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Amazon has penned an agreement to buy out Lovefirm. This is a European company that operates just like Netflix in the USA. Amazon has its own video on demand service, but you must pay for titles individually. There is no all you can eat like Netflix offers.

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The online retail giant had owned a minority stake in Lovefilm since 2008 when the latter bought Amazon's DVD rental business, which covered the U.K. and Germany. Fully acquiring Lovefilm is an interesting move for Amazon. The rental company is essentially Europe's answer to Netflix, offering DVD-by-mail rentals, as well as a streaming service available on PCs, the PlayStation 3, and some HDTVs. Lovefilm, which was founded in 2004, currently operates in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The company states that it has over 70,000 titles available to its 1.6 million customers. Amazon didn't say what it has planned for Lovefilm, but the acquisition will expand Amazon's video on demand service, which offers streaming or downloading of films in the U.S. Greg Greeley, Amazon's vice president of European retail, did take note of Lovefilm's streaming service in particular in the acquisition announcement.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20029014-17.html

Those little red kiosks at supermarkets and such are out-pacing traditional video rental stores. This should come as no surprise as people are generally lazy and will do what is the easiest thing. Having those kiosks at stores they are already in makes the rental process easier and leads to more impulse renting. Netflix streaming is the ultimate in ease, though.

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NPD Group says that for the first time, movie rentals from standalone kiosk have a larger market share in the United States than those from brick-and-mortar stores. "Netflix and other subscription services comprised 41 percent of video rental turns in the third quarter of 2010," NPD wrote, "followed by kiosk rentals at 31 percent, and in-store rentals at 27 percent." NPD, a research firm, said today that its study found the share of kiosk rentals grew 10 percent from the same quarter in 2009. The data only accounts for disc rentals and does not include movies streamed over the Web. The findings come four months after Blockbuster, the former No. 1 video rental outlet, filed for bankruptcy protection. The company is now pursuing its own kiosk strategy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20028673-261.html

According to AMD/ATI the new Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix drivers address some issues with the HD4850x2 and HD4870x2 video card performance. Hopefully this is the case, and hopefully it will address an issue that has been seen around the web dealing with CrossfireX on some of the HD48xx's and even some HD5xxx series of cards running specific motherboards. This issue is not really wide spread, however there are some of the "gamer" series of motherboards that have experienced this issue, and we can only hope that AMD/ATI has addressed these issues in the new "hotfix" drivers. This issue was addressed in the Catalyst 10.8b drivers, and we have to wonder why this was not carried over to the original Catalyst 10.9 drivers.

At any rate, this is what AMD/ATI has to say about the new 10.9a Hotfix Catalyst drivers:

* ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 series of products use both Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for high performance
* Intermittent hangs with Pop Cap games in a system with an ATI Radeon series graphics card installed
* High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) overscan / underscan settings are restored upon system reboot

Instructions:
Download and install the ATI Catalyst hotfix from the following location:

* ATI Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix for Windows® 7 / Windows Vista®

Refer to Article 20870 for detailed instructions on how to properly install the ATI Catalyst™ hotfix.

Note! This hotfix is provided as is and is not supported by AMD. It has not completed full AMD testing and is only a driver update.

Applicable Products:
This article applies to the following configuration(s):

* Hardware
o ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series of products
o ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 series of products
* Operating System
o Windows 7 32-bit Edition
o Windows 7 64-bit Edition
o Windows Vista 32-bit Edition
o Windows Vista 64-bit Edition

For further information, or to download the new Catalyst 10.9a drivers you can go to the main download and information page below.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICatalyst109Hotfix.aspx

The Flip Video Mino is the latest in Youtube inspired technology. Specifically made for web uploads, it gives you video in a small and easy to use package with a boutique price to match.Next Page »