Archive for: June 2007

If you depend on the sounds of Internet radio to get you through your workday, don’t be surprised if your headphones pipe out little more than dead air.

In protest of the elevated royalty fees Webcasters are poised to begin owing to the record industry next month, Internet radio operators are planning to stage a “day of silence.”

So far, Live365 and AccuRadio.com have agreed to cease their music programming on June 26, save for brief audio public service announcements sprinkled throughout the day, according to a Wednesday report by Kurt Hanson of the Radio and Internet Newsletter,. So has the online presence of KCRW, the Southern California-based public radio station.

On Friday: SaveNetRadio, an advocacy group opposed to the copyright judges’ action, has posted an updated list of protest participants (PDF), which now also include Yahoo, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, MTV Online, and more than 30 other stations.

Smaller Webcasters staged a similar protest five years ago in response to a similar rules change by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board.

At issue are fee hikes that the Internet radio community says could bankrupt its services, particularly those run by smaller operators. SoundExchange, the non-profit collection entity that lobbied for the changes, has repeatedly argued the changes are fair and necessary to ensure artists are compensated adequately.

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Consumer electronics giant Mitsubishi now hopes to combine the inherently large size of a rear-projection unit into a sleeker, lighter-weight product and pack it with enough advanced technology to out-dazzle the rest of the HD pack, although consumers may have to wait a while to see this next-gen version of DLP for themselves.

Since last winter, Mitsubishi has been trickling out details of what it unofficially is calling “Laser TV,” citing it as a breakthrough in existing DLP (digital light processing) that it believes will eventually move HDTV one step further to perfection cosmetically and technologically, through the use of colored lasers.

DLP, a registered trademark of Texas Instruments, traditionally uses white-light mercury bulbs. Mitsubishi’s new system, instead, uses separate red, green and blue semiconductor lasers in combination with an HD chip, which those who have seen a real-world demo (mostly dealers and Mitsubishi employees) say provides richer and more complex colors and hues, and noticeably more distinct HD clarity and depth-of-field.

Mitsubishi contends that lasers also prompt a more realistic manifestation of “black” than current DLP, plasma, LCD or CRT screens. Lasers purportedly shut off totally when not needed, frame-to-frame, creating a more natural blackness. (In contrast, today’s DLP mercury bulbs do not completely blink off, according to Mit-subishi.) Today’s DLP units without colored lasers already produce at least 16 million color variations, including 124,000 shades of gray, according to TI.

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