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Amazon offers on-demand DVD manufacturing service (Monica Soto Ouchi, 4/25/06, Seattle Times)

For those obsessed with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, the PBS mainstay "Nova" or Matt Lauer, Amazon has something for you.

The online retailer Monday began offering a service that allows film studios and TV networks to sell more obscure or niche titles through an on-demand DVD manufacturing service.

The Media Gateway program — developed by Amazon subsidiary CustomFlix Labs — encodes films and TV shows in a digital format and archives the content.

When a customer orders a film or show on Amazon, the online retailer manufactures the DVD and ships it to the customer. While film studios and TV networks already sell their most popular titles online, the service erases the financial risk associated with manufacturing DVDs and holding inventory for lesser-known works.

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Welcome to custom-made online radio (Althea Legaspi, April 23, 2006, Chicago Tribune)

There's that legendary record store person who knows everything, and when you mention a band, he or she has about 10 suggestions for what you might like. In these brick-and-mortar-less days of online music, he is now a program that runs on your computer.

Pandora.com and Last FM do their jobs in different ways, but both are that future: music boiled down to a science, where radio plays only the music you like. Your "neighbours" have similar tastes, and you can discover new music, regardless of label affiliation and without repetitive set playlists. Welcome to personalized radio. Oakland-based Pandora and London-based Last FM are helping artists and listeners find each other in a way traditional and Internet radio have never done before.

While customized Internet radio has been in existence for years, in which a listener can pick specific genres and artists to tailor a station, Pandora looks to the actual composition, analyzing musical attributes that describe a song. Initially named Savage Beast and created in 2000 to be a recommendation service licensed to companies such as Best Buy and AOL, it evolved into Pandora by mid-2004. Through its Music Genome Project, Pandora's filter, it discovers and catalogs some 400 genes -- such as vocal tonality, instrumentation and mood. The genes are the basis of how songs are grouped together on a Pandora "radio station."

Listeners create a station simply by typing in a song name or artist, and Pandora launches a radio stream, playing songs that have similar attributes to the individual user's selection. Each listener can then fine-tune the personal station, giving a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to songs, and Pandora responds, paring the attributes more specifically to the user's taste. Conversely, users can add more music to expand the musical gene pool. Listeners can share their personally created "radio stations" with others by e-mail and can also view top stations being played.