Sony were once known as a sterling company who couldn’t put a foot wrong. Unfortunately recent years has seen a backlash from customers over under performing hardware and underhanded installations made to consumers PCs.

It’s seen its Walkman heritage fade every so painfully to become what many would agree is now, when juxtaposed against the all-powerful iPod-iTunes duopoly, just another second-class. 

And just last week the company announced that it is shelving the ATRAC file format it stubbornly held onto since as far back as I can remember, and will also be putting to bed the music side of Connect Music Store; the eBook division of the Store will remain open (for now) for the sole purpose of maintaining its Reader-compatible catalogue.

Doesn’t look very good for Sony, does it? No, not very. But it’s not over for the company yet. In case you’re thinking the company’s digital media division is finally biting the dust for good, Sony’s got news for you. 

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Although you may not have heard of it, Pyro.tv is a service comparable to VeohTV. It collects videos from around the web, and delivers them to its users as channels, similar to traditional television.

The bread-and-butter of the service lies in the ability for each user to create their own channels of their favourite videos, which can then be shared amongst others.

Now, Vibe Solutions Group, the company behind the service, has announced that the Pyro.TV video channel service has been integrated into the Facebook Platform. 

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NBC got a little greedy yesterday when it decided to drop its contract with iTunes to sell digital downloads of TV shows on iTunes (source: NYTimes.com).

NBC was requesting that iTunes introduce stricter piracy controls and higher pricing, something that Apple was unwilling to provide. Personally I already think that iTunes is already packed with far too much DRM and the prices for TV Shows are about as high as I’d be willing to pay.

The current contract that Apple has with NBC was to run up until December this year. However, Apple bit back and decided to cut this short and stop selling NBC TV Shows in September at the end of the current TV season.  

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BitTorrent uses the P2P architecture but build upon it while blurring the already unclear legal lines.

The growth in the popularity of the BitTorrent protocol has lead to bandwidth limitations by ISPs, and legal action from the MPAA.

With that said, it should come as no surprise that TorrentSpy, a popular torrent search directory, has now begun to block all searches originating from within the United States.

The service was named in the February 2006 lawsuit by the Motion Picture Association, but it was not until this June when the tension started building. 

That’s when a federal judge ordered the site to begin tracking users as possible evidence in “a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a handful of movie studios and the MPAA.“

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Suprnova.org was the be all and end all of Bittorrent sites before The Pirate Bay came along.

And now it has been relaunched thanks to the happy Swedish pirates over at The Pirate Bay. 

Besides offering yet another site to grab your warez, including current movies and new albums, the members responsible for the reincarnation have a message for the “non-internet loving companies” out there:

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In something of an ironic twist, an online video site is suing a major music label – Veoh has filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group in a pre-emptive strike to prevent UMG from bringing a case of copyright infringement against Veoh.

In July, UMG indicated to Veoh that it was investigating legal action over massive copyright infringements. But Veoh has cut in with its own lawsuit, filed Thursday, which requests that the video sharing site not be held liable to Universal if users upload content featuring Universal artists without permission.

The lawsuit claims that Veoh has not been provided with any specific details from UMG of the alleged copyright infringements, making it difficult for them to investigate and comply. Like many online video sites, Veoh preach a policy of removing infringing material promptly when notified by the copyright holder that it’s in infringement.

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Skype 3.5 for Windows was released to the public a few days ago, and to coincide with this upgrade, Skype and Dailymotion, an online video community have partnered together.

This new version of Skype adds videos from the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Metacafe to Skype and will establish an exclusive channel. This will allow Skype users to share videos from Dailymotion’s Mood Channels.

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