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According to British press reports, Sir Paul McCartney has sanctioned the release of the Beatles’ back catalogue on iTunes in a deal that is expected to bring in £200million (around $400million). With albums such as the White Album, Help! and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the catalogue is by far the biggest prize released for on the Internet and will surely dominate the download charts for some years.

The deal must have been a nightmare to pull together with rights to the catalogue owned across the surviving Beatles Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, the families of John Lennon and George Harrison, and through deals done in the past, EMI, Sony and Michael Jackson. A dispute between Apple and the Beatles’ original record label EMI over royalty payments was settled last year, paving the way for a download deal.

Good news for Sir Paul who is enduring the final throws of an expensive and acrimonious divorce with Heather Mills. Good news for Heather Mills  who will no doubt want to factor in future earnings somewhere in the settlement. Good news for MJ who is reportedly cash strapped. And finally good news for Apple who will no doubt see this as a further consolidation of the iTunes store as the webs premiere download facility.

Tags: Apple, Beatles, EMI, Sony

So the little fat bloke with the red outfit, black boots and a white beard has done it again. Not only is he on schedule for his Christmas deliveries, he has managed to deliver an early pressie for PS3 owners.

This holiday’s hottest gift, the Sony PlayStation3, has become even hotter with new technology from MP3tunes that turns the gaming device into a home stereo system. Developed by Ade Rutter for MP3tunes, owners of the PS3 can now wirelessly stream their personal music collections from their own MP3tunes Music Locker using the console’s controller. Music stored in MP3tunes Music Lockers can also be played on Windows Mobile devices, the Logitech Squeezebox, Chumby and more, thanks to MP3tunes’ open API (Application Programming Interface).

“My vision for MP3tunes is that a person’s digital music collection will play not just through any web browser but through all their devices,” commented Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3tunes. “To help reach our goal, we sponsored a $10,000 contest, challenging the best developers to help us get people’s music to every device and service. Full streaming of the Music Locker through the Sony PlayStation3 is just the first of many exciting announcements MP3tunes will be making about how we will deliver our users’ music to every popular device they own.” For more details and set-up instructions for the PS3 and other devices, visit http://www.mp3tunes.com/contest. To sign-up for a free MP3tunes Music Locker visit http://www.mp3tunes.com/signup.

Original story

Tags: MP3tunes, Sony

Oregan Networks, an expert in lightweight web browsing technologies for mainstream non-PC Consumer Electronics (CE), has announced the release of a technology feature that makes it possible for consumers to access and control Adobe Flash streaming video directly on TV, thus broadening entertainment and communications options for the mass market audience of TV viewers. Oregan Media Browser now seamlessly delivers user generated content, such as YouTube and MySpace, as well as facilitating search of such media via universal and specialised search engines, including Blinkx and Google.

With its implementation, Oregan addresses the critical issues that have obstructed a larger scale uptake of Flash video on TV: video streaming latencies, and high memory and CPU power requirements. To achieve a smooth TV viewing experience during progressive streaming of Flash video content over broadband, Oregan’s media player works behind the scenes, improving the ‘Quality of Service’ by intelligently caching the stream as it arrives, thus enabling the video codecs to perform more efficiently.

www.oregan.net

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Tags: Adobe, NTT DoCoMo, Oregan Networks, Philips Consumer Electronics, Sony

VentureBeat are reporting that one of the first portals for publisher-sanctioned trading of virtual goods announced its first funding, promising to add structure and protections to transactions for items that only exist online.

Live Gamer will stay on the good side of publishers by only allowing trades according to the rules of the game, and will seek to prevent strategies like “gold farming,” in which some players use the game only to accumulate goods and sell them for real-world currency.

Several competitors to the company already exist, part of an unapproved “gray zone” of trading that publishers find undesirable. Two of the largest are GamePal and IGE.

Live Gamer plans to split revenue from sales, with 10 percent being split between Live Gamer and the publisher, and the remainder going to the seller.

The company already has some clients on board, including Funcom and Sony. However, Vivendi, the publisher of the current most-popular online game World of Warcraft, has said it will not work with Live Gamer.

Charles River Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and Pequot Ventures provided the $24 million funding, the company’s first.

www.livegamer.com

Tags: Charles River Ventures, Funcom, GamePal, IGE, Kodiak Venture Partners, Live Gamer, Pequot Ventures, Sony, Vivendi