I am greatly anticipating learning more about how this technology works: Video appears in paper magazines. Copies of Entertainment Weekly (a U.S. entertainment magazine) will have small, presumably flexible screens that are supposed to be able to store 40 minutes of video. The magazines are slated to go on sale in Los Angeles and New York next month. With any luck, San Francisco (which I am near) may see a few as well.

The BBC article reports that the underlying chip technology is supposed to be similar to the stuff found in singing greeting cards. That sounds like an oversimplification. But the article also names the tech supplier– Americhip, the self-proclaimed leader in multisensory marketing. They have a YouTube channel with demos of this and related technology.

I still read the IMDb Studio Briefing everyday, though it gets a little discouraging. I sometimes wonder if there will ever be anymore interesting multimedia tech news. I should have more faith: New Movie Media Devices Predicted. Really, the story here is that IBM has developed a new, giant capacity yet very small storage method. This is one of those curious situations where they don’t mention how large capacities can possibly reach but instead express the capability in terms of how much media the thing might theoretically hold. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to decide what the average size of a ‘song’ or ‘movie’ might be and compute from there.

Remember the days when CD-ROM storage capacities were expressed in terms of how many printed documents it could hold? Later, the benchmark was number of pictures, then songs. Now it’s movies. This article cites that a device built around the memory could hold the 3500 movies or 1/2 million songs. Thus, the average movie is ~140 times larger than the average song.

The weirdest aspect of the articles floating around is that the hypothetical device would come with 3500 movies prepackaged and the consumer would purchase codes to activate individual movies.

Given recent media consumption trends, there’s little reason to doubt this strategy.

I’m reading fluffy press releases today about how Sun is going to work towards developing an open video codec: Sun Tackles Video Codec. The article is short on substance which is generally what earns this article a spot the Multimedia PressWatch category of this blog. Something about an Open Media Stack (OMS), perhaps correlated somehow to Open Media Commons (not to be confused with Open Media Now!).

It’s hard to find anything about this initiative that’s not a rehashed press release. But this Sun blog seems to have the most authoritative information, abstract though it may be. They present a fascinating design approach: Rather than evaluate algorithmic techniques based on their performance, evaluate them based on their legal status.

Good luck to them. Here’s a Wiki page to track it.