South Korea’s LG Display Co. said its third-quarter net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier, thanks to a steady rise in prices for flat-panel screens.

Big producers of liquid-crystal displays, including LG Display, are currently reaping the benefits of higher prices. Prices have gotten a lift lately because of reduced production and robust demand from China, where a government stimulus package is pushing consumers in rural areas to purchase consumer electronics. A shortage of glass used to make LCD panels also contributed to the tightness of the panel market during the third quarter, further boosting prices and profits.

LG Display, one of the world’s largest makers of LCDs, said it expects its fourth-quarter shipments of liquid-crystal displays to rise by a high single-digit percentage from the third quarter, while it expects average selling prices to show a “gradual” decline from the third quarter.

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Even as the electronics industry pushes televisions for watching three-dimensional videos as a future growth area, Panasonic Corp. (PC) acknowledged that it will be challenging to get consumers to upgrade to 3-D sets so soon after many purchased new flat-screen TVs.

The electronics company also said it is sourcing more components from places where the currency is tied to the U.S. dollar to offset the strength of the Japanese yen, which it said was putting the company at a disadvantage to rivals, particularly from South Korea.

Japanese electronics makers, along with South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics Inc., see 3-D as the next major technological breakthrough to spur sales of televisions and Blu-ray players, similar to how high-definition video helped to drum up demand for LCD and plasma TVs.

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YouTube’s cat-and-mouse game with governments abroad continues.

To avoid a South Korean law that would require users who upload or comment on videos to first register with their real names, YouTube last week disabled those two features on its local Korean site, according to the company. The move garnered new attention Monday, after it was reported by a Korean publication, Hankyoreh.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for YouTube parent Google (GOOG), said it devised the compromise because it believes in users’ rights to be anonymous online. He notes that users in Korea can upload and comment on videos by changing their country settings to another geographic zone. And users of the Korean site can still watch videos anonymously.

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Things keep getting worse for Corning (GLW), as demand for large-screen LCD televisions sags in the face of a global consumer recession.

The LCD glass maker this morning said it is now withdrawing the financial guidance it provided just a few weeks ago for the fourth quarter and for 2009.

In a statement, CFO James Flaws said that “Panel makers, particularly those in Taiwan, have continued to reduce the utilization of their factories heading into the second half of this quarter in response to weakened retail demand for LCD televisions and desktop monitors.” He added that demand in the company’s wholly owned display glass business “has dropped more precipitously than we expected just a few weeks ago,” with “additional, but less severe, reductions in demand at Samsung Corning Precision Glass,” its joint venture in South Korea.

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