Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), General Electric (GE), Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Walt Disney (DIS), Viacom (VIA), Sony Corp ADR (SNE)

Lions Gate (NYSE: LGF), the feisty little studio that is responsible for torture-porn franchises Saw and Hostel, has hooked up with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to see if consumers care about owning digital duplicates of the movies they purchase on DVD and Blu-ray format.

According to the following press release, Lionsgate will include an iTunes digital version of select projects on certain home-video releases. The digital copy will allow users to transfer a movie to an iTunes account, so it could then be viewable on multiple devices like PCs or Macs, iPods, Apple Television and iPhones. First up for the iTunes digital treatment will be Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo — yes, the old soldier is still around — to be released to home video in Might.

As the studio makes clear in its press release, this is all about experimentation with the promotion of new distribution models. Lionsgate wants to efficiently, and effectively, create new opportunities for its library. It’s not alone — Disney (NYSE: DIS), Viacom (NYSE: VIA), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Sony (NYSE: SNE) and General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) NBC Universal asset are all on a never-ending study of how ideal to leverage the digital era to make money from content portfolios. Lionsgate wants DVD buyers to realize that they have the ability to use iTunes to buy movies from its catalog. It’s a bit weird to me, though, since one would figure that a person who buys a DVD will probably just access that particular content from the DVD itself. I understand the value of transferability, of course, but if Lionsgate — or any content provider, for that matter — simply ensures that each digital product sold online contains very special, compelling extras that can’t be found in any other format, then a digital library will be that much easier to monetize.

At any rate, it will be interesting to see how Apple and Lionsgate do with this scheme. Apple and its iTunes brand are certainly powerful drivers of digital distribution, so maybe users will perceive a value from the digital copies.

Disclosure: Steven Mallas owns shares of Disney and General Electric; positions can change at any time.

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Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

We recently previewed the new Evernote clients — for web, mobile and Mac — and now we’ve got even more details about what’s in the works for this popular cross-platform capture tool. Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin, talked to Download Squad about Evernote’s expanding catalog of features. The biggest news is today’s launch of a desktop client for Mac. We also have 2000 invitations to the beta to share with Download Squad readers, so make sure you read this whole post to get yours!

Libin states the Mac client has been improved a lot even in the short time since demo videos were released on the Evernote website. We were already impressed with how nicely Evernote played with Apple’s Photo Booth — snap a picture of some kind of text, like a handwritten note or a business card, and Evernote will be able to recognize it and make it searchable. Libin states that, even though Pic Booth works well for this, Evernote also has direct support for Apple’s built-in iSight cameras.

As with the Windows client, all the memories you save in the Mac version can be automatically synced to your phone, your Evernote web account, and your other computers. This opens the door for some creative use cases: Libin says he gets around his poor sense of direction by saving his trip itineraries and Google Maps before he leaves the home. Another staff member took photos of his prescription medications, so he could remember what they looked like and make the labels searchable. The Download Squad team down at SXSW could no doubt have used Evernote for another neat trick: taking pictures of people you meet at conventions — Evernote will search the text on their nametags!

Continue reading Evernote launches Mac client: 2000 beta invites for Download Squad readers

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