DIGITAL L.A. : BRIGHT PICTURE FOR GROWING DVD MARKET.

Byline: David Bloom 

You have a new DVD player on your TV or in your computer and now you want stuff for your new toy. Well, the good news is, there's more and different new stuff hitting the shelves, and to help you keep abreast of it all, some nifty new online resources.

One new wrinkle is coming courtesy of Palm Pictures, the new corporate home of former Island Records owner Chris Blackwell.

Palm is selling what it calls ``DVD singles'' of music and performance videos for $7.98, starting with ``Superthruster'' from reggae rhythm gods Sly & Robbie and ``Detonator'' from electronica dance act Mocean Worker.

Actually, the term DVD single minimizes what's offered on the discs, which have material designed for computer DVD-ROM drives, as well as the music and videos that will play on TV set-top players.

The discs, which each have eight to 12 minutes of video performances, also include interviews, album samplers, Web links, a photo gallery, brief biographies and more. The Sly & Robbie single also includes an interview with noted producer Howie B, who collaborates on the music.

Palm also is offering two wildly different longer-form pieces: a Sly and Robbie set of 11 music videos featuring Los Angeles dancers called ``Strip to the Bone'' and a lovely black-and-white tone poem to Africa called ``Hommage A' Noir,'' from German filmmaker Ralf Schmerberg.

Palm's distributor, Rykodisc, also is mingling with singles, issuing ``Indoscrub'' from long-time Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. It contains two songs and two videos, a video interview of Hart, a Web link to Rykodisc's site and more. The visuals are kind of cool, too, constructed by filmmaker Chuck Fishbein from time-lapse photography and ``found'' footage.

For those of you having a hard time finding a local place that rents and sells DVD, check out the Web site put together by the DVD Video Group and the Video Software Dealers Association, which represents all the video rental stores in the country.

Go to www.dvdvideogroup.com, type in your ZIP code, and the Web site will tell you the closest DVD retailer and even create a map to get you there.

And DVD.com (at www.dvd.com) is offering an electronic newsletter of DVD-related information to keep you up to date with developments in the business. The site, along with competitor Netflix.com and others, sells and rents DVDs online at competitive prices.

Internet by the numbers

There are days when it seems like the only thing proliferating faster than new Web pages on the Internet are studies about the Internet. Among the array of recent tidbits:

A nonprofit organization called SeniorNet - which helps train older people on computers at learning centers around the country - said 40 percent of those between ages 50 and 75 own the machines. Among senior citizens with college degrees, the computer ownership figure is 53 percent. SeniorNet can be reached at www.seniornet.org in San Francisco.

InfoWorld columnist Bob Metcalfe - creator of the Ethernet protocol and networking giant 3Com Inc. - predicts more than half of American households will have computers, and a third of them will be online by the end of this year.

Sometime this year, there will be more female than male Internet users, which will change Net usage patterns (less surfing, different destinations, more control over household purchasing decisions), and change the Net itself as a result. For more information on these trends, go to International Data Corp.'s site at www.idc.com/F/Ei/123199ei.htm

Finally, a long-running annual UCLA study of more than 275,000 freshmen at 469 U.S. colleges found that about five out of six of them used the Internet to do research and homework, and almost two-thirds used it for e-mail.

One bit of good news: Only 3 percent of the students want to be lawyers, while nearly three-fourths say they volunteer for various causes. The study is conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute and the American Council on Education.