Last week, Time Warner Cable said that it has successfully tested distribution of a high-definition TV feed from Home Box Office and will soon begin delivering it in the upgraded areas of its Tampa, Florida cable operation using equipment from Scientific-Atlanta, Inc. According to Time Warner, this marks the first time HBO's HDTV signal has been made available to cable customers using a form of signal-modulation technology known as QAM, which allows two HDTV channels to be delivered in the same bandwidth needed for one off-air HDTV channel.

At last week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Dolby Laboratories unveiled the first Dolby E encoder and decoder products, which are intended to help television broadcasters make the transition from two-channel to multichannel audio. According to the company, the DP571 Dolby E Encoder and DP572 Dolby E Decoder allow broadcasters to distribute up to eight channels of audio, as well as additional data, with a pair of channels on a single AES/EBU cable, two audio tracks of a digital video tape, digital audio tape, or video server.

Using hard-drive technology to store audio and video data has become a growth industry of late, with startups TiVo and Replay taking the lead (see previous articles). Consumer-electronics giant Sony has also gotten into the act with its announcement last December that it will team up with Western Digital to develop hard-disk-based products.

In a joint statement by Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO of Pixar, and Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, it was announced that A Bug's Life will be the first feature-film video release on DVD to be created entirely from digital data. Video releases of previous "completely digital" films, such as Toy Story, were created through an analog film-to-videotape process. The DVD for A Bug's Life is the first to be created using the original digital computer data and an all-digital process. The DVD release presents the film in its original widescreen aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and is due for release on April 20, 1999.