CEA is opposing a move by the California government to loan $75 million from the Electronic Waste Recovery and Recycling Account (EWRRA) to the general fund. The money from the e-waste account comes from a fee levied on consumers who purchase electronic gear and is used for the state’s electronics recycling program. Citing a substantial reserve in the e-waste fund and projections that revenue is “running ahead of expenditure demands,” CalRecycle staff recommended cuts to the recycling fee on consumers.

Major League Baseball players, many experiencing live sports for the first time in 3D, seemed to enjoy playing up the 3D effect during cutaways from the action at Tuesday night’s All-Star game on Fox Sports via DirecTV. Donning polarized 3D glasses for use with on-location 3D TV monitors provided by Fox, players showed excitement watching the game in a new way and participating in casual interviews to highlight the technology.

California wants to cut the e-waste recycling fee that consumers pay when they buy new products, because the state has a substantial reserve fund, CalRecycle said. The state was the first to enact an e-waste law in 2003 and is the only one that has adopted a fee-based system known as the advanced recycling fee (ARF). The agency is seeking comments on staff recommendations that the consumer fee, raised in 2008, be reset to levels prescribed in the 2003 law. Twenty-two states have enacted versions of producer responsibility e-waste laws.

The Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Move and Xbox 360 Kinect motion control systems are “great news for the casual market” that Ubisoft will “strongly benefit from,” Yves Guillemot, the publisher’s CEO, said in a Monday earnings call. He predicted that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will “put lots of promotion behind” the initiatives, giving the industry overall a lift.

Dell said Tuesday that it stands by its environmental record despite Greenpeace allegations that the company “continues to walk away from its commitment” to eliminate hazardous materials from its products. While all of Apple’s products are now free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and bromiated flame retardants (BFRs), its main competitor, Dell, “continues to walk back from its public commitment to phase out the use of these two chemical compounds that have been linked with numerous health problems throughout their lifecycles,” Greenpeace said in an e-mail Tuesday. “If Apple can do it, then why can’t Dell? That’s the question Greenpeace has been asking at protests around the world."

Online video competition is among the media market threats from Comcast’s planned purchase of control of NBC Universal, many speakers said at a Chicago FCC field hearing on the deal that continued into Tuesday night. The combined companies have ample incentive to maintain exclusivity over their broadcast and cable programming, to the detriment of rival pay-TV companies, websites and other companies, some speakers said.

LONDON -- The U.K.’s digital TV switch-over is “on track” to finish on time in 2012, and about 55 million pounds under budget, said David Scott, CEO of Digital UK (DUK), which was set up to mastermind the rolling switch-over that began 2008 and will include the release of 14 UHF channels for government sale.

A palpable sense of relief went through executives from the YES Network Sunday at the Helen Mills Theater in Manhattan when a glitch that nearly soiled viewers’ first impression of baseball in 3D was resolved in the third inning of the YES/DirecTV telecast of the New York Yankees-Seattle Mariners game. After two innings of unimpressive low-resolution video, double-images in graphics and motion glitches, the picture popped into impressive 3D focus. That prompted a YES spokesman to address the crowd -- including reporters and guests of YES and sponsors Panasonic and DirecTV -- and announce that a previously undisclosed problem with a fiber cable in the 3D truck had been fixed.

SAN FRANCISCO -- By 2014, about 90 percent of consumer mobile IP traffic will be video, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donavan told the MobileBeat 2010 conference here. He was citing a recent Cisco forecast, but said it wasn’t “very far off” of AT&T’s own internal projections.

Best Buy Mobile launched its Movie Mode interactive cell phone application last week with the opening of Universal Pictures’ Despicable Me. At a special pre-release screening at the Times Square AMC Theaters in Manhattan, reporters were given demo iPhones to audition the feature, which syncs to select smartphones and delivers special content linked to specific cues in the movie. According to a spokesman at the event, the feature will extend to other media, including DVDs, in the future, although follow-up questions regarding future plans for disc-based Movie Mode versions weren’t addressed.