by Steve O'Hear
June 24th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | 
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We’ve known for a long time that Nokia wants to be seen as much as a services company as a handset maker, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising to learn that the company is exploring different ways to deliver online video to mobile phones.
According to a report in New Media Age, Nokia is particularly interested in “kick-starting” the consumption of long-form content on mobiles by utilizing a podcast style delivery method whereby users subscribe to various video feeds, presumably enabling content to be downloaded to the device “over-the-air” rather than being “side-loaded”.
While the service is said to be in trial mode only with about 600 users, 100 of which are Nokia employees, content partners already reportedly include BBC Worldwide, ITV, Sky and Paramount.
by Steve O'Hear
June 24th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | Comments Off
Major League Baseball on Boxee
Forget the ongoing spat with Hulu, PC-to-TV media player Boxee has announced an official partnership with MLB.com.
Subscribers to the MLB.TV Premium can now use Boxee to pipe content from the service, which includes “live and on-demand in HD (where available)”, to their TVs or simply enjoy Boxee’s ‘ten foot’ and remote control-friendly UI on their PC. On that note, MLB.TV Premium offers DVR functionality to pause and rewind a live game.
Going forward, Boxee hopes this is the first of such partnerships, as live sport is bound to be seen as a major driver of uptake for Internet TV solutions such as Boxee.
MLB.com represents a big step for boxee as we hope this is the first of many different live sports offerings we can bring to you. We hope other sports follow MLB.com’s lead of giving fans a choice of how they enjoy watching their favorite teams…. [Boxee blog]
The company also announced that a version of Boxee, albeit in Alpha, is now available for Windows along with existing versions for Mac OSX and Linux.
by Steve O'Hear
June 16th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Net TV, Other | Comments Off
Forget the UK government’s Digital Britain report (out today), which will propose a solution to the “file sharing problem”, or Virgin Media and UMG’s carrot-and-stick solution. Notorious BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay thinks it has the answer: a new service that will offer file swappers their own encrypted virtual private network that will keep any “ilegal” activities away from the prying eyes of the content industry and their trigger happy legal teams.
Dubbed IPREDator after Sweden’s copyright law IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive), the VPN service is currently in limited beta with 3,000 testers and another 180,000 on the waiting list. The service costs 5 euros per-month.
(via The Register)
by Steve O'Hear
June 16th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | Comments Off
CISCO-owned Pure Digital, makers of point and shoot camcorders such as the Flip Mino HD, have launched their own video sharing site dubbed “FlipShare.com”. One of the biggest selling points of the Flip range of camcorders is the software that they come bundled with (installable from the camera itself), which enables basic editing and upload to YouTube and other third-party video sites. So why launch a competing site of their own? Two words: Privacy and convenience.
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by Steve O'Hear
June 5th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | View Comments
Sometimes a seemingly complex problem requires the simplest of solutions. Case in point is Western Digital’s WD HD Media Player, which provides a near fool-proof way of watching almost any video downloaded from the Internet on the TV. The device can also be used to view photos and as a music player.
The tiny box – about the size of a small paperback book, only thicker – does away with WiFi or Ethernet and all the potential hassles of a streaming over a home network. Instead, you simply connect it to the television (preferably a High Def one via HDMI) and insert a USB thumb drive or any other mass storage USB device in which your content is stored and you’re good to go. Of course, the WD HD Media Player isn’t the first product to take this non-networked approach to shuttling content downloaded from the Internet via PC to the TV, but here’s where it beats most of the competition. Throw virtually any file format at the device and it plays.
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by Steve O'Hear
June 4th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | View Comments
BBC iPlayer on the Creative Zen X-Fi
Yesterday, I was out tech shopping with a friend and a simple brief. Purchase a 4-8 GB flash-based MP3 player, and one that wasn’t an iPod. What we came away with was the Creative Zen X-Fi, which isn’t the newest of players but has its fair share of iPod-trumping features nonetheless. Top of the list is the ability to ’side load’ content downloaded from the BBC’s TV catch-up service, iPlayer. That’s because the Zen supports Windows Media DRM, needed because of the way the BBC licenses content for download so that it will only be playable seven days after broadcast. (Obviously, you’ll need to be a Windows user in the first place, which is far from ideal.) The advantage of downloading rather than streaming iPlayer, of course, is that you don’t need to be connected to the Internet while viewing the content.
A couple of other features that I really like about the Zen X-Fi is the external speaker for communal viewing, the SD card slot so that the storage capability can be expanded, and that music, pictures and videos can be drag ‘n’ dropped both ways – to and from a PC via USB – while in mass storage mode. Take that iPod/iTunes.
by Steve O'Hear
June 4th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | View Comments
Disney HD content for purchase on Vudu
Vudu (U.S.-only) is to offer new Disney HD releases for purchase through its set-top box movie service on the same “day and date” as their competing DVD/Blu-ray release. It’s the first time that Disney has broadly licensed its content in HD for sale through an online video service, beyond one-off offerings or ‘rental-only’, says Vudu. Alongside new releases, 60 library films are also being added to Vudu’s ‘for purchase’ HD catalog. Disney chose to work with Vudu, says the company, “in large part because of the [picture] quality” offered by the service.
Interestingly, Steve Jobs, the guy who runs Apple, is also Disney’s majority shareholder after the motion picture company bought animation studio Pixar a few years back. Therefore, I wonder how long it will be before iTunes secures the same access to Disney’s HD library as Vudu, if it hasn’t already.
by Steve O'Hear
June 2nd, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | View Comments
YouTube XL
It’s not the first time that YouTube has rolled out a version of the video sharing site designed specifically for viewing on a television but the application’s been given a polish and a new name to boot.
Now called ‘YouTube XL‘ the new version of the site features a ‘ten foot’ User Interface designed for viewing on a TV or large screen monitor, which despite running in a web browser, TechCrunch describes as having the look and feel of a ‘native application’. Like the previous version of YouTube optimized for the living room, XL is supported on both the PlayStation 3 and Wii games consoles, though the video quality is compromised on the Wii due to its limited processor and support for an older version of Flash video.
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by Steve O'Hear
May 29th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | Comments Off
Here are few links for some Friday/weekend reading. All Internet TV-related.
- Next-gen HDMI Turns your TV into an Internet Hub. New HDMI standard to carry Ethernet connectivity meaning that an Internet-connected TV could act as a hub: “Instead of a having tangled mess of cables behind your TV, the HDTV itself will act as an Internet hub for all those wired goodies in your living room.” (PC World)
- Video recording on G1 (Cupcake update). New version of Google’s Android mobile OS adds video recording capability, paving the way for support for live video streaming services, such as Qik. (Digitalwerks)
- Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow Arena movie download service ready for June launch. “Direct on-phone downloads over WiFi or 3G would be awesome, but as most of these services tend to operate, PlayNow Arena will require that users select and download movies on their PCs, cable up their phones, and transfer the media the old-fashioned way…” (Engadget Mobile)
- The Streaming Content Is There, Just Not Enough People Watching It — Yet. Dan Rayburn gives a great overview of the limited penetration of Internet TV services and hardware. (GigaOm)
- D7 Video: Pure Digital Demo. Pure Digital (Flip) have demoed a new online video sharing site that aims to be easier to use than YouTube for sharing and viewing home videos with friends and family. A range of playback devices are said to be supported not just a PC. (AllThingsD)
by Steve O'Hear
May 29th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | Comments Off
Image credit: CNet UK
Microsoft has long talked up its Internet TV prowess (they’ve been in the space for a very, very long time), with a combination of its consumer led set-top box a.k.a. the XBox 360 and its telco IPTV solution dubbed Mediaroom.
One of the advantages of the company’s connected vision was supposed to be the advent of interactive television based on what the Internet could bring to the table. Think: live instant messaging through the TV with friends while watching the same channel or accessing additional information pulled in from the web, for example. With yesterday’s announcement that satellite broadcaster BSkyB’s broadband TV service ‘Sky Player’ is coming to XBox 360 users in the UK and Ireland, that vision is now a lot more tangible.
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by Steve O'Hear
May 28th, 2009 | Posted in Net TV | Comments Off
Hulu Desktop
You’ll remember when Hulu decided to block desktop Internet TV browser Boxee for having the audacity to provide a better user experience for playing back the online video site’s content on a television. Content that originates on TV in the first place! At the time Hulu defended the decision, citing the requests of content owners not the policy of the site itself. And yet today, Hulu have made available their own desktop application (Mac and Windows) that features a “ten foot” user interface designed specifically for operating with a remote control, providing a much better experience when viewing Hulu content via a PC connected to a TV.
Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons.
You can download the Hulu desktop app from the site’s new “Labs” section. Don’t think about running Hulu Desktop on anything other than a PC, however, such the AppleTV set-top box, unless you’re cool with breaking the software’s terms of service (via NewTeeVee).
