Despite remaining the best-selling handheld and home videogame systems, shipments of DS and Wii hardware and software tumbled in Nintendo’s fiscal year ended March 31 compared to the prior year, hurting its revenue and earnings, it said Thursday.

Ahead of a rumored Apple announcement on a streaming component to iTunes, which could follow Apple’s planned shutdown of Lala.com at month’s end (CED May 3 p7), Warner Music Group is playing down any possible tension with the digital-music powerhouse. WMG CEO Ed Bronfman told analysts in a Q2 earnings call Thursday that Apple’s dominance in digital downloads had actually promoted greater competition in the broader music-technology industry. Major labels are thought to be opposed to the incorporation of Lala’s upload-and-stream-anywhere business model into iTunes, at least at the royalty rates Apple pays them now.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Step-up LCD and plasma TVs are in tight supply, sending dealers scrambling for available inventory but temporarily stabilizing prices, retailers told us at the PRO Buying Group meeting here.

Bowing to industry pressure, the EPA announced late Tuesday that it will allow the use of a temporary test procedure for measuring “download acquisition mode” (DAM) energy use for TVs used in hotels, restaurants and other “hospitality” settings. CEA told that agency that the Rovi Corp. test procedure incorporated in Energy Star version 4.1 would keep hospitality TVs from qualifying for certification (CED April 30 p4).

The number of TVs sold to consumers globally that feature real-time 2D-to-3D conversion is expected to soar to almost 50 million of the 66 million 3D TVs sold in 2016 from only about 1.7 million of the 3.3 million 3D TVs sold this year, Insight Media analyst Dale Maunu told Consumer Electronics Daily on Tuesday.

Trade groups representing IT, telecom and Internet companies worry that financial industry revamp legislation being considered by Congress might be too broad and that some language in the House bill could significantly expand the FTC’s rulemaking authority, officials told us. But public interest groups supported expansion of FTC power under the House bill, which was absent from the Senate version.

The model of a “default” state-run e-waste program with an option for multiple manufacturer-run programs -- embraced by the e-waste programs in Washington and Oregon -- has “proven to be viable,” according to a study of the 2009 operation of the producer responsibility programs in the two states. Oregon has three approved manufacturer-run programs in addition to a state-run program. In Washington manufacturers chose in 2009 to join the “standard plan.” Manufacturer-run plans proposed by groups led by Sony and Panasonic for 2010 were rejected by the Washington Department of Ecology on the ground that they failed to demonstrate enough “confirmed” sites for their collection networks.

It’s not necessarily so, as a Natural Resource Defense Council blogger recently suggested, that the e-waste bill that just cleared the New York State Senate has “broad industry support,” CEA spokeswoman Jen Bemisderfer told us Tuesday.

"We now have seen how satellite radio performs in what was this terrible recession,” and the experience “bodes very, very well for our future,” Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin said Tuesday on a quarterly earnings call. “What we found is that consumers love our product. They stuck with us in spite of the 10 percent unemployment."

Battered by competition from Netflix, Redbox and the emergence of new video streaming, Movie Gallery by early July will close the more than 1,900 stores that remain in the chain, store staffers told us Monday. The chain, which in February filed for bankruptcy for the second time in three years, told employees that all stores will close 10 weeks from Wednesday, a store manager said: “We just decided to shut down rather than keep closing stores.” The chain’s Portland, Ore., headquarters didn’t respond right away to requests for comment.