Oct 03
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is working on a set-top box that will be ready in time for the holidays. And surprise, surprise, the lynchpin of this rumor is that Amazon has some major content deals in the works.
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Oct 03
There’s a collection of Amazon products on the way nearing the end of the year here in 2013, it would seem, with the winner for Most Likely to Appear First going to a trademark filing by the name of Amazon Firetube. This name will quite likely go to a product that’ll take cues from Google’s […]
Oct 02
Samsung’s Galaxy Gear may be in a committed relationship with the Galaxy Note 3 right now, but the Korean firm is considering integrating the smartwatch with future TVs, it has revealed. The wearable, which we reviewed earlier this week, could be used to collect and feed fitness and health information from viewers to their smart […]
Oct 02
Sky+ viewers have had advanced search through the TV service’s mobile app for a while. Starting today, they’ll get that experience through their set-top boxes. Sky is rolling out an update to Sky+HD receivers that introduces as-you-type search, with unified results that include both live and on-demand shows. The upgrade will take a few months to reach all subscribers, but the days of slow searches may soon be at an end.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Sky
Oct 02
Apple has taken on a new Engineering Director: Jean-Francois Mulé, from CableLabs, who’s an expert i
Posted in: Today's ChiliApple has taken on a new Engineering Director: Jean-Francois Mulé, from CableLabs, who’s an expert in IP voice and video, and TV apps. He claims to be "part of something big" at Apple. Make of that what you will!
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Oct 02
The stars have aligned in such a way that two of our favorite, yet disparate interests are crossing paths: gadgets and Slurpees. Hon Hai Precision Industry (better known as Foxconn’s parent company) has struck a deal with 7-Eleven, and will manufacture slates for the latter to sell in Taiwan. Details are slim on the 7-inch (7.11-inch?) tablet, but it’s now up for pre-order, and the pair hope to give 3,000 units new homes in the first three months of sales. As absurd as it sounds, this isn’t the first partnership between the unlikely couple. In June, a similar deal resulted in 7-Eleven-branded TVs (in 40-, 60- and 70-inch flavors), and over 15,000 have been sold since. Now, a 50-inch set has been added to the mix, and between five and ten new products — which include smartphones and laptops — will be available by years’ end. Rather than crowding the inside of shops with the gadgets, the televisions were up for order through the convenience store’s 7net website as well as brick and mortar locations, and it appears the other hardware will follow suit. We don’t expect the gas station to dabble in electronics stateside, so you might as well make the most of a trip to Taiwan and pick up a Honey Lemon Slurpee while you’re at it.
[Image credit: Nicky Fernandes, Flickr]
Source: Taipei Times
Oct 02
Give credit to the MediaPortal team for making swift progress: just a few weeks after revealing a pre-release build of MediaPortal 1.5, the group has released its finished software for download. As promised, the home theater PC client now supports CableCARD tuning for most channels outside of pay TV. The update also brings support for Windows 8.1, a directly integrated PowerScheduler++ feature and improved IPTV streaming. The only drawback is the end to Windows XP support, but we suspect that backward compatibility isn’t as much of an issue these days.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software, HD
Source: MediaPortal
Oct 01
Wondering why the BBC brought iPlayer downloads to just 11 Android devices, several months after iOS users got their turn? The broadcaster has just explained itself through a blog post detailing the Android app’s testing process. Like Netflix, the BBC had to focus its support on a handful of Android products in order to launch on time; this supports what we’ve heard from our own sources, who suggest that iPlayer development is normally arduous. To address as much hardware as possible on a tight schedule, the network conducted frequent, iterative tests that guaranteed compatibility relatively quickly. While the end result still leaves a lot of viewers without downloads, the BBC suggests that its testing process introduced the feature sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Whether or not you’re happy with the finished product, you can check out the corporation’s full methodology at the source link.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, HD, Mobile
Source: BBC Internet Blog
Sep 30
The time has come: As announced earlier this summer, Microsoft is shuttering MSN TV, a service it’s operated since 1997. Originally known as WebTV, the box (naturally) brought the internet to many a living-room set — it was something of a pioneer back in the day, really. Nostalgic types can still turn to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 for their browser-on-the-big-screen needs, of course, and MSN TV holdouts will want to switch their email addresses to Outlook and copy saved content to SkyDrive, stat. For more details, hit up the ultra-comprehensive FAQ page via the link below.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Via: GigaOm
Source: MSN TV
Sep 30
Now that Facebook has granted broadcasters access to your public wall posts, it wants to give them even more of your data — but anonymously this time. Zuckerberg and Co. told the Wall Street Journal it’ll supply the likes of ABC, NBC, FOX and others with detailed analytics on how much buzz a show is generating in terms of likes, comments and shares. It’ll mine that info from private postings as well public ones, though it said that the data will be aggregated without revealing anyone’s identity. Of course, Twitter and Nielsen have been supplying networks with such info for a while now, but Facebook claims its results are more meaningful, since viewers must ostensibly use their real identities. One CBS exec added that Facebook’s wider demographic also seemed to jibe better with actual audience numbers, meaning that programming could become less affected by tech-savvy types and more by your mom.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Facebook
Source: WSJ
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