Rovi hopes to have the first CE manufacturers signed on for its TotalGuide electronic program guide by late March and deliver the source code for it in Q2, company officials said in a conference call.

DirecTV sued Dish Network for false advertising, claiming that a recent ad campaign misrepresents what are comparable packages between the two companies, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. DirecTV is asking the court to force Dish to pay DirecTV all profits related to the advertising, financial damages sustained by DirecTV as a result of the advertising, exemplary damages and attorneys’ fees. The company said Dish’s advertising violates the Lanham Act, New York General Business Law and common law of unfair competition.

With the gap between the launch of new technologies and their arrival in mass retail stores having sharply narrowed, CE manufacturers need to “redefine” differences between distribution channels, the PRO Group board said in a letter to vendors.

Activision Blizzard is the latest major game publisher to talk up digital opportunities. On a Wednesday earnings call CEO Robert Kotick cautioned that although subscription games, digital downloads and value-added services offer “immediate and tangible business models, along with rapid growth in consumer adoption,” social and mobile games “remain characterized by unproven business models” and “a lot of clutter."

It’s questionable whether existing passive-polarization 3D TVs will be able to cope with Blu-ray 3D. Comments from industry experts indicate they won’t, at least without modification.

Spending by cable giant Comcast on DOCSIS 3.0 equipment such as cable-modem termination systems probably will drop this year as the company completes its initial rollout of the technology, but other North American cable operators will raise their spending, Arris executives said on a teleconference Wednesday. “We are still in the early stages of a worldwide deployment of this generation of technology and I don’t expect these trends to let up,” CEO Bob Stanzione said. “Neither do I expect cable operators to stop improving their networks as they aggressively compete with telcos and satellite service providers."

Clear-Vu’s new “Amigo” optical disc packaging offers green benefits and can be used with benefit-denial technology to combat retail theft, Daniel Lax, vice president of business development, told the Supply Chain Academy’s GameSupply for Interactive Entertainment conference Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. The packaging became available last month and “a couple” of companies have expressed interest in trying it, Lax told us, declining to name them. Volume orders would take 10-12 weeks to fill, he said.

Natural Resources Canada released revised Energy Star TV specifications for imported products sold in the country. The specifications mirror the U.S. EPA’s revised specs for TVs in Energy Star versions 4.0 and 5.0 completed in September. Meanwhile, the EPA put out for stakeholder comment a test procedure developed by Rovi Corp. to measure the power consumption of TVs in download acquisition mode (DAM). NRCan said its version 4.0 of the spec will take effect May 1 and version 5.0 in May 2012.

CEA President Gary Shapiro on Thursday generally hailed Google’s plans to build and test ultra-high-speed broadband networks. Google announced the plans on its policy blog Wednesday.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Downloadable content is “great” for the game industry, but isn’t yet living up to its full potential, Tony Bartel, GameStop executive vice president of merchandising and marketing, told the Supply Chain Academy GameSupply for Interactive Entertainment conference here Wednesday.