The Associated Press is reporting today that seven heavyweight electronics makers (LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial/Panasonic, NEC, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba, SiBEAM) have joined forces to form the WirelessHD Consortrium and develop a new 60-gigaherz radio frequency technology that will be capable of streaming uncompressed HD video as early as 2008. The format is designed to work within ranges of 32-feet and can deliver high-definition video at multi-gigabit data rates – faster than any other radio technology in development. The group intends to integrate WirelessHD into future HDTVs and a range of other audio-video equipment, as well as make it compatible with other video formats.

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RL Development releases QPict Digital Asset Manager 7. QPict 7 is a major update to the popular tool for viewing, organizing, searching and batch processing media files. Improvements in the new product includes over 50 new features such as Source List, Organizer List and many others. Company offers a special introduction discount price of QPict 7 Professional. MORE »

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Big announcement today on Xbox.com. As of October 31st, “you’ll be able to download a free system update that provides more than 85 new features and enhancements, including support for native 1080p games and movies, faster Arcade game list display times, and even more choices when it comes to video playback options.” Of course the features that matter to us are its new 1080p support, WMP 11 video streaming, and video playback from USB 2.0 flash drives, data CDs and DVDs. MORE »

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In a major step forward to simplifying the security and management of private data stored on any computing device, Seagate Technology is introducing a powerful new security platform that delivers a simple, cost- effective way to deploy the highest levels of security for computing systems, computer electronics and mobile devices by protecting data where it lives - on the hard disc drive. MORE »

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I just received DivX’s newsletter and to my surprise was the announcement that 1080 HD video with MP3 Surround encoding is now possible with DivX Pro 6.4 for Windows ($19.99). The company has also released DivX Player 6.4 to support the playback of the new format, which of course is free to download. No word at this time if a 6.4 port will be making it to either the Mac or Linux platform. MORE »

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Sling Media this evening announced the immediate availability of the SlingPlayer for Mac OS X, a software download for Slingbox customers who wish to view their home TV natively on an Apple Macintosh computer. MORE »

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Congrats to Niveus Media! Not only is their new set-top MCE PC a sexy looking product (and a replacement to their award winning AVX Media Center), the Rainier Edition has got the goods under the hood that will please the most critical of A/V enthusiasts who are looking for performance, silence and a well balanced feature-set. MORE »

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HomeSeer Technologies announces the release of its PRO-100 series-II second generation home automation controller. The series II unit now includes a faster processor, twice the memory, twice the storage and twice as many serial and LAN ports as the popular PRO-100 series-I unit released last year. MORE »

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(Hehehe) Got love activist groups to well… take action against things they have disregard for. In this case, DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management). DefectiveByDesign wants all customers who use Amazon’s tagging feature to start calling a spade a spade. If the product on display is encumbered by DRM, let others know. For more info, checkout DefectiveByDesign’s Amazon Product Tagging Campaign announcement, as well as, their Amazon Customer Page for a list of tagged products and discussion.

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Mac Rumors is reporting with great enthusiam that Apple’s latest Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and iMacs are secretly sporting Atheros 802.11n chipsets inside. Of course, OS X Tiger currently doesn’t support 802.11n, so one can’t make much use of them at this time, but once the 802.11n spec gets finalized you can rest assured that your new Mac will be blazing at speeds 650% faster than 54Mbps 802.11g. Hey, I guess this means that iTV will also be leveraging 802.11n for its video streaming as well. If that’s the case, will Apple soon be releasing HD versions of TV shows and downloadable movies in their iTunes store?

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