Despite the efforts of the RIAA and the huge success of iTunes (and similar), illegar music sharing on the Internet is still going strong. According to a recent research, a 43% of people questioned are using P2P to download music from the Internet. One of the key reasons must be that BitTorrent and sites like The Pirate Bay have made music downloading a very simple task, helping it to become a mainstream phenomena, like Napster did years ago. Another notable detail is that DRM technologies applied to music CDs seem to have about zero effect on reducing online music sharing, which is not a surprise as the DRM protections are a piece of cake to bypass.

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Adult entertainment, or porn, has historically played a significant role in media publishing market. Adult entertainment was among the first industries to be profitable on the Internet, and it has also been speculated that porn was one of the key factors affecting the ancient Beta vs. VHS video tape war which turned into the favor of VHS format. So one more slap to the face of HD DVD camp is that Japan’s porn producer have chosen to support Blu-ray format in their high definition productions. According to the source, Sony is even providing technical assitanse to the adult film studios of Japan.

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As Blu-ray seems to have an edge on the emerging high definition market, Microsoft has announced today price reductions and promotions of their Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive. Indeed, priced now at $179 it seems like a very affordable solution for HD video, although it requires the Xbox or a PC for playback. In addition Microsoft is bundling the package with five free HD DVDs, so the offer really seems like a bargain.

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All major game consoles are showing off impressive sales growth figures. King of the hill is still Nintendo Wii, followed by Microsoft Xbox360 and Sony Playstation 3. But perhaps most substantial change is the figures is the recent sales boost of PS3. According to the source the $100 price cut is showing immediate impact and has resulted in 135% sales growth of PS3 in the last two weeks. The figures might suggest that many potential PS3 buyers were waiting and expecting the first price drop before making the purchasing decicion. However, Sony still has a lot of catching up to do in order to reach the 2nd or 1st position

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Sony will be releasing an updated firmware version for the PlayStation 3 console tomorrow, the 24th of July. The update will bring a bunch of technical and usability improvements, fixes to bugs and even new features. There will be animated avatars in the chat, new functionality to rearrange games in the dashboard, ability to change settings for PS1 and PS2 games, additional outfut formats, and so on.

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Apple managed to create major fuzz about their iPhone, which is again a neatly designed but technically less than impressive device by the fruit company. Apparently they have left in a severe security issue while working on the web browsing features of the phone. The Safari web browser of the iPhone has the ability to utilize device telephony features, but the trick is that it could be exploited to force the device to make calls to expensive service numbers, potentially causing plenty of expenses to the users.

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Whoops, we are a bit late with this one but the finest freeware audio CD ripper always deserves some attention. EAC, or Exact Audio Copy, has been recently updated to a version 0.99pb1. Although it is labeled as a pre-beta release, the quality of public EAC releases has usually been extremely good - better that many software advertised as “1.00 stable”. The new version comes with a nice pack of improvements, perhaps most notable being the inclusion of the FLAC, Free Lossless Audio Codec, which provides native support for audio compression at 100% CD quality. Check out the full list of changes and download!

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Sony made an annoucement recently that the price of PlayStation 3 will be slashed -100$, but some people speculate whether hundreds bucks is enough to raise interest. Has Sony made a mistake by creating a console with a high end philosophy? The source shows some interesting historical facts about console sales vs. price, and if the history repeats itself Sony may be in some trouble. A high end console, or a media center, is a rather new product concept and perhaps the Joe Average is just not ready for it? On the other hand Sony has been able to sustain very long product life cycles in the past with PlayStations, so perhaps they can repeat the trick and be a winner eventually? The key element might also be the high definition video - oddly the HD televisions are selling like pancakes, but the HD video players are not. People are watching low resolution content with the high definition TVs, but that must eventually change.

At the same time the media praises the $500 Apple iPhone (a 2-year contract!), there has been constant whining about the price of Sony PlayStation 3 ($599). Well, Sony doesn’t have the media appeal of Apple or Steve Jobs as spokesman, so they have to slahsh prices in order to remain competitive. On the other Nintendo Wii has managed to reshape the 3rd generation console market by delivering a low cost yet low performance console with a new twist in gameplay. I am pretty sure that the success of Wii has surprised the decision makers of Sony and potentially at Microsoft too. So here is Sony’s response and now we are waiting for the counter strike from Microsoft.

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The media is eagerly waiting for Sony to announce price reductions for the PlayStation 3 console, mostly due to the sales figures. PS3 has stuck to the third place in “next-gen” cosole sales, aftet Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox. It has been speculated that the slower than expected sales are due to the combination of high price and lack of software titles. Sony claims that they have seen it all before with PS2 and evetually they succeeded in selling a whopping 120 million consoles. However, when PS2 emerged the console market was virtually ‘empty’ without any serious competitors (sorry for not counting Dream Cast as a serious competitor).

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