Samsung and Sony today announced an agreement to build an eighth-generation LCD plant, confirming claims made last month that the pair were near to signing just such a deal.

Sony is trialling the sale of movies on Memory Stick in a bid to rekindle the fading marketing for pre-recorded content formatted for its PlayStation Portable handheld games console.

Toshiba has put back the Japanese release of its RD-A1 HD DVD recorder by two weeks, the company said today, in a public apology for having to reschedule the shipment and customer "annoyance" arising from the delay.

War may be hell, but it sure can be profitable too. Consider the nearing fight between next-generation optical disc formats HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Only a few opening salvos and empty throws have been made so far, but the battle's expected to intensify this coming Christmas. But that won't stop it expanding into a $28bn market come 2010.

DVDs may eventually become organic, replacing dyes with light-sensitive proteins in order to boost their storage capacity to 50TB - the equivalent of 1,000 dual-layer Blu-ray Discs. It also gives them potentially the same high-speed read and write access as hard drives.

Microsoft, Intel, Toshiba, HP and others are to spend $150m promoting the HD DVD next-generation optical disc format to North American consumers in the run up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and through into 2007.

Seagate will ship a 1TB version of its twin-drive, RAID-enabled Maxtor Shared Storage II network-attached storage (NAS) box later this month, the company announced yesterday.

Will Sony's PlayStation 3 production ramp limit the ability of optical drive vendors to ship sufficient Blu-ray Disc writers? That's effectively what a report from the Far East today reckons.

Sony will this Summer ship a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo memory card, the company announced today. With the company's array of MemoryStick, Pro, Duo, Pro Duo, Micro, Tiny and High Speed variants, the "revitalised" packagin design Sony promised is probably more welcome than the higher storage capacity.

HD DVD movies can be copied, and all it takes is the presses of a single button on any PC's keyboard. Well, lots of presses. Lots and lots of presses. Lots and lots and lots of presses.

Slim Devices has added support for the Real Networks' Rhapsody digital music download service to its Squeezebox network music player. The deal will allow the device to play DRM-protected tracks purchased from the service.

Fancy turning your copy of Skype into a watch-anywhere TV viewer? Now you can, courtesy of Japanese company Novac, which today announced a box that turns any suitably-specified PC into a machine for beaming TV shows to anyone on the internet.

Sony UK today unveiled its smallest Micro Vault Flash drive yet - a 2.4mm-thick SD Card-like unit that clips into any free USB port. The 1.5g, 3 x 1.5cm Micro Vault Tiny ships in capacities of 256MB to 2GB, but ships with what Sony calls Virtual Expander software to compress the card's contents boosting storage capacity almost threefold.

Britain's recording companies - major and minor - will be able to sue controversial Russian digital music site AllofMP3.com in the UK, the English High Court has ruled. The judgement was granted to music trade body the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), which claims the low-cost music site is operating illegally.

UK satellite TV broadcaster Sky last week quietly released a firmware downgrade to fix dozens of old Sky+ boxes rendered inoperable by a firmware update transmitted earlier in the week. PVRs affected include almost all machines equipped with upgraded hard drives.

Spanish activists have launched a web-based campaign to fight the recently-imposed levy on blank media which will "place a tax on blank CDs, DVDs and even flash memory sticks", as we reported earlier today.

Pure has updated its PocketDAB portable digital radio, boosting the battery life, trimming the weight and adding an FM tuner for good measure and overseas jaunts. Oh, and it's now available in rather more tasty black attire.

Plextor will ship its first Blu-ray Disc drive in September, the storage specialist has said. The PX-B900A is an internal unit for PCs and will support both single- and dual-layer recordable and rewriteable media.

Sapphire has claimed to be the first graphics card maker to offer a board with a built-in HDMI port. The card is based on ATI's CrossFire-ready Radeon X1600 GPU.

The Spanish government will add a levy to blank media such as CDs and DVDs to hand over to copyright holders to compensate for the duplication of copyrighted materials.