Weekly wrapup, 31 December 2007 – 4 January 2008

by Steve O'Hear

January 5th, 2008 | Posted in last100 weekly wrapup | No Comments

Here’s a summary of the week’s digital lifestyle action on last100. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special weekly wrapup RSS feed or by email.

Top digital lifestyle news

The big news this week was Sony BMG’s decision to, in part, ditch DRM and start selling tracks on Amazon MP3 without copy-protection. That makes four out of four, with Sony BMG joining the other major labels: EMI, Universal Music and Warner (as predicted in our Digital Music 2007 year in review). In a follow up post, Daniel Langendorf asks where this leaves Apple’s iTunes Store?

On the Internet TV front, Netflix made a splash with its announcement of a partnership with LG to deliver movies over the Internet directly to a TV. We’ve long speculated that Netflix would get into the set-top box game, either through partnerships or by developing hardware of its own (see out Internet TV 2007 year in review).

In a pre-CES announcement, Archos unveiled its own set-top box. Offered in 80GB ($249) and 250GB ($349) versions, the Archos TV+ features TiVo-like DVR functionality, as well as WiFi and Ethernet connectivity to support access to the Internet for web browsing and downloading paid-for video content from CinemaNow. Additionally, the device can operate as a media extender of sorts, to stream content (movies, TV shows, photos and music) from a PC to the TV.

More digital lifestyle news:

Features

In our main feature-post this week titled ‘Mobile: the Year of Wireless hasn’t arrived — yet‘, Dan Langendorf completed our ‘year in review’ series, taking a hard look at the changing face of the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.), calling 2007 part of the transition years — with much bigger changes yet to come this year and realized in 2009.

That’s a wrap for the week. Happy New Year everyone!

last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.