Director Rob Reiner has created a fifteen minute sequel to his mockumentary classic This is Spinal Tap. While the short film was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, it won’t be released in theatres any time soon. It is available, however, online
One of the world’s oldest libraries, at the Vatican, is to close for three years for rebuilding, in an unexpected blow to scholars around the world. The decision to shut the library was made without warning. After the library closes for its summer break in mid-July, it will not reopen until September 2010, the Vatican says. The reason is that some buildings constructed only a quarter of a century ago are now considered unsuitable for the safe storage of ancient books
Dead Like Me
, the popular Showtime television series starring Mandy Patinkin and Ellen Muth, is returning as a made-for-DVD movie. Stephen Herek will direct the new film. There’s no word yet on who’ll be starring in the film — but hopefully they’ll revive the original cast
BBC shows such as Doctor Who and EastEnders are to be made available on-demand after the BBC’s iPlayer service was given the green light. The service — which will launch later this year — allows viewers to watch programmes online for seven days after their first TV broadcast. Episodes can also be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days
Steve McQueen’s 1963 Ferrari is expected to fetch US$800,000 to US$1.2m at auction in August. Christie’s auctioneers unveiled the metallic-brown Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso on Friday. McQueen bought the car, with beige leather interior, in 1963 and used it as his everyday runaround for 10 years. It’s probably the best example of a Ferrari Lusso that’s out there on the marketplace,
said Christie’s Christopher Sanger. The car will be sold at auction on 16 August at Monterey Jet Centre in California
Spinal Tap is back, and this time the band wants to help save the world from global warming. The mock heavy metal group immortalised in the 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap
, will reunite for a performance at Wembley Stadium in London as part of the Live Earth concerts scheduled worldwide for 7 July
Ty Roberts, CTO of Gracenote, made the claim this week that the music industry was about to cave in the next six months
on the issue of DRM, at least when it comes to downloads
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store
Amazon wants to launch an online music store next month to challenge Apple and is working on plans to sell music with reduced protection against copyright infringement. The internet giant has approached all the music majors in the past fortnight and said that it wanted to sell unprotected MP3 songs in May as it tries to follow Apple in shaking up the music industry. However, it remains unclear if Amazon will meet its deadline. The internet retailer has been trying, unsuccessfully, over 18 months to break into the market dominated by Apple iTunes, which has a share of about 80 per cent
The BBC is to open up its vast archive of video and audio in an on-demand trial involving more than 20,000 people in the UK. Full-length programmes, as well as scripts and notes, will be available for download from the BBC’s website. The pilot is part of the BBC’s plans to eventually offer more than a million hours of TV and radio from its archive
Reports continue to filter in about DVDs that refuse to play on standard players from Toshiba, LG, Pioneer, Sony and others. The culprit is titles that utilise Sony’s ARccOS copy protection scheme, such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
, The Weinstein Company’s Lucky Number Slevin
, and Sony’s Casino Royale
, The Holiday
, and Stranger Than Fiction
. ARccOS artificially scrambles sectors on the disc in an attempt to keep users from ripping the disc to a drive. Many older (or less sophisticated) players simply skip these corrupted areas as unreadable and continue on. Computers — and unfortunately, some newer players — try to perform error correction on these areas and fail playback
One of the outstanding figures of modern US literature, Kurt Vonnegut, has died aged 84 in New York. He became a cult figure among students in the 1960s and 1970s with his classics of US counterculture. The pivotal moment of his life was the bombing of Dresden by allied forces in 1945. The experience informed his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five. He suffered brain injuries after a fall at his home in Manhattan and died on Wednesday, said his wife Jill Krementz
Microsoft says that it’s dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we’ve all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be implying that it’s going to sell DRM-free tracks from labels other than EMI
Along with James Doohan’s cremated remains will also travel the ashes of one of NASA’s first space travelers, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, aboard a privately-built rocket set to launch from New Mexico this month. The launch of a SpaceLoft XL rocket built by the private firm UP Aerospace is scheduled for 28 April. SL-2, as it has been dubbed, will lift off from Spaceport America, a state-funded launch site near Upham, New Mexico and about 72km north of the city of Las Cruces
EMI’s entire digital music catalogue will be available in premium DRM-free form via iTunes in May, the music label said Monday at a press conference in London. Beatles tunes under EMI’s control, however, are not part of the plan. Major music label EMI Group plans to sell a premium level of digital downloads through Apple’s iTunes Store. For $1.29 per song, consumers will be able to buy higher-quality digital music lacking digital rights management. Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. Rather, they will complement the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads and will be sold at a premium: $1.29 per song. Consumers who have already purchased EMI tracks containing Apple’s FairPlay copy protection will be able to upgrade them to the premium version for 30 cents, EMI said. Full albums in DRM-free form can be bought at the same price as standard iTunes albums
A California judge handed a victory to Kaleidescape, which manufactures home media servers, ruling that the company’s products do not violate the DVD industry’s CSS license. The company was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association, which said that Kaleidescape’s media servers violate its standard licensing contract
The working title of the third Stargate television series has been unveiled. The series currently exists in the form of a one-page treatment of the story and characters, with the title Stargate Universe. The new series has been conceived to be a completely separate, third entity
, executive producer Robert Cooper said in an interview — much more so than Atlantis was. Atlantis was much more of a spin-off series of SG-1 and was sort of born out of SG-1
Doctor Who will return for a fourth series in 2008, executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies confirmed last night. Series four is officially existing,
he announced at the launch of Series Three in London. I’m very excited, but we have known for ages
Activist groups sued the parent company of Comedy Central on Thursday, claiming the cable network improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the network’s The Colbert Report
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