Holder of patents covering everything from color television to the MP3 audio-compression format, Thomson has been selling off its loss-ridden television business to focus on becoming the fount of everything digital, from cameras to DVD duplication, for the entertainment industry.
Live streaming of video is also now available in a UK-only embedded format, but live audio - as well as certain other content - may appear in the old pop-up player for the time being.
That leaves two other precedents, one of which was the dual-format audio disc war fought between SACD and DVD-Audio.
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Blu-ray DiscTM is the next-generation optical disc format for high definition audio-video and high-capacity data software applications.
The YHT-697BL offers a full complement of HD Audio format decoding, including Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio.
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Not long ago, hi-res audio was marginal, but the format has the potential to go mainstream.
One main reason: The company had a history of religious devotion to proprietary file formats, and took years to release a digital audio player that could handle the ever-popular MP3 format.
Now, next time you sync your iPod you'll get the latest posts (assuming you set up iTunes to sync the playlist you chose) in audio format, as read in the ever-engaging style of the operating system voices, ready to take with you on the go.
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Just as AC beat DC, the audio cassette beat 8-track and VHS beat Betamax, Qwerty won the format war.
Microsoft Windows Media Player: This audio and video player supports almost any type of local and streamed multimedia format, including Real Audio, Real Video, QuickTime, MIDI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MP3, AVI, .wav, .mov, .vod, and .au.
Pioneer's DV-AX10 model also comes with the ability to play SuperAudio CD discs - a format developed by Sony and already commercialized that is battling with DVD Audio for the place as the successor to compact disks.
CNN: Pioneer to launch DVD Audio players without waiting for copy protection
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