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BBC: Sky is kicking off the UK’s first 3D channel with a live Premier League football match to be broadcast in nine pubs around the UK this weekend.

The match between Arsenal and Manchester United will be viewable in 3D in pubs in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

In April Sky will roll out its 3D channel to hundreds of other pubs. Later in the year, Sky 3D will be made available to all Sky+HD customers with a range of content on offer. This will include movies, sport, documentaries and entertainment. Sky 3D will initially be available as a free add-on for those with Sky+HD boxes. Viewers need to wear a special pair of glasses to watch the content.

There has been a great deal of hype around the technology since cinemas began showing films in 3D. Avatar, shot in 3D, has become the highest grossing film of all time. It is expected that 3D-ready TVs will hit the consumer market later this year.

“People have already embraced 3D cinema and because Sky’s 3D service uses the same kind of technology, we’re confident there will be demand for sport, movies, concerts and drama in 3D,” said Gerry O’Sullivan, Sky’s director of strategic product development. In February, two rugby matches in the Six Nations championship will be filmed in 3D and shown at cinemas around the UK.

The 2010 World Cup will also be filmed in the format. The BBC was the first to show a 3D sports event, broadcasting a Scotland v England rugby match at the Six Nations championship in 2008.

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Engadget: Pretty good news for Nokia today as it announces its Q4 results. Net income jumped 65% to €948 million (on €12 billion in sales) or 26 eurocents per share, from €576 million euros, or 15 eurocents a share, earned in Q4 2008.

That handily beat the consensus forecast of 19 eurocents per share. Importantly, Nokia grew its smartphone (or “converged devices” in Nokia parlance) marketshare to a healthy 40%, up from 35% just last quarter.

Looking forward, Nokia cautioned that it expects its adjusted operating margin in Devices & Services in Q1 2010 will be at the low end of its 12% to 14% target. At the time of this posting, Nokia stock has jumped about 9% in recognition of these good times.

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Electronista: Sony this week outlined a plan to fight back against Apple by opening its own flagship retail stores.

Starting with Sony Store Nagoya, the stores will imitate the multi-floor design of Apple flagships like Ginza and use large, spacious display areas divided by category.

The first floor of the Nagoya store will focus on portable devices like Cyber-shot and Handycam cameras, the PSP, Sony-Ericsson phones, Walkman players and VAIO PCs; a second floor will focus on home theater equipment such as Blu-ray players and TVs.

Staffing will also echo Apple’s and will include “Stylists” who, like Apple’s Specialists, will provide help on choosing devices in addition to actually handling purchases. They will be unique in that they’ll provide customer feedback to Sony itself, the company says.

While Sony already provides service at some of its stores, staffers on the second floor will take on more of an Apple Genius-like role and teach customers to use what they own. The Nagoya location will open on March 13th and should be accompanied by others in the future, though it’s not known if this will involve international locations. Existing Sony Style and Sony Store locations aren’t expected to close in at least the short term.

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Electronista: Amazon on Thursday released its fourth-quarter earnings report, indicating a net income increase of 75 percent to reach $9.5 billion.

CEO Jeff Bezos claims that “millions of people now own Kindles,” although the company has yet to release specific distribution numbers for the e-book reader.

The US Kindle Store now offers over 410,000 e-books, covering 100 of 112 New York Times bestsellers.

Customers can also choose from over 8,000 blogs and more than 130 domestic and international newspapers.

“When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books,” said Bezos. “This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.”

Amazon has reported a 28 percent increase in net sales for the full year of 2009, reaching approximately $24.5 billion. Net income rose to $902 million for the year, a 40 percent increase compared to 2008 profits.

The company recently changed its Kindle payouts to compete with Apple, now giving 70 percent of the purchase price back to the publishers. Apple has maintained its 30 percent cut, however publishers are not restricted to Amazon’s $10 price cap for e-books.

The iPad maker recommends that publishers charge $14 or $15 for hardcover bestsellers.

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DigiTimes: Paul Peng, executive VP of AU Optronics’ (AUO’s) global business unit has commented that Apple’s new iPad may take away some demand from the netbook market as their pricing is similar.

Peng commented that iPad’s starting price of US$499 is very competitive and should give Apple a chance to achieve annual sales of 10 million units, which is a significant estimate considering the current tablet PC market is only about three million units a year.

However, sales may be impacted by component shortages. AUO has already received enquiries from clients to supply panels similar to that in the iPad, Peng said, adding other panel makers are likely in similar talks. As to whether iPad will impact demand for e-book readers, AUO CEO and president LJ Chen commented that the issue will mainly depend on consumer reading habits since electrophoretic displays (EPDs) are currently still more comfortable than LCD panels if reading times are longer than an hour.

In addition to e-book readers, e-paper displays can be used in many different kinds of products such as electronic labels (e-tags) and digital signage and are unable to be replaced by LCD panels. AUO’s e-tag shipments will grow 300% and reach a total of eight million units in 2010, Chen added.

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HotHardware: DLP-based 3D HDTVs have been around for years now, but those weren’t these fancy new advanced sets that were showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Now, Samsung is claiming to be the first to mass product 3D TV panels, ones that use “3D Active Glasses” technology.

The move marks a bold new step in the march towards making 3D a household mainstay, and it shows that even TV makers are on the bandwagon.

The company began producing LED and LCD compatible panels for 40-inch, 46-inch and 55-inch full-HD 3D TVs using ‘3D Active Glasses’ this month, employing Samsung’s exclusive true 240Hz technology.

The displays are able to showcase 3D and 2D content in Full HD, and the company has reduced the response time of its LCD and LED panels by 20 percent to less than four milliseconds, eliminating any interference between left and right eye images.

There’s no exact plan for release (at least not yet), but we’d guess that some of these sets will be on the market as early as this year.

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BBC: A new music file format has been unveiled by some of the key figures behind the development of the MP3.

The new file, MusicDNA, can include things like lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, which will continually be updated, as well as the music.

It has been created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the first MP3 player in 1993. And its investors include German researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg, who is credited with inventing the MP3.

British record company Beggars Group, whose labels are home to Vampire Weekend, MIA and The Strokes, has signed up to use MusicDNA, as has US label Tommy Boy.

But no major labels are currently on board and the MusicDNA files are likely to be more expensive than current music downloads.

It will also be in competition with Apple’s iTunes LP, which gives users added content including bonus tracks, lyrics and video interviews.

Speaking at the Midem music conference, Mr Bach said: “We can deliver a file that is extremely searchable and can carry up to 32GB of extra information in the file itself. “And it will be dynamically updatable so that every time the user is connected, his file will be updated.”

MusicDNA is launching a beta, or test, version this spring with a full roll-out at the end of the summer. Mr Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany, said: “I think it brings together a number of ideas that have been around for a long time. “I remember 10 years ago, a lot of people were saying that we need to enrich the user experience, that legal access to music has to give the customers more than just music, and this is certainly one very nice way to do it.”

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EngadgetHD: While Futuresource may still be sticking to its 2012 predictions of Blu-ray software dominance, In-Stat has taken a break from the tea leaves to mention it expects Blu-ray player sales to near 80 million by 2013.

In its vision of the near-future that’s not enough to overtake DVD player sales of 90 million, but with a higher average selling price Blu-ray players will own most of the dollars being spent.

Naturally, Blu-ray recorders (and, we’d expect Blu-ray/VHS combos) are most popular in Japan, while Europe produces the most revenue for players. We’re not ready to lay down $3,495 to find out more detailed forecasts, but we’ll put a pin in the calendar and ask Jeremy Toeman to save the date for our 2013 podcast about whether or not Blu-ray sales have lived up to expectations.

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JCNNetwork: Sony Corp. will start selling 3-D televisions and Blu-ray disc players this summer, part of a plan by Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer to go “all out” to seize control of the market.

The company will sell nine 3-D models of Bravia televisions and a Blu-ray player in mid-2010. Stringer is betting that 3-D products will generate more than 1 trillion yen (US$11 billion) in the year ending March 2013, not counting content.

Samsung will sell similar products this year. Samsung will begin selling 3-D TVs and Blu-ray players starting this year.

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Wired: Google is quietly rolling out a new minimalist design for its YouTube video-player pages, which it claims will be more appropriate for a wide range of content from the user-uploaded content that has always been a staple to feature-length films.

By muting the “voice” of the old design, YouTube hopes to make videos stand out from everything else on its pages.

The decision was driven in part by the need to create a unified tone on the site — a subtle but important move, considering that people who are viewing videos of destruction from the recent earthquake in Haiti may not be in the mood to watch skateboarding videos.

You can switch your version of YouTube to the new design now, by clicking a special link.

All YouTube users will notice the changes at some point over the next few weeks.

In the new version, search results, playlists or recommended videos follow viewers around the site depending on how they found a given video.

This makes it possible to check out a bunch of search results without using the “back” button on your browser.

YouTube hopes this will increase viewing time by reducing friction.

The stealth strategy behind YouTube’s redesign is to make the site more appropriate for feature-length films — a key aspect of its strategy to court video producers across the whole spectrum, including professional filmmakers and eventually Hollywood studios, as part of its new video rental service.

While the “Filmmakers Wanted” campaign will debut at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, YouTube told us “as we work to iterate and improve our rentals product we will invite a broader set of partners across different industries and geographies in the weeks and months to come.”

“If the user interface was too pronounced, personality-laden, or really even too noisy, it is going to distract, detract and take away from the experience of that video,” said Margaret Stewart, head of design and user experience for YouTube.

“We want the voice that people hear in the design to be the voice of the creator of the video, and not voice of the user interface itself. The palate is more subdued … the container needs to feel like a welcoming home for everything from user-generated content to feature-length films.

It’s an interesting design challenge, but one that we focused a lot on in the past couple of months.” The viewer pages are so stripped down that they no longer feature the “Broadcast Yourself” motto or the site’s familiar five-star rating system, which never made much sense in the first place. In the new system, when you give something a “like” rating, you’re also adding it to your list of favorites.

If you don’t like a video, a more sensible “thumbs down” rating simplifies the process. (Did people ever really dislike a video enough to assign it two stars, but not enough to assign it one?) Also, the comments section is no longer labeled, because “people are smart” and understand that the comments section is the comments section, according to Stewart.

The overall effect of this much cleaner interface will be to help YouTube achieve its goal of directing viewers’ attention to videos, as opposed to other page elements — an important design consideration when people are paying for video, as YouTube and film producers hope they will.

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Electronista: Online sales of music were up significantly in 2009 but still weren’t enough to compensate for dropping CD sales, the IFPI said today in its annual overview.

The revenue from Amazon, iTunes and other sources climbed 12 percent to $4.2 billion during the year, but a corresponding drop in CD sales is estimated to have made total revenues shrink by 8 to 9 percent to about $15.6 billion.

The international music group again blames piracy for much of the shortfall but notes that it’s no longer as centralized on peer-to-peer services as it was before. Some of it now occurs from direct hosts, including forums and IM, as well as stream rips.

Agency officials allege that copying has had an especially destructive effect on local music, with local releases or sales falling between 60 to 80 percent in countries like France and Brazil.

Gains in digital sales instead were fueled mostly by a 20 percent boost to album purchases: the IFPI believes that switching to variable pricing at iTunes and other stores actually helped album sales as it helped convince some to get the full collection instead of opting for just one track. Single-song purchases were up only 10 percent compared to their 2008 levels.

Other recent efforts like iTunes LP may also help, the IFPI suggested in the report. These provide incentive to buy the full album by supplying photos, videos and other extras that aren’t present in singles. The split is likely to shift as streaming services like Spotify and MySpace Music, as well as music video hosts like Hulu and YouTube’s Vevo, have grown rapidly in the past 12 months.

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DigiTimes: Shipments of 3D-ready TV are expected to grow to 64 million units in 2018, from 200,000 units in 2009, according to DisplaySearch.

Closing out on a year in which average selling prices for TVs are expected to fall for the first time since the flat panel TV transition began, TV manufacturers are building new combinations to re-value their products and retain consumer interest.

LED backlighting and 240Hz LCDs will serve as enabling technologies for new feature developments in TVs in 2010, specifically for 3D TVs, an area of intense interest to TV manufacturers.

“We have passed the first hurdle,” said Paul Gray, DisplaySearch director of TV electronics research. “The critical Blu-ray 3D specification is written, but now comes the hard work of securing interoperability. Consumers will want reassurance that such things as 3D glasses will interoperate between brands. Retailers will also have the same demand to allow a thriving accessory market to develop. The next stage is less glamorous but vital to secure 3D’s long-term value. We have seen 3D crazes before, and sustained attention to detail is important to prevent disillusionment from starting.”

DisplaySearch forecasts that over 70 million connected TVs will be shipped in 2012 – up from around 15 million units in 2009. “The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) demonstrated that Internet-connected TVs have finally come of age,” Gray added. “While in the past connected TV sets have seemed to be a solution in search of a problem, compelling new capabilities such as family video calling not only reinforce the TV’s central position in the home, but also represent a bold move to reclaim some of the tasks swallowed by the PC.”

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