Entertainment

Home entertainment pioneer TiVo today announced it will be dropping the cost of its basic digital video recorder to $99 and will expand distribution of its products to three more major retailers. The Alviso, California-based company also announced a redesign of its TiVo box and a rewards program for...

Loudeye today announced a multiyear agreement with the multimedia business group of Nokia to develop a wireless digital music platform for mobile operators and their subscribers worldwide. This agreement includes a multimillion dollar commitment to Loudeye for development fees and defines a global c...

TiVo, one of the initial creators of television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), announced today that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has certified TiVo's technology protection of digital broadcast television. The FCC determined that digital broadcast television content shoul...

Online search engine Ask Jeeves has reached an agreement to start offering Citysearch's local content and business data, with the information expected to start showing up in searches in September. Citysearch's data will complement the local features already offered on Ask Jeeves, including maps, dri...

DreamWorks today filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing it intends to make an initial public offering of shares in, and split off, its animation unit, DreamWorks Animation. The studio, formed in October 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and D...

European regulators have approved the merger between Sony Music and Bertelsmann Music Group, leaving only U.S. approval before the two companies can come together to create the world's second-largest music business. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed and the merger excludes some act...

Apple Computer on Monday introduced an upgraded version of its popular iPod digital music player, adding more features and lowering the price in a bid to ward off competition from the likes of Sony. Apple said the new model iPod features up to 12 hours of battery life, compared with 8 hours on the p...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken additional steps in its fight against music piracy by issuing nearly 500 more lawsuits against alleged music file-sharers. This action brings the total number of individuals it has sued to nearly 3,000. While the RIAA doesn't yet know th...

Nintendo and Sony took the stage with competing announcements at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Each game console maker detailed specs of a new portable gaming device, but the proposed gadgets differ in important ways. Nintendo said its dual-screen entrant in this mar...

In a bid to boost sagging demand for its devices, palmOne has launched two new products in its popular Zire line of handheld computers: a lower-end model designed to appeal to price-conscious consumers and a higher-end model with multimedia and Bluetooth wireless functions. Page Murray, vice preside...

Underscoring the long-term potential it sees in applying technology advances to home entertainment, Intel has said it will dip into its $200 million home-technology fund to back several startups in the space. The company's announcement came at its annual developers forum in Barcelona, Spain. "These ...

Saying it wants to help advance the "digital revolution" in the entertainment industry, Hewlett-Packard has announced alliances with DreamWorks and Warner Brothers. The deals call for HP to help the studios create and distribute digital content. The company made the announcements at the National Ass...

In an agreement billed as one of the largest Internet-only content deals in history, Microsoft has won the right to offer streaming audio and video of Major League Baseball games through its MSN service. As part of their monthly $9.95 fee, MSN Premium users also will get MLB.com's All Access service...

The cost of making movies has risen significantly over the years, with the average Hollywood film now costing $60 million, double the average in 1996. One main reason for this increase is the rise of special effects, which has ballooned from a small specialty industry into a vital cog in the product...

Sun Microsystems has revealed it is working on a server designed to enable faster and more expansive online game play. The company's goal is to create a dedicated server that can allow far more online gamers to play the same game at the same time. Meanwhile, a continent away, Sun is flooding the CTI...