While DISH Network just recently hit market number 70, DirecTV is throwing itself a party after reaching the big 100. With the addition of Columbia-Jefferson City, Missouri and Evansville, Indiana, the satcaster can now claim to have HD locals available in a hundred US regions. The milestone means that some 83% of the US can now get DirecTV and their HD locals sans an OTA antenna, and if all goes to plan, it'll hit 121 cities by the year's end. We suppose a round of golf claps is in order.

AT&T has made a habit of patting itself on the posterior whenever it reaches the one-year mark in U-verse deployment at a certain locale, but given that it also took the time to reiterate its $500 million investment in Ohio this go 'round, we figured we'd let you toss on a party hat and join in. Over the past year, U-verse TV has been made available to 600,000 living units in Ohio, and according to the company, it's planning to "invest in fiber network upgrades and further broadband deployment" across the state. As it stands, U-verse is available in parts of nearly 200 Ohio communities -- let's see how much that number changes over the next 12 months, shall we?

When Raleigh, North Carolina's WRAL took its local news to high-definition some eight years back, we'd be willing to bet it never thought the rest of America would be so immensely slow in following suit. Sadly, it has indeed taken eight full years for a country known for its pioneering spirit in HD to see 100 local news stations make the high-def leap -- but we suppose it's still a milestone worth celebrating. That being said, if it takes another eight years to hit 200, we just might drown in our own tears.

[Thanks, Jeremy]

If you thought the previous HD film records set by MI:III, The Departed, and 007: Casino Royale were impressive, 300 just raised the bar in a big way. According to sales figures from the title's first week on shelves, more than 250,000 copies were moved on HD DVD and Blu-ray. Moreover, this mark makes it the fastest selling high-definition disc to date, and enables Warner Home Video to claim six of the top ten selling HD flicks. Of course, the news we're truly interested in -- which format made up the majority of the sales -- was unsurprisingly omitted.

[Via MovieWeb]

Break out the party hats and streamers folks, as according to the well-compiled statistics over at HD DVD Stats.com, Universal has cranked out 104 high-definition titles to date. Of course, the number in and of itself is essentially meaningless, but when you consider just how critical the studio is to the HD DVD camp, one could easily envision the format war shifting should the firm eventually decide to support Blu-ray. Unfortunately, it still seems that we're quite a ways from seeing that come to fruition.

While Paramount's Mission: Impossible III didn't make it out on one of those forthcoming three-in-one mega discs, it did get the green light on all three major formats (and a forth, too), and set some records while it was at it. While Tom's personal life has been all but personal, the general public apparently still loves him, crazy antics and all, as studio sources have pegged first-week sales at 3.7 million units, more than either of the two previous releases in the franchise. More importantly, however, is the 20,000 units that were sold on HD DVD / Blu-ray formats, which made it the "the biggest-selling next-gen title since the formats launched. But with quite a few hits slated to hit shelves soon (and during the holiday shopping season, no less), we don't expect this record to stand for too terribly long.

Stop trying to type faster, watch TV for hours, or organize the largest water balloon fight: there's now another way to get a Guinness world record holder in your home, as LG has just announced it is going to begin mass producing its record-setting 100-inch LCD. The 6-million pixel 1,920 x 1,080 display won't come cheap though -- while a final price has not been decided, the manufacturing costs alone are expected to be over $150,000 US. But anyway, how can we be satisfied with a 100-inch LCD HDTV featuring a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, 92% color gamut and 5ms refresh time when we know Mark Cuban is just going to come over and start bragging about his $70,000 103-inch 1080p plasma from Panasonic? While sneaking in and watching Oxygen Network until the logo burns in on his precious plasma would be nice, we'll probably just wait for the first price drop and save everyone some pain and suffering.

In a story to bring a tear to Ben's eye, Echostar has sponsored an Ultimate Football Fan contest with the NFL to allow some tough TV watchers the chance to win a trip to the 2007 Pro Bowl in Hawaii. All they had to do was break the Guiness World Record for continuous television watching, and what better way to do it than by watching football in high def? Dish and the NFL took the winners of eight regional "ultimate fan" contests, sat them down in La-Z-Boy recliners, and turned on the sets on Sunday.

The greatest part? After one of the contestants couldn't stand it anymore and bowed out to hit the sack (or was it the john?), the remaining seven banded together to help each other stay awake and watch as one group. They watched football nonstop until Wednesday morning, a full SEVENTY HOURS after they began. Now that's teamwork! Dish was so impressed they awarded the prize to all seven, who will get a trip to the bowl game, the recliner they used to break the record, a 37-inch Akai HD set, a Dish HD tuner, and HD programming for a year.

Forget DirecTV's Superfan package, that's what I call super fans! We can't even imagine watching anything for seventy hours straight, we think after forty or fifty anyone would be done for. Any takers to break this new record, and win some free HDMI cabling, or something else that happens to be behind one of our A/V racks?

Going dual-format certainly has its benefits. You can put up cool press releases about slating a record number of high definition media releases on one day. Luckily, Warner hasn't just stopped there. Among the six Blu-ray and four HD DVD discs are a few particularly notable items. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride makes its HD debut on blu-ray, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines will include Warner's In-Movie Experience (IME) on HD DVD and they will debut their Ultra-Resolution technology by transferring over the animated Bugs Bunny flick The Adventures of Robin Hood. All of the movies will carry an MSRP of $28.99 and except for T3, contain the same extras as the original DVD releases. No details on if any of the Blu-ray discs will be encoded in anything other than MPEG-2 but we will keep you posted.

Blu-ray releases:

• Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
• Swordfish
• Space Cowboys
• Lethal Weapon 2
• The Fugitive
• House of Wax

HD DVD releases:

• The Dirty Dozen
• Grand Prix
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
• The Adventures of Robin Hood

You can also check out our Google Calendars for all the dates.
HD DVD release schedule


Blu-ray release schedule

While we've seen a few Blu-ray burners announced by other companies and Sony has announced BD-R media, they are finally ready to show off their burner for anyone who wants to make Blu-ray discs at home. The BWU-100A is a 2x BD-R/RE burner that also reads and writes to DVDs and CDs. It will be available in August for the (comparatively) low price of $750. The drive will come bundled with Cyberlink BD Solution to help author and burn your discs, however there is not any software for Blu-ray movie playback included so you'll need to find your own.