Australia’s dead-heat election over the weekend has left both the Labor and Coalition parties scrambling to try to form a government. Meanwhile, the National Broadband Network Co. suggests it may stop the early-stage roll-out of a fiber optic network across the country until it knows who will be heading the next government. Labor backs the …

Free-to-air digital TV consortium Freeview may have been quick to rebut claims that existing TVs would become obsolete in May, but Freeview member SBS is hoping to embrace the technology at the centre of the controversy. SBS managing director Shaun Brown confirmed that while it’s sticking with current MPEG-2 technology for now, in the long term there was “a reasonable …

Earth Hour started out in Sydney just two years ago as a pie-in-the-sky idea, but its amazing momentum will this year see residents of 2848 cities in 84 countries switching off their lights in a show of solidarity for the cause of reducing energy consumption. While it’s only saving a trickle of electricity compared with the amount the world’s cities …

A new survey has found that two-thirds of high-definition-capable TV owners lack an HDTV set-top box and half of consumers mistakenly believe that DVDs already offer HD video. Vendors, David Braue explains, have their work cut out for them in educating the public about the new technology. Consumers may be spending big on large new flat-screen TVs, but ignorance of …

Forget downloading movies from your local video store; by early next year, an on-demand video service from Video Ezy will rely on consumers to physically deliver movies from store to home for viewing on their TVs. The upcoming offering, known now as Video Ezy’s Electronic Video Store (EVS) and due to be launched early next year, will be built around …

Australians may be snapping up high definition (HD) capable equipment, but movie studios and technology vendors face a potential public relations disaster if they can’t help consumers avoid compatibility problems that could potentially force consumers to repurchase equipment down the road. The risk comes from HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection), a technology that encrypts the data of an HD signal …