More evidence of NBC Universal’s anybody-but-iTunes strategy comes with news that the company is partnering with SanDisk. Reuters reports that as of January new shows from NBC’s broadcast network and cable channels will be available on Fanfare, SanDisk’s newly launched Windows-only video download service. The initial content lineup will include “The Office”, “Heroes” and “30 Rock.”

Fanfare, in combination with SanDisk’s TakeTV device, offers a way of getting paid-for video content downloaded via a PC onto a television. We’ve previously covered TakeTV, where we described it as taking a much simpler approach compared to the many media extenders on the market by negating the need for a home network. “Instead, content is physically shuttled from a PC to a TV via a dedicated USB stick and docking station.”

Meanwhile, Vudu’s set-top box (see our review) has landed some television content of its own. Crave reports that, as of today, TV episodes from Fox are available for purchase priced at $1.99 each, the same price as TV shows on Apple’s iTunes Store. The lineup covers twelve shows including “24”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Family Guy”, and “My Name is Earl”.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

It was called a stupid idea at first and then ridiculed for its name. But once people had a chance to look at the site’s lineup of shows and try it out, it was praised as a worthy competitor. The service I’m talking about is of course Hulu, the multi-million dollar online television streaming (video on demand) venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. Most people haven’t had the chance to try the service yet because of the highly exclusive closed private beta but today we are talking with Matt, who has found a way to get around the “closed private beta” problem without breaking any rules.

Most online video services allow you to embed the videos into blogs and websites in an effort to increase their branding and in the hopes of driving traffic back to the originating site. But what would happen if someone took all your embeds and called it a day? Let’s find out. Continue reading »

Watching a favorite show you missed on television on the Internet is increasingly popular, two recent studies show.

Horowitz Associates found that 16 percent of high-speed Internet users watched at least one full-length TV program online during a week, double the number from last year. Horowitz just released its report: Broadband Content and Services 2007. (Online Media Daily account.)

The Nielsen Company found that 25 percent of the 1,599 Americans surveyed in October have watched full episodes of a TV program in the past three months. (New York Times.)

Both studies point to the increasing popularity of full-length streaming video on the Internet. Continue reading »

Microsoft to Sony: anything you can do, we can do faster.

After we got over excited about the PlayStation 3’s forthcoming support for DivX video, Microsoft’s XBox 360 has beaten Sony to the punch. The console’s latest software update adds DivX (and Xvid) video playback, which, after extensive testing, Gizmodo happily reports that in terms of DivX-compatibility, the 360 can now “play back pretty much anything”. Technically speaking, however, only DivX 5.0 and above is supported, which luckily should cover all but the oldest of DivX files floating around the web. Continue reading »