Entertainment

A federal judge's ruling against the RIAA not only represents a setback for the litigious trade group in one particular lawsuit, but also opens a Pandora's box of technicalities that could mean a few speed bumps ahead for its legal steamroller. In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA moved for summary judgm...

More than a year after it shut down The WB Television Network, Warner Bros. said Monday it is bringing back the brand as an advertising-supported, video-on-demand site. Warner will launch a beta version of TheWB.com sometime early next month as part of a larger push to capitalize on new channels for...

Telecommunications giant Verizon Communications reported a strong profit boost for its first quarter as growth in its wireless business and its fledgling video service helped compensate for losses in its traditional home phone segment. The numbers from Verizon and those from competitor AT&T, whi...

Japan-based Toshiba reported a 95 percent drop in profit in the January-March fiscal fourth quarter, blaming its loss in the high-definition format war that pitted its HD DVD format against Sony's Blu-ray. Toshiba reported a profit of about $12 million for the quarter, compared with approximately $2...

Well, Blockbuster has finally done it. After years of simply copying the Netflix business practices, it's definitely done something that Netflix is probably never going to do -- offer to buy Circuit City. I find Blockbuster's actions to be confusing and inconsistent. In their last quarterly call, Bl...

Subscribers to Microsoft's defunct MSN Music service will lose access to songs they purchased from the store in a few months. Microsoft informed MSN Music's customers via e-mail Tuesday that it plans to turn off the store's license servers, and that Aug. 31 will be the last day to move purchased mus...

Comcast has lied about how and why it blocks peer-to-peer Internet traffic, and may be lying in its promise to stop some of its practices by year end, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said during a hearing held by a Senate committee on the future of the Internet. The FCC shoul...

Creating videos in-house means corporations have to either hire contractors who have their own equipment or sink thousands or millions of dollars into hiring trained staff and leasing or buying equipment. Then they have to spend days, if not weeks, editing the videos. Not any more: Veodia offers a l...

When the former vice president of the United States gives a speech at a major technology conference in San Francisco, you'd expect to see a story about it the next day, or -- since it was a technology conference -- later on that same day. You'd see a run-of-the-mill story in the Chronicle or the Exa...

Another company is making a play at online video. Launched Wednesday, PluggedIn is the new kid on the block in a market of heavy hitters that includes MySpace Music, Yahoo Music, AOL Music, MTV.com and of course YouTube. PluggedIn, however, offers at least one thing those other sites do not have -- ...

Adobe may still enjoy a resounding lead with its Flash rich-media runtime and player, but Microsoft appears to be gradually gaining ground with its Silverlight application platform. At the National Association of Broadcasters Show 2008 in Las Vegas, Microsoft on Monday announced a raft of new compan...

In a surprise move that could reshape the consumer electronics and movie rental industries, Blockbuster went public Monday with an offer to pay as much as $1.3 billion to acquire Circuit City. Blockbuster announced that it made the offer to Circuit City directly on Feb. 17 but went public with it be...

MySpace on Thursday announced a new partnership with ShineReveille International under which original content developed for MySpaceTV will be distributed internationally. The information was revealed at the MIPTV conference in Cannes, France. Under the plan, online shows such as "Prom Queen," "Quart...

Blockbuster is working on a new movie-streaming and/or downloading service, according to a news report. The reported device apparently would let its customers view movies from a television set-top box similar to the Apple TV or an Xbox 360, both of which can download rentable movies. Such a service ...

Verizon has filed a lawsuit against Time Warner Cable, claiming that company's advertising gives a false impression about the telecom firm's new fiber optic-based TV service. Verizon filed the suit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In it, the company claims ...