TV

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to pay 94 million yuan ($12.3 million) for a stake in Sichuan Changhong Electric Co. and will form a cooperative alliance with the TV and electrical appliance maker, the Chinese company said on Monday.

Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) joined the growing number of consumer electronics manufacturer's connecting the home television to the personal computer today, making its Apple TV set-top box available to consumers for the first time.

The total number of U.S. households with televisions will jump nearly 50 percent by the year 2050, according to new estimates from The Nielsen Company.

News Corp. on Tuesday said it will launch a new service to offer full episodes of its television shows on MySpace.com and the Web sites of its local Fox TV stations after they have aired.

Canon and Toshiba said on Tuesday they would start mass production of ultra-thin flat-panel TVs in early 2008, entering a market dominated by makers such as Matsushita Electric Industrial and Samsung Eletronics.

The two fastest growing sectors in the semiconductor industry are digital television (DTV) and portable media players reports released this year indicate.

Telecommunications company Verizon Communications Inc. said on Wednesday that officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, have agreed to let it sell Web-based video service to local residents and that it may drop its lawsuit against the county for blocking it.

An increasing number of television viewers are producing their own shows, and the TV industry is frantically trying to figure out how to combine broadcasts, Internet movies and home videos into one package.

Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a widely anticipated Internet service offering movies and TV shows that can be downloaded to personal computers

Men's cable channel Spike TV is joining other Viacom properties that have taken their content digital in a significant way with Wednesday's official launch of a broadband player on SpikeTV.com.

Global sales of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs jumped 135 percent in the April-June quarter from a year earlier to a record 9.4 million units, led by Philips Electronics with a 13.5 percent share, a research firm said.

Cuba's Communist government has signaled a crackdown on the use of black-market satellite dishes, just over a week after ailing leader Fidel Castro temporarily relinquished power to his brother.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., the maker of Panasonic brand electronics, said on Monday it hoped to start selling the world's largest plasma television by early next year.

Myspace.com, one of the Internet's fastest growing websites, will begin to offer Fox's popular 24 series as a download through its site next week.

AT&T Inc. is making headway at state and federal levels as it tries to go over the heads of local governments to enter the subscription television business to compete with cable TV, Chairman and Chief Executive Ed Whitacre said on Friday.

Time Warner Cable is in early discussions to create an auction system for advertising spots on video-on-demand channels, modeled after Google's AdSense system on the Internet, the company's CEO said.