Starwatch Consumer | Verizon, Redbox team up on video streaming service

Verizon teams with Redbox Verizon Wireless and Redbox on Monday announced a service that will rival Netflix in delivering physical DVDs and Internet streaming,. Anyone with broadband, even if they are outside the Verizon network, will have access to the new service, said Paul Davis, the chief executive of Coinstar Inc., the company that operates the Redbox self-service DVD rental locations and other automated retail services. Redbox has 35,000 kiosks at convenience stores and McDonald’s restaurants nationwide. Verizon has more than 100 million wireless customers. In the last few years, cable and satellite TV companies have increasingly tried to deliver video via the Web. The Redbox-branded service gives Verizon an established entry into the competitive digital streaming space. Verizon estimates that by 2015 nearly half of the 114.7 million U.S. homes with TVs will have Internet-enabled sets. Those TV typically come with icons for Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu streaming services. The hope is that soon they will also include a Redbox icon, said Bob Mudge, Verizon’s president of consumer and mass business markets. Chinese imports Citigroup on Monday became the second foreign bank, and the first Western one, to be permitted to issue credit cards in China. The announcement came as the World Trade Organization, acting on a U.S. complaint, investigates the legality China’s refusal to let foreign companies issue bank cards denominated in China’s currency or permit companies such as Visa Inc., American Express Co., MasterCard Inc., Discover Financial Services and First Data Corp. to process card transactions in China. “It’s perhaps not a coincidence that this is coming at this point when this case is going on,” said Fredrik Erixon, the director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy. “But I think it’s more connected to changes on the ground in China, in its policy on competition in banking in China, where we see a cautiously gradual opening.” China requires foreign banks to “co-brand” with Chinese operators to issue credit cards and execute payments through China UnionPay Data Co. The U.S. says the rules contravene a pledge the world’s most populous nation made when it joined the Geneva-based WTO in 2001 to open its debit- and credit-card markets to foreign processors by 2007. ‘Dr. Oz’ milestone TV already has “The Biggest Loser.” Mehmet Oz is looking for the biggest number of losers. “The Dr. Oz Show” said Monday that it had netted its 1 millionth participant in its “transformation nation” health effort, and the number is climbing. One of those people will win a $1 million prize in May. Since September, Oz, a physician, has urged viewers of the syndicated show to participate in his health challenge, done together with Weight Watchers. The number of registrants has increased steadily to a point that Oz said he had never imagined the program would reach. Oz’s program has seven steps, starting with the simplest: Tell a friend to get some moral support. Participants are asked to register with Weight Watchers and go to a center to have their body mass index calculated. Other steps include connecting with a doctor, learning your family’s health history, getting more sleep, managing stress better and starting new fitness habits. Prostate cancer drug Scientists for the Food and Drug Administration say that a drug made by Amgen Inc. slowed the spread of cancer to the bone in men with hard-to-treat prostate cancer, though the drug did not extend life and carried significant side effects. The FDA on Wednesday will ask a panel of outside experts whether the benefits of Xgeva outweigh its risks, which included bone disease in about 5 percent of patients taking the drug. The agency posted its review of the drug online Monday morning ahead of the meeting. Xgeva, s, in a different formulation called Prolia, already is approved for preventing fractures in cancerous bones and for osteoporosis. Calmer cruise A third U.S.-based cruise ship with an outbreak of stomach illness has sailed again after being decontaminated in Florida. The Ruby Princess sailed Sunday from Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades. It was one of three cruise ships that docked in Florida and Louisiana over the weekend after outbreaks of norovirus, which causes upset stomach, vomiting and diarrhea. Princess Cruise Lines operates the Ruby Princess and another ship, the Crown Princess, that sailed from Fort Lauderdale after cleaning. Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Sea left New Orleans a few hours late Saturday because of the same illness. The Star’s wire services影视帝国 tomove.com.cnMAP