Looking for an easy way to play computer-based music and video files through a home entertainment set up? JVC now offers a system that easily connects to a computer to provide access to music, video and image files.

The social impact of Apple’s iPod can’t be denied. In one modest handful of technology anyone can carry around and or play any one of 10,000 of their favorite songs, TV shows, movies and beyond. It has changed the way people listen to music as well as the way they buy it. Downloadable music has become a three billion dollar per year business as compared to nine billion per year for the domestic sales of Compact Discs. In fact the iPod is likely the most important thing to happen to recorded music since the CD.

It’s been a while since Microsoft has launched a new operating system and just a few days since the latest and greatest OS from the folks at Microsoft, home theater integrators are fearful of rumors about copy protection problems and the internal solutions found inside the code of Vista. Copy protection issues are nothing new to AV industry “integrators” who struggle to make the highly unstable HDCP copy protection work for their clients when using the HDMI output of HD DVD and Blu-ray players to their HDTV sets. HDMI is the only connection that outputs 1080p video along with audio from either format currently and the HDCP copy protection that is used on both HD disc formats has significant troubles “making a handshake” between a player and a video display device.

XM, the nation's leading satellite radio company, announced that XM Radio Online will be included in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista. Windows Vista, which will be broadly available on January 30, will offer XM Radio Online as part of its digital music hub. XM Radio Online delivers more than 80 radio channels, including commercial-free music, the Oprah & Friends talk and lifestyle channel, "The Bob Edwards Show," "Opie & Anthony," stand-up comedy, and children's programming.

While electronics companies around the world gathered at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Apple shook up the digital world yesterday from hundreds of miles away in the Moscone Center Theater in San Francisco.