Is the world ready for interactive television? The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) apparently thinks so. Last week PBS, along with several of its member stations, LG Electronics, and LG Electronics Research Center of America (LGERCA), began demonstrating "enhanced digital television and data broadcasting" to their viewers as part of PBS Digital Week 2.0.

According to figures released last week by the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA), an additional 900,000 DVD-Video players were shipped to retail in the third quarter of 1999, bringing total year-to-date hardware shipments to 2.2 million. The CEMA statistics also reveal that DVD-Video experienced approximately a 225% rate of growth in the third quarter of 1999 vs. the third quarter of 1998, shipping 600,000 more hardware units than shipped in the third quarter of 1998. CEMA estimates that total players shipped in 1999 will exceed 3 million units.

Last week, Warner Home Video announced North American shipments to dealers of 1.5 million DVDs of The Matrix, generating $23.4 million in revenues and establishing yet another benchmark in DVD's market acceptance. Setting another industry record, The Matrix, released on DVD September 21, generated sales to consumers of approximately 780,000, or 52% of the shipment totals mentioned above, making it the most successful DVD in first-week sales. According to VideoScan, first-week consumer sales of The Matrix on DVD were three times greater than the next-highest-selling title to date.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington in Seattle reported last week that digital high-definition TV signals (HDTV) had been successfully transmitted across the so-called "Internet2" network. The group says that the transmission has proved the capability of Internet technology to transmit broadcast-quality video, in stark contrast to the poor-quality video loaded onto today's commercial Internet systems.