In an effort to kickstart the digital feature-film production and distribution market, Intertainer and Artisan Entertainment announced last week a new agreement to co-develop, produce, and distribute five feature-length motion pictures, to be shot and edited completely in the digital format. Intertainer says it will showcase the films on its entertainment "on-demand" service, and Artisan will retain domestic rights to the features.

While computer makers are still struggling to find consensus for the recordable DVD format, with the front-running rivals DVD-RW and DVD-RAM duking it out, a few consumer electronics products incorporating DVD-R are beginning to appear. Last week, Toshiba announced its introduction of the RD-2000, which it describes as "the world's first combination of hard disk drive and DVD-RAM video recorder" for recording TV programs. The new recorder is planned for sale in the Japanese market only, starting December 22.

Last week, Thomson multimedia announced a major investment and development partnership with Geocast Network Systems, in an alliance that the company claims is intended to deploy a comprehensive terrestrial broadcast-based digital television datacasting system and service to millions of homes from coast to coast. Thomson says it is making a $15 million investment in Geocast Network Systems, and that "the result will be seamless, high-quality playback of rich-media content at a moment's notice from home entertainment and information devices."

It's been roughly 12 months since TiVo and Replay Networks first unveiled their digital video recorders, so it seemed a good time to ask how the format is doing so far. To answer the question, market intelligence company TechTrends conducted a survey of more than 1400 consumers for a new study, The Digital Television Revolution: Success Factors for the Emerging Digital Video Recorder Market. TechTrends claims that their research is the most comprehensive market study to date of the DVR market.