iTunes pricing policy under threat from record labels

Apple faces the prospect of reconsidering its one-price-fits-all policy for iTunes downloads or risks losing the backing of the major record labels. With Apple's agreements with the labels due for renewal early next year, the New York Times reports that the labels' are no longer prepared to let Apple determine how downloads should be sold. Disharmony is already evident in Japan, where Sony declined to sign up to iTunes because, it is thought, Apple was not flexible enough on pricing, despite making concessions that it has not sanctioned elsewhere. ...more

And also today (9-Jan-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Oracle announced support by the Oracle9i Application Server and Oracle8i Database for the new Linux kernel, v4.2. ...more

MGM backs Blu-ray

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the latest movie studio to back the Blu-ray consortium headed by Sony. The studio is behind the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises. It is also of course the copyright holder of some of the biggest movies and TV programmes of the last 100 years and its archive will give a huge boost to the number of titles available on the new format - many of which will be in high definition for the first time. ...more

NVIDIA beefs up 64bit mobos with nForce3 chip

NVIDIA has launched new graphics chips to its nForce3 range, taking advantage of AMDs 64bit platform The nForce3 Pro 150, nForce3 150 and nForce3 Go 150 are the latest media and communications processors for the workstation, desktop and mobile markets respectively. As well as providing NVIDIA's graphics power and unified driver architecture, nForce3 also supports AMD's HyperTransport bus interface, designed to prevent data bottlenecks with data bandwidths of 800MB/sec on offer. Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA, said: 'Our new NVIDIA nForce3 MCP family extends our reach into untapped markets and demonstrates our technology prowess in a number of new areas, including high-speed networking, storage and connectivity. ...more

Recordable DVD discs in short supply

According to Ritek, recordable DVD discs are in short supply. Both Ritek and CMC Magnetics are planning to transfer part of their CD-R discs production lines to recordable DVD disc manufacturing. Ritek said that it has already increased recordable DVD disc shipments to 10 million units per month in the first quarter, up from eight million units near the end of last year, but it still cannot meet the strong demand from its clients, according to the Economic Daily News. ...more