media

This week the folks at GameStop have made clear their intention to further tie themselves to the Sony software ecosystem with their own offerings of Sony Music Unlimited. For both PlayStation 4 and non-PlayStation consoles, this service will be moving to GameStop for subscriptions in-store and online. Music Unlimited is being released at GameStop with a number of tiers of service, each of them valid in a cool 19 countries around the world.

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At a shareholder meeting this week, Apple made clear the current state of affairs with Apple TV, showing it to be the fastest growing product in their hardware line-up. As it was announced that the company made $1 billion USD in revenue in 2013 from Apple TV alone, Tim Cook was reminded of his comment on the Apple TV being a "hobby" all the way back in January of 2012. Today Cook suggested of Apple TV that "it’s a little more difficult to call it a hobby these days."

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The Comcast and Time Warner Cable acquisition plans came as a surprise to many, and is tipped to have stalled ongoing talks Netflix has had with the latter company about being made available on the cable provider's set-top boxes. Such information comes from unnamed sources who spoke to Bloomberg.

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An update to the Shazam app for iPhone this week adds a bit more content-led action to the ecosystem while the entire layout earns a much more simplified look. This update to the system is part of what the Chief Product Officer at Shazam, Daniel Danker, suggests makes Shazam much more in-tune with its goals: simplicity in design and consumer experience. In other words - Shazam doesn't do one whole heck of a lot more between yesterday and today, but it's a lot easier to understand what it does do.

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Those with a Roku player were graced with a new homescreen for a while over the winter holidays, shaking of the typical purple homescreen with a bit of snow-themed color. If that temporary change served to remind you about how nice it would be to have a bunch of themes to choose from, you're in luck.

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Following the launch of the Google Play Music app for iOS in November, the company has expanded that push into Apple's playground, announcing today on Google+ the availability of Google Play Movies & TV for iOS. The app was released today, and can be nabbed straight from the App Store by those running iOS 6 or higher.

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One of the most surprising gifts I received this Christmas was a subscription to National Geographic. I didn't expect to get signed up for a printed publication, but I did - and I'm really excited to get the magazine in the mail each month. But when I see a story like the one Wil Weaton published today on how his name was sold to junkmail dealers by the likes of Popular Science, I become suspicious of the whole media once again.

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Two major sources for technology that organizes and mades sense of your media have, this week, combined into a single entity. What’s happening here is a transaction between Tribune Company and Sony Corporation of America in which the former will acquire “the global leader in music technology and metadata” from the latter: Gracenote. This data will be added to Tribune Media Services, making this one entity into “one of the largest entertainment metadata companies in the world.”

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Twitter is working on an edit feature. Meaning you could soon be able to edit your tweets -- with some caveats. You won't be able to write a tweet, publish it, wait a few hours, and then replace the content of the tweet with entirely different and unrelated content. Twitter is still working out the details of what you can and can't do in edit mode, but the feature is on the horizon.

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Amazon has been the target of an undercover report that looked into working conditions for employees at its warehouse near Swansea, something that will air this evening on the BBC's Panorama. The undercover report shows unfavorable conditions that could prove unhealthy to workers, but Amazon has spoken out against such claims, saying that it has taken steps to make sure its work shifts "comply with all relevant legal requirements."

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Freelance photojournalist Daniel Morel was awarded $1.2 million yesterday when a US federal jury found two large media companies guilty of copyright infringement. Agence France-Presse and Getty Images had swiped his photographs of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and distributed them to news outlets around the world. Guess where they swiped them from!

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For the first time, BitTorrent traffic has declined in the United States, a trend that is said to be caused by more available legal alternatives, such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Prime, and similar streaming and digital-download services. On the flip side, torrenting has continued to increase in Europe, and the most likely reason is similar, if unfortunate -- there are less legal means of acquiring content, and so viewers seek illegal copies.

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