When it comes to keeping themselves entertained, UK citizens like three things: video games, vinyl, and Adele. According to a report by the Entertainment Retailers Association—the UK trade organisation for physical and digital retailers—revenue from music, TV shows, films, and video games hit an all-time high of £6.1 billion in 2015 thanks to a huge rise in digital services, as well as stand out properties like Adele’s album 25, and games like FIFA 16 and Fallout 4.

Nielsen: Music Streams Doubled In 2015, Digital Sales Continue To Fall
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/07/nielsen-music-streams-doubled-in-2015-digital-sales-continue-to-fall/

2015 was a good year for streaming services, according to Nielsen’s year-end Music report out now. In 2015, on-demand streaming services grew to 317 billion streams – that’s a doubling from 2014, which saw 164.5 billion songs streamed, Nielsen report states.

Also interesting is how the shift to streaming is impacting album sales. Though album sales were still down by 6 percent in 2015, the decline was not as bad as the year prior when they had dropped by 11 percent.

In addition, sales of vinyl grew in 2015. Sales were up 30 percent, and accounted for almost 9 percent of physical album sales.

One of the world’s oldest and most successful “standards” – so standard in fact that western musical notation is simply called standard notation – does not yet have a standard way to be displayed on the web.

But a W3C group formed earlier this year, in the summer of 2015, hopes to change that.

The Music Notation Community Group consists of representatives from some of the biggest names in the music notation software business who’ve come together to create a standardised way to display western music notation in your browser.

The group is off to a strong start, having set out a list of what it believes are achievable goals in the next six to 12 months. However, don’t look for the W3C to endorse MusicXML, as the proposed standard is known.

Community groups like the Music Notation group are not officially part of the W3C, so the W3C has not yet endorsed the group’s efforts. The community groups are more of a starting point.

About a week and consumer electronics CES fair start in Las Vegas. At the same time when considering which technique this time to steal the headlines, may be declared that the fair favorite five years ago turned out to be virtually complete flop.

This technology is the 3D image. Five years ago, it was estimated that the technique can occupy the rapid pace of living cinemas addition. Then slowed different technologies – mainly between active and passive – for the debate.

In 2012 there appeared a new technology that increased the screen size to four times full HD market compared to. Suddenly, consumer interest in 4K screens exploded and 3D stayed in a third position.

3D looks great in some movies, if you are in a movie theater. But why the technology is virtually failed even though every new TV set has been added to display the 3D image as an option?

The reasons for this can certainly consider flopping. Analysts said some people lack the ability to stereoscopic vision. For many, the 3D image caused eyestrain or nausea.

However, the 3D does well in many cases give no more the story itself. Not all movies not work in 3D.

What’s in 3D will happen to you? Some people still believe in technology. According to them, the 3D will be properly rights only with the 8K-quality picture.

Stereo image has way to break trough in various virtual reality applications.

Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3791:3d-kuva-oli-floppi&catid=13&Itemid=101

For the fourth year in a row Game of Thrones has taken the crown for the most pirated TV-show on the Internet. The Walking Dead is firmly in second place, followed by The Big Bang Theory.

With an estimated 14.4 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2015 season finale has beaten the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US.

US. The Walking Dead and Big Bang Theory complete the top three with an estimated 6.9 and 4.4 million downloads respectively.

Pirates have shown an increase in interest for higher quality releases compared to earlier years. However, the lower quality 480p copies of TV-shows remain by far the most popular among downloaders, followed by 720p and 1080p respectively.

Modern DSLR cameras are amazing devices. Mechanics, electronics, and optics, all rolled up in a single package. All that technology is great, but it can make for a frustrating experience when attempting any sort of repair. Lenses can be especially difficult to work on. One misalignment of a lens group or element can lead to a fuzzy image.

[Kratz] knew all this, but it didn’t stop him from looking for a cheap lens deal over on eBay.

Nikon Lens Repair #1
http://burnt-traces.com/?p=460

The Beatles Are Coming to Apple Music, Spotify and Everywhere Else on Christmas Eve
http://recode.net/2015/12/22/the-beatles-are-coming-to-apple-music-spotify-and-everywhere-else-on-christmas-eve/

You can spend Christmas streaming the Beatles.

The world’s most famous band will finally be available on streaming music services, starting this Thursday, Christmas Eve. And they’ll be available very, very widely: Industry sources say that the Fab Four’s music will be on all of the obvious music services, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and Tidal, as well as some you might not expect, including Amazon’s Prime Music.

It is also worth noting that unlike Taylor Swift, the Beatles will be available on the free versions of services like Spotify. It is also worth noting that streaming is becoming the music industry’s most important music source, and has been headed that way for a while.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde served his prison sentence last year but still owes the entertainment industries millions in damages. Some might think that he’s learned his lesson, but with a newly built copying machine he’s generating millions of extra ‘damages,’ which might be worth a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

One of Peter’s major frustrations is how the entertainment industries handles the idea of copying. When calculating the losses piracy costs, they often put too much value on pirated copies.

This is something Peter knows all too well, as he still owes various movie and music companies millions in damages.

However, this hasn’t stopped him from continuing to copy. In fact, he’s just built the ultimate copying machine using a Raspberry Pi, an LCD display and some Python code.

With these three ingredients the “Kopimashin” makes 100 copies of the Gnarls Barkely track “Crazy” every second. This translates to more than eight million copies per day and roughly $10 million in ‘losses.’

Crazy indeed.

Peter’s machine is part of an art project about the value of digital copies which he’s preparing for an upcoming exhibition.

“I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all,” Sunde tells TF.

“But following their rhetoric and mindset it will bankrupt them. I want to show with a physical example – that also is really beautiful in it’s own way – that putting a price to a copy is futile.”

KH000 // Kopimashin
http://konsthack.se/portfolio/kh000-kopimashin/

The Kopimashin creates an endless amount of copies of a specific audio track (gnarls barkley’s crazy). The audio track is copied to /dev/null, a unix data pipe for avoiding permanent storage. The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD1,25 per copied piece.

Google is bringing its Spotlight Stories – immersive, 360-degree animated videos meant to introduce a new form of storytelling – to YouTube, the company announced this morning. The first story to arrive is a holiday film called “Special Delivery,” from Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations. This movie will now be viewable on the YouTube app on many Android devices, allowing you to experience the interactive movie by moving your phone around to watch various scenes.

Google this year has been rolling out other types of viewing experiences on YouTube, beyond traditional video, including VR features to YouTube’s Android application and 360-degree video. Spotlight Stories, however, are a bit different because they actually take advantage of a phone’s sensors to create the interactive experience.

#SpecialDelivery: Google Spotlight Stories come to YouTube with interactive 360-degree storytelling
http://youtube-global.blogspot.fi/2015/12/specialdelivery-google-spotlight.html

Everyone loves a big screen TV. Back in the old days, anything over 27 ” was considered big. These days if you’re not sporting at least 50″, you’ll end up with display envy. One thing hasn’t changed though, those who want to go really, really big get into projectors. Hacking and projectors seem to go hand in hand. Anyone else remember those old DIY projection setups where the user would put their TV in a box upside down? This week’s Hacklet is all about projector hacks!