Hasta La Gadget!

The curved television era has officially begun, with LG announcing US availability for their new Curved OLED HDTV, which is the first of its kind to reach the US. LG’s 55-inch class model is going on sale starting today at select Best Buy locations. However, you’ll want to save up and go through your piggy bank to make sure you have enough cash, because these things aren’t cheap.

The new television from LG will cost you $15,000, a price that isn’t too surprising and one that we were expecting, but it’s certainly not in the category of an impulse buy. The curved OLED TV was initially put on sale in Korea, but Americans are now finally getting their chance to own one of the newest pieces of technology.

The TV is exclusively launching at Best Buy’s flagship store in Minneapolis, but availability will begin to spread over the coming weeks, including locations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and San Antonio. Availability at all Best Buy locations is expected to hit later this summer at some point.

The new TV is only 0.17 inches thin at the edges, and it weighs just 38 pounds. On top of the OLED technology (which is known for better image quality and low-power state), LG’s proprietary WRGB technology is being used in this new model, which features white sub-pixels on top of the traditional RGB color scheme. It’s also the world’s first OLED TV to achieve THX Display Certification, but we’ll let the buyers be the judge of the television’s quality, if anyone is up for buying it, that is.

LG Curved OLED HDTV rolling out in the US is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In the HBO drama series, "The Newsroom," Jane Fonda plays the recurring role of Leona Lansing, the self-important CEO of the TV news show, Atlantis Cable News (ACN).
Fonda views the fictional network’s influence as falling "somewhere
between Ted Turner (her ex-husband) and Rupert Murdoch." Playing against
type and her real-life liberal bias, Lansing is a staunch Republican
who feels the need to constantly remind her news team staff headed up by
Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) . . .

The Wall Street Journal reports unnamed sources that say Google has approached big media companies about licensing TV shows for a streaming television service it wants to launch. Intel and Apple have also been working on similar services.

Read more…

Earlier this month, Apple reportedly formed a deal with Time Warner Cable over Apple TV, which we’ll be hearing about towards the end of the year, if the sources are correct. Now word has surfaced that Apple is approaching cable networks with ideas of a “premium” service it would offer that allows the users to skip advertisements, something for which Apple would then pay the network.

The information comes from Jessica Lessin, who goes on to point out that in 2012 an Apple patent surfaced showcasing technology that allowed for a video stream to be played when a different one is being watched when a commercial comes on. As far as the actual claim goes, very little known, such as what kind of compensation Apple is offering for each skipped advertisement.

Reportedly, according to the sources who provided the information, the talks are being kept very hush-hush, with the latest ones having taken place last week at an event by Allen & Co that media businesses participated in. Both Senior Vice President Eddy Cue and marketing head Phil Schiller are said to also be part of the talks.

If all of this sounds familiar, it is not just because many DVRs already allow users to fast-forward through commercials. Dish Network allows for a similar feature, which is called Auto Hop and raised the ire of most of the industry. Fox, CBS, NBC, and others sued Dish over the feature, saying such a feature was an attack on the overall ecosystem.

NBC was particularly vocal over the feature, and Dish Network’s chairman eventually responded with his own stance, talking about advertisements in general and Dish’s goal. In light of this, it will be interesting to see how networks respond to Apple’s plans, and what effects that could end up having in the grander scheme of things.

SOURCE: Jessica Lessin

VIA: Engadget

Apple pushing for “premium” advertisement-skipping TV service, says sources is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many people have been cutting their cable thanks to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, but the reason many people are still glued to their cable subscription is that live sports are hard to find on anything other than cable, but that may change slightly, as cable providers are looking into cutting sports from their lineup in order to provide lower monthly cable bills.

You may have experienced your cable bill rising ever so slightly recently, and it’s a running joke that our cable bills keep getting more and more expensive, but that actually has mostly to do with sports programming. The fees that cable operators pay to offer sports networks have risen a whopping 113% over the last 10 years or so.

In 2012, cable providers paid regional sports networks an average of $2.47 per subscriber to carry their channels as part of their digital basic programming, which is up from $1.12 in 2002. This means that you’re paying almost $2.50 every month for a sports channel that you may or may not be using (fees for ESPN and ESPN2 was a combined $5.71 in 2012), and the odds are, you aren’t watching sports.

TV ratings company Nielsen found that only a measely 4% of households watch sports on average, but in order to offer an attractive lineup of channels to consumers, cable providers are still having to pay these fees that are being passed along to the consumer. However, cable providers are considering cutting down on sports networks in order to offer lower monthly bills for customers. Both AT&T and DirecTV have already begun doing this.

However, this could spell bad news for sports fans, as the cheapest cable plan may no longer consist of favorite sports channels, leaving these people to upgrade to a higher-tier plan and pay more money to get the sports channel they want. Of course, we talked in the past about how great of an idea it would be to have an a la carte option for channels, but we don’t see that happening anytime soon, if ever.

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal

Cable companies may lower bills by getting rid of sports is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.