Today's High-Def Headlines

Second Leg of Apple’s Plans Includes Jumping Back Into Movie Rentals - NYT
Steven P. Jobs is rebooting Apple’s digital movie effort and putting the company squarely in the middle of an intensifying industry battle to download movies and Internet content to high-definition televisions. On Tuesday at Macworld Expo, an annual trade show, Mr. Jobs announced that the company is adding movie rentals from all the major Hollywood studios to its iTunes download service. Mr. Jobs said that more than 1,000 regular definition and about 100 high-definition movies would be available by the end of February.

Digeo Cuts Staff, Retail Products - TWICE
Digeo disclosed Tuesday that it has discontinued plans for previously announced retail versions of its Moxi HD Digital Media Receivers (HD DMR) and will instead focus on the development of a next-generation model slated for introduction later in the year. The company said the decision was made to allow its development team to focus on fewer platforms, and will result in a reduction of Digeo’s workforce by nearly one half, the company said. Digeo, backed by Microsoft co-founded Paul Allen, supplies DVRs to eight cable operators, including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications.

SDV a Big Hammer in Bandwidth Toolbox - CED Magazine
As cable operators rush to satiate customers’ appetites for more HD channels, and as they compete against telco and satellite operators’ growing HD channel lineups, switched digital video (SDV) is becoming one of the most used tools in the cable operators’ bandwidth toolbox. SDV has been around since 2004, when the first trial took place in Austin with BigBand Networks and Time Warner Cable. SDV sends just the programming that consumers in a service group or node are watching, instead of the entire slate of channels. While the technology also holds promise for sharing bandwidth resources between video silos such as video-on-demand (VOD) and SDV, switched digital’s biggest impact this year is reclaiming bandwidth in order to allow MSOs to deploy more HD channels.