Blu-ray. Have You Heard of It?

Sit down at a cafe in Paris and begin talking about your latest Blu-ray movie purchase, and odds are your French neighbors will have no idea what you're talking about. Try the same at a Manhattan bar and the barflies will likely get the gist.

That's the takeaway from a new Interpret study about Blu-ray awareness levels. About 60% of Americans were familiar with the format, as of January 2008, while only 30% of French consumers had a clue. British, German and Japanese consumers fell somewhere in between.

Stones. Scorsese. "Shine a Light." Smash!

Too old to rock & roll? Not the Rolling Stones, as they prove in Martin Scorsese's killer concert documentary Shine a Light, which opens today.

The subject of age seems to be on most other critics' minds, but I honestly wasn't struck by the Stones' advanced years until "As Tears Go By" — six songs in — when Mick Jagger's face strains to hit certain notes. His voice, meanwhile, hits nearly all of them.

Indeed, Jagger is in amazingly fine vocal form throughout the film, which was shot at New York City's Beacon Theatre on October 29 and November 1, 2006. And it's his voice, and of course the band, that will keep you thinking young, too — if not forever, at least for the 2 hours of Shine a Light.

But first, a little comedy . . .

Blame Canada's Carrier

Comcast isn't the only service provider trying to make room for more high definition channels by compressing other channels into a smaller bandwidth footprint. It looks like they all do it, to some degree, though some carriers are better at masking the differences in quality from consumers.

According to Digital Home, Canadian carrier Rogers will begin compressing high definition signals on April 9. About 15 high-def channels currently on Rogers will be compressed to make room for others, though no Rogers customers have yet spoken out about a degradation of HD signal quality.

Online TV-Watching Goes Mainstream

In 2008, 14% of all television-watching will happen online, according to a study from Convergence Consulting Group. It would be reassuring to also hear that approximately 14% of television-watching will take place outside of a home environment where there is no TV, but the Convergence report did not address where the Internet TV watching will occur, such as at home, at work, in a coffee shop, etc.

Instead, it remains possible that many people will watch a good chunk of TV sitting hunched over a laptop on a couch at home, while a perfectly good spot for a beautiful HDTV languishes, empty, six feet away.

iTunes: America's Favorite Music Store

In fewer than five short years, Apple has managed to whomp the entire music industry. The iTunes online store sold more music in January and February than any other U.S. retailer, including second-place finisher Wal-Mart, according to a report from the NPD MusicWatch.

Even though Wal-Mart and Amazon.com also offer digital music in addition to CDs, they weren't able to compete with iTunes. Apple sold 19% of all music in January.

Fast Flicks and Fat Pipes from Comcast

Many consumers are justifying purchases of expensive high-definition Blu-ray players and movie discs by lamenting that a better alternative — such as streaming downloads of high-def movies to a hard drive attached to the TV —is too many years away.

Just how many years is too many? Comcast said Thursday it will roll out a broadband Internet system called Docsis 3.0 in 2009 and 2010 that will enable download speeds of 50 megabits per second at first, and 160 megabits per second eventually. At the first speed, a high-def movie will take 10 minutes to download, according to the company.

Tiny HD: World's Smallest TV Camera

Excuses, excuses. Television executives like to say that upgrading certain shows to high-def not only costs mountains of cash, but would be inconvenient for certain types of programming. Such as shows, where, you know, a behemoth high-def camera would take up too much room or intimidate actors.

At a National Association of Broadcasters conference this month, however, Toshiba Imaging will show off a tiny HD broadcasting camera that, as Toshiba says, “is highly suitable for reality TV, specialty broadcast, sports, news, commercials, and many other high definition video imaging applications.”

Tiny HD: World's Smallest Camcorder

True high-def camcorders tend to be on the bulky side compared to their standard-def brethren. Sony is touting its new HDR-TG1 camcorder as the world's smallest full-HD version, so there's no real excuse to leave the camcorder at home while you head off on a family vacation with only a carry-on bag in tow. Other than the price, of course.

The HDR-TG1 is available for a $900 pre-order tomorrow and will arrive in May, just in time to capture all variety of school graduations.

TiVo Shaves Down Lag Time

Those spoiled TiVo-owners always seem to get what they want. Unlike the poor slobs who get by with poorly-designed and slow-as-molasses DVRs from the cable company, TiVo customers will soon get an upgrade that improves response times and processing wait times on their HD and Series 2 boxes. Everyone else will simply get back to twiddling their thumbs or practicing Zen philosophy.

Dolby's LCD Lights Up with LEDs

Contrast ratio junkies have long dismissed LCD televisions, repeating the idea that LCDs don't get black or bright enough compared with plasmas. A new technology from Dolby Laboratories and SIM2 Multimedia might just change their minds.

A prototype from the two companies incorporates a “high dynamic range” involving light emitting diodes that can be brightened and dimmed within specific regions of a screen.