As the accompanying chart from Jon Peddie Research shows, the industry will experience a continued increase in advertising and capital expenditures through 2006. There are several reasons for this growth. First, the transition to digital technologies is gaining speed within studios as companies transition to an end-to-end digital process. At the same time, attractive flat-panel TVs with even more attractive prices are driving demand for digital television. FCC mandates also are having their effect, as TV manufacturers are required to incorporate DTV tuners. And finally, HDTV sales are increasing in tandem with the growing amount of HDTV broadcasting.
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| Recent research indicates a continuing trend toward the adoption of and investment in digital video technologies. |
The research also discusses the introduction of x86 64-bit processors by both Intel and AMD, and supporting operating systems from Microsoft, all of which should be firmly established by 2006 with the introduction of Microsoft's next major version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The advent of these new systems will lead to further acquisitions of hardware and software by content creators, as digital video is one application that truly can take advantage of the larger memory addressing of 64-bit processors.
—Kathleen Maier, senior analyst, Jon Peddie Research
DisplayMate Technologies (Amherst, NH), an independent source for image quality testing, has bestowed Five Star Awards on
Nvidia for its Quadro NVS professional 2D graphics accelerators. In fact, Nvidia solutions, such as the Quadro NVS 280 and 400, are included in four of the five graphics cards categories in DisplayMate's
2004 Best Video Hardware Guide. At the fourth annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony held during GDC 2004 in San Jose, the
International Game Developers Association (IGDA; San Francisco) honored
Mark Cerny with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Having served a number of roles in the video-game industry—including creator, producer, programmer, designer, and publishing executive—Cerny founded the Sega Technical Institute and worked on such blockbuster games as the
Crash Bandicoot series,
Spyro the Dragon series,
Ratchet and Clank, and
Jak and Daxter.
Delaplaine Creative (Corte Madera, CA) received two Gold Telly Awards at the 25th Annual Telly Awards Show for its postproduction work on two broadcast commercials,
Straw Hat Pizza and
South Bay Galleria.
Mental Images (Berlin, Germany) has acquired Cult3D, an interactive 3D software platform for e-business, from Sweden's
Cycore. Expected to accelerate the adoption of 3D technology on the Web and Web-enabled devices, the acquisition enables Mental Images to integrate Cult3D technology into its RealityServer server-based collaboration platform. —CEH