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Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.

Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.

However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

Hands On: Canons HD Vixia HF10 and HF100 Need No Tape

The announcements from Canon are very exciting, an update to the HV20 and the new tapeless HF10 and HF100. Especially for south of $1000. One thing conspicuously missing  from the announcement are the compression format. They do say that you will be able to record 16 hours in 16 GB… Are they using that crappy H.264 that all the solid state camcorders use? Also sucky is the non-standard accessory shoe, although better none certainly.

If we can get a very minor compression, an adapter to a standard accessory shoe, and a lens adapter like for the HV20, this could be very exciting indeed for the price.

Maybe the studios are starting to realize that continuing the war between the formats is only succeeding in slowing DVD sales (which were down for the first time year-to-year in 2007). Maybe they are afraid that without a successful HD-format story, both formats will lose to downloading. For whatever reason, the US’s largest seller of DVDs has now endorsed Blu-ray. Can the HD DVD consortium reverse this decision? Does anyone even care anymore?

Warner Backs Blu-ray, Tipping DVD Scales

U.S. Album Sales Fell 9.5% in 2007 (New York Times): when the year’s top albums are Josh Groban’s Christmas music album, a High School Musical soundtrack and the Eagles, why is anyone surprised that sales are down?

Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM (Business Week): The last major label hold-out on DRM has finally realized that punishing your customers is not a good business strategy.

Trent Reznor releases numbers on his Saul Williams download experiment (nin.com): Trent is not only willing to show the data from his experiment, but also to talk about the notion of allowing a pay-what-you-will strategy as a business model

Jim Jannard posted something interesting on the Red forum…

The name is… - Reduser.net

Scarlet. Our Pocket Professional camera.

We know that the name has leaked out, so we want to avoid any postings and speculation.

Prototypes will be shown at NAB. It is not a competitor or replacement for the RED ONE.

Jim

“Scarlet” is a Trademark of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company.

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industrys lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

There is no way that this was a good move by the RIAA. The digital intelligentsia is already against them, and most others who have heard about them aren’t too supportive. If they continue to pursue this line however, they will encourage a full scale revolt by the normal folk who never cared too much before. I can’t see them winning this case, but if they do, I would expect congress to enact a law protecting the millions of mp3 player-owners tout de suite.

David Byrne interviewed Tom Yorke from Radiohead about their on-line sales experiment for Wired. It was an interesting article, but David Byrne’s sidebar has been gathering even more attention. Here he tries to spell out the 6 different possible business models for musicians now. I actually thought that he summed it up pretty well. Lets ignore for the moment that if you aren’t Radiohead or David Byrne, your options (at least at first) are really limited to two business models at most. He at least says that he thinks the true independent path will be the only path eventually.

I think these discussions are really interesting and it is exciting to see some folks as smart as Byrne and Yorke discuss it, especially given their perspectives.

Idolator also had an interesting take on this discussion.

Most of us are probably dealing with this on a much smaller scale. I’ve got a bank of drives sitting around with old projects on them. I should be cycling them periodically, but I don’t always get to it. I’ve got some random old video file formats that I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to read. I’ve got stacks of minidiscs, DV and DAT tapes lying around. Plus tons of old CDRs and DVDRs will backups on them. I’ve had some scares. There was a recording session for transPacific that I’d archived to hard drive and also to about 40 DVDs. At one point, I needed some files, so I grabbed the DVDs. NONE of them worked. Luckily, the drive was still good and I was able to copy the files.

Imagine now that over in Hollywood, they are producing 100s of Gigabytes a day. What the hell do they do with it? This article from the New York times is interesting, but I’d love to see an in-depth interview with a major film studio data wrangler.

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies - New York Times

Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups - Los Angeles Times

Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.

This has been expected since the strike began. The writers are frustrated with the system and realizing that they can own it all. The musicians have been living this for a while, but it takes a bit more people to produce a tv show than an album. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Look at all the episodic stuff on the web these days. Let a million small studios bloom!

Create Digital Music » Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pioneering Composer, Dies