Contentinople - Eve Bergazyn - News Bits: South Korea a Harbinger of DVD Doom?

Written by Eve Bergazyn

Thursday, September 4. 2008 at 11:20 AM EDT Post a comment

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South Korea has seen another major movie studio abandon DVD sales, reports The Korea Times. Sony Pictures Digital Inc. 's slinking away caps off two years that saw the removal of Paramount Pictures Corp. , Universal, Buena Vista, and 20th Century Fox from the country's Internet-addicted market.

The Korea Times movie consumption figures are surprising: While nearly 50 percent of respondents to a survey by the Korean Film Council admit to downloading movies from the Internet (no surprise there), nearly 70 percent have downloaded movies for free or for a (nominal) fee.

With rental stores failing across the East Asian country, it would seem that paying for a download is preferable to getting up and going to rent a DVD.

And don't bother investing in Blu-ray either, since South Korean firm Samsung unsurprisingly foretells its death, according to MCV. The consumer electronics company gives the supposed winner of the home-video format five years.

In other news:

P2P isn't only preferred in Asia -- one million viewers of Fox show Prison Break have BitTorrented the premier episode of the show's fourth season, reports AlleyInsider. This despite its availability on Hulu LLC . So it's not quality of picture or legality that wins viewers either...

Relevant social networking site LinkedIn and CNBC have teamed up, reports PaidContent.org. The two will expose users to the partner's content. CNBC is now the "preferred business media provider," according to the press release, meaning the social networking site will display text and multimedia content from the news Website. CNBC.com will integrate LinkedIn user-generated content and "LinkedIn community and networking functionality into CNBC.com." Financial details haven't been released, naturally.

Google Chrome's grumbled-about End-User License Agreement (EULA) has been revised, according to the BBC. This comes after yesterday's uproar (or e-roar, more accurately) over what the company claims was an accidental signing away of all "Content" rights to Google. The new EULA's relevant section has been pared down from four parts to one, reading: "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."