirements of 3D and Super HD. Read more »

The new High Efficiency Video Coding standard can support much higher resolutions than H.264, making it possible to encode up to 8K video (7680 x 4320). But its biggest impact is likely to come from the huge improvement in compression efficiency it provides over current codecs. Read more »

The next phase in the evolution of two-screen video is likely to focus on inverting the current relationship between the big screen and the little one. That is, tablets and smartphones increasingly will be used to acquire and playback content directly, from the internet, while relegating the TV to the subsidiary role of display device. Read more »