Google on Tuesday apologized for the way it handled a decision to exit the video sales business, telling customers it has listened to their feedback and wants to remedy the situation. Instead of purchased videos expiring last week, Google will keep them playable for six months.

In addition, the company said it was sorry for offering Google Checkout credits to customers instead of providing them with full refunds. Google took this step because of the hassles in making sure it had customers' latest credit card information, but now says it will refund credit cards for all purchased videos in addition to the Checkout credit. "Our bad," the company acknowledged in a blog post on the matter.

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Apparently miffed at Paramount's announcement yesterday that it would only offer movies in HD DVD format and not Blu-ray after testing both formats for a year, director Michael Bay says he will not make a second "Transformers" movie - which may or may not be a bad thing depending on your tastes.

"I want people to see my movies in the best formats possible. For them to deny people who have Blu-ray sucks! They were progressive by having two formats. No Transformers 2 for me!" Bay wrote in a forum posting on his "Shoot for the Edit" Web site. The response highlights the frustration that both directors and consumers are experiencing with competing high-definition formats.

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Canon announced two new digital SLR cameras on Monday, including a model with 21.1 megapixels of resolution.

The high-end camera, which will retail for $8,000, is directed at professionals. It has a five frame-per-second shooting rate, and can be configured in four resolutions, including 5.2, 11.0, 16.6, or 21.1 megapixels. Canon said the camera will go on sale in November.

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Wal-Mart said Tuesday it will begin offering MP3 tracks from its music download service through arrangements with labels EMI and Universal.

Tracks will be priced at 94 cents and albums at $9.22 USD. Artists at launch include The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, and Maroon 5, among others.

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In June, IBM announced a fourth-quarter release timeframe for a new class of BladeCenter systems for small and medium business. To make certain its initial rollouts are going the right way, this morning, IBM added that it's launching a beta test program for select BladeCenter S customers, encompassing perhaps dozens of clients in ten countries.

Whereas most SMB servers are based on processor platforms, with a blade cluster, the "platform" stops at the blade's edge. So BladeCenter S will offer clients the extraordinary option of Intel, AMD, or Power processors.

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ComScore is changing the way it records market share of search engine to reflect the changing ways consumers are interacting with sites.

The company had previously been counting the number of search queries to determine a search share. However, the company is now changing those methods so it can add figures from other types of search engines -- like those used on auction sites and retailers -- as well as sites like Wikipedia.

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In a strange public display combining affection and disaffection, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appeared jointly before a small crowd of select journalists. Between them, there was no major new revelations to announce, though the companies are attempting to publicly demonstrate that major corporations can decide amicably to collaborate in certain areas and maintain a competitive stance in others.

It's not a bad goal: a strategic peace forged between companies that each maintain their respective interests. It's even better when you realize the companies involved have, in the past, strayed out of bounds with their respective competitive strategies (though complaints against Cisco peaked a decade ago).

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Owners of Blu-ray Disc players anxious for the upcoming release of Shrek the Third were shocked to learn this morning it was not going to happen - at least, not for the brand they'd chosen. The Viacom division, which now includes the DreamWorks Animation label, said it has chosen to resume supporting the HD DVD format exclusively, effectively reversing its decision of October 2005 to release in both formats.

The move appears sudden, as only ten days ago video press sources were given notice by Viacom that Shrek the Third and many other titles were being released for both formats on November 13. Now, Viacom plans to formally commence its exclusive HD DVD support with the release of the Will Farrell comedy Blades of Glory on August 28, with Shrek and Transformers to follow thereafter. Those three titles combined garnered $1.5 billion in US box office sales.

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Virtual unknown Vizio catapulted to the number one spot in LCD TV sales during the second quarter, data from research firm iSuppli indicates.

According the the report released on Monday, the firm sold some 606,402 LCD TV’s during the quarter, a rise of 76 percent over the previous one. The firm now holds a 14.5 percent share of the market. Samsung dropped to second place, selling 467,210 TVs, although it also saw a quarter-to-quarter increase.

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As I sat in a Washington, D.C. hotel suite earlier this month demoing and discussing the first network-enabled movie titles with the HD DVD group, one remark struck me: HD DVD says it is not at war with Blu-ray and seemingly has little concern over Sony’s format.

It’s hard to miss the ping pong game of rhetoric between the promotion groups pushing HD DVD and Blu-ray. From sales figures to exclusive deals, press releases are churned out almost daily. The so-called “format war” is Betamax and VHS redux - at least that’s what the media wants you to think.

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Upset that advertisements for its competitors are appearing in searches for its trademarks, American Airlines parent AMR has sued Google seeking unspecified damages.

AMR says that ads for competitors' services appear when searching for its trademarked names, such as its “Aadvantage” frequent flyer program. The company says the ads appear alongside ads placed by the company itself in the ‘Sponsored Links’ section.

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A system outage that impacted Skype users for about 48 hours last week has officially been attributed to a multitude of Windows-based clients receiving critical security patches and rebooting at roughly the same time. According to the company, the reboots triggered a flood of logon requests that collided at Skype's network hub, like a circumstantial form of denial-of-service.

Coupled with a reduction in the P2P capacity of the Internet at the time those Windows reboots were going on, there simply wasn't enough capacity in the network to handle the network traffic, as the company's Villu Arak explained this morning.

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Microsoft moved to lower the price of its Xbox 360 console in Europe on Monday, about two weeks after it made a similar move in the United States and Canada. In EU countries, the price of the high-end console drops by 50 euros to 349.99 euros ($470 USD), while the Core model drops 20 euros to 279.99 euros ($378 USD). In addition, the Xbox 360 Elite will premiere at a price of 449.99 euros on August 24.

The price cuts are intended to fend off stronger than anticipated competition from Nintendo and its Wii, which have been selling at a torrid pace since its release last November. Additionally, Microsoft is hoping a cheaper price will help it to expand its core fan base, which primarily consists of younger men. Analysts say that much of the Wii's success can be explained by its appeal to a much wider consumer base.

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It is a mere eighteen months away: American terrestrial television transmitters will vacate the VHF and UHF spectra that dominated the broadcast industry for most of the 20th century, and move to a new set of frequencies with the broader bandwidth required for digital television. While lawmakers complain that not enough people are aware their analog TVs won't pick up over-the-air signals after February 17, 2009, a collection of interest groups is now telling the FCC that it's neglected to enact critical ethical standards for the use of that spectrum.

The Benton Foundation's complaint deals with multicasting, which is something owners of new DTVs may have already discovered: Many relocated channels are capable of broadcasting three other sub-channels concurrently. For instance, viewers might find the old Channel 4 programming on the new Channel "4.1." But they may find other programming from the same station on Channels "4.2," "4.3," and "4.4."

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Entries in Wikipedia involving subjects such as the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay have been edited by individuals using FBI and CIA computers, a scanning program indicates.

The researcher says he created the application to "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and see if others are attempting to edit Wikipedia entries that may involve them, according to an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday.

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