Video piracy's Olympics showdown

With the Olympics set to start in Beijing in August, Chinese officials vow to crack down on video piracy on the Net, reports Business Week.

At a May gathering in Beijing, government officials warned executives from video sites to keep their hands off Olympic coverage or risk being shut down.

"Our goal is to make the Beijing Olympic Games a fine example of copyright protection," said Hu Zhan Fan, vice-minister of media regulator State Administration of Radio, Film & Television. NBC Universal and the state-owned CCTV have Olympic broadcast rights in the US and China, respectively.

Is the next big thing free TV on your cellphone? It just might come about if Korean giant LG has anything to do with it, says The Street.

According to a Reuters report, LG has introduced a handset that allows users to watch new, over-the-air digital broadcast TV channels on the phone without having to pay the cellphone company a monthly fee. This new technology threatens to remove cellular phone operators from what could become a lucrative mobile TV business in the future.

The LG HB620T phone taps straight into existing TV broadcasts, which means that operators could lose out on broadcast revenue from services streamed over 3G and 4G networks or on dedicated mobile broadcasting platforms.

InterVision Network has unveiled a solution for live streaming global broadcasting, states TV Over.

The company expects the solution to change the face of multimedia delivery by allowing the dissemination of live streaming content to computers and to Internet Protocol-enabled cellphones and televisions, says.

The backbone of the solution is IVNet's custom-built, globally-distributed servers, which are built from the ground-up to be, first and foremost, a streaming network. This means that IVNet can support a live stream that is broadcast across the globe to potentially tens of millions of users with minimal signal degradation and no buffering.