Hasta La Gadget!

The banners aren’t even officially up in Vegas yet, and already we’re catching a drift of what all will be unveiled in the days to come. Take this Wireless Media Stick for example, which is HSTi’s way of telling you that a dedicated storage drive beside your Blu-ray player or media player is completely unnecessary. Put simply, this device (and the accompanying software, we presume) plugs directly into any USB-enabled disc player or media streamer that’s connected to your television; from there, you can easily stream media that’s already shacked up within your main PC to your TV-connected device(s), which cures the problem of having your media fragmented between varying drives. We’re still waiting to hear exactly what kind of technology this thing relies on (we’re guessing 2.4GHz), but hopefully we’ll find out more (along with a price and ship date) real soon.

HSTi Wireless Media Stick nixes the need for dedicated storage drives originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boxee’s media player software app promises to free us all from stinky, trashy preprogrammed television by bringing web video’s hassle-free, on-demand, click-to-watch experience onto our HDTVs.

The somewhat clunky alpha release of Boxee’s software has been around since the beginning of the year, but the company took a big step forward with its public debut of the amped-up beta version in early December.

The Boxee beta, which is currently invitation-only but will be made available to all as a free download during the Consumer Electronics Show the first week of January, improves the stability and the usability of the alpha significantly.

The company will be offering a dedicated set-top box next spring, but the software — which runs on almost any computer — is almost fully cooked. I’ve been testing the new Boxee beta on an Intel Mac Mini hooked up to my HDTV for a little over a week. Windows and Linux versions are also available.

While I’m not ready to tell the cable guy to stuff it (as much as I’d love to), my evenings have been filled with hours of streaming video pulled down from literally scores of online sources. The quality ranges from watchable to spectacular.

Loads of HD options

Most importantly, the software has opened up a treasure chest of possibilities for my HDTV: cooking shows, travel shows, underwater documentaries, Ze Frank, Cool Hunting, Star Trek and all sorts of classic movies. Normally, I’d have to sit at my desk or prop open a laptop to take in this stuff. But Boxee lets me enjoy it on the big screen while sitting on my couch.

Yes, there are many methods for putting web video on your TV, but Boxee is the most elegant solution I’ve seen. For the beta release, the whole user experience has undergone a slick redesign.

The new Boxee homepage delivers a global menu where you’ll find big icons for all the important stuff — Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Music, Photos and a local file-system browser (called simply “Files”). There are also direct links to your queue, Boxee’s settings and a “Now Playing” button that immediately takes you back to your full-screen video.

Click on one of the content libraries for TV or movies in the global menu and you’ll see a huge improvement in the way Boxee organizes your available content.

The TV show library, for example, now aggregates all available shows from the web and from your local machine. Since each show is listed in the library regardless of its source, you no longer have to go into various independent apps — Comedy Central, CBS, Hulu feeds, etc. — to find the shows you want. You just get a huge list. Sort it or filter it how you’d like. I found it useful to filter out shows that require a paid subscription (like those from Netflix) so I would only see the free streams.

Movies are handled the same way. Picks from Hulu are mixed in with documentaries from other sources and the local files on your hard drive.

Boxee’s homepage hub

The libraries are deep, but all roads lead back to the Boxee homepage. It’s your hub, and there’s always something fresh waiting for you there.

The global menu takes up the whole top of the homepage. Below it, a new three-column layout shows your personal queue, a feed of content recommended by your friends (”Feed”) and a stack of programming chosen by the Boxee staff (”Recommended”).

To get the most out of the Feed column, you have to follow some other users. As with Twitter, following is a one-way proposition. Boxee makes it easy to import your contacts from other services. I quickly added a bunch of friends, but since the Boxee user base is tiny, I didn’t get the flood of awesome suggestions I was expecting. The Boxee staff seeds the Feed daily with some cool viral videos, however, so even if you don’t “do” social networking (or if your friends are stooges), the Feed is still useful. Boxee says it will soon let you add suggestions from Twitter and Facebook friends to your Feed.

The Feed column contains mostly shorter clips from YouTube, but the picks in the Recommended column tend to be longer, feature-length videos or HD eye candy like slide shows from NASA and the Big Picture blog. By clicking around both columns, you can get a taste of what all the cool kids on the web are currently into.

The queue is the best part of the beta’s redesign. As you cruise around the various libraries within Boxee, you can add to your queue any bit of content that catches your eye. Then just fire it up and let the streams flow. After each video, you’re given the option to share it with your Boxee friends or move along to the next item in the queue. Click, click, click.

There isn’t much to say about the revamped Apps area other than that it’s been redesigned to make it easier to browse the available episodes within each channel. I actually spent less time browsing the content inside the Apps now that the TV library does such a good job aggregating videos from across the whole system.

Improved video playback

Video playback also has been improved. The expanded controls are easier to use, and the software is more responsive. You can use a regular handheld remote like the Apple remote to control playback, but it’s clunky. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone, get one of the free official or third-party Boxee remote apps, which are much more responsive.

The Windows version of Boxee has moved from OpenGL to DirectX, with full hardware graphics acceleration on Nvidia Ion chips. This makes it possible to play full 1080p HD videos on relatively inexpensive PC hardware. I did my tests by hooking my Intel Mac Mini (2007 model) to an Olevia 747i with a DVI-to-HDMI cable. So even if you have an older, slower machine and a big HDTV, you can run Boxee and get an excellent picture. It may not be true HD in all cases, but it still looks great.

Some of the full-HD streams (like Heroes and House) hiccupped while they played, but when I dialed down my resolution a step to 1280×768, the stuttering stopped. Getting surround sound from the Mini involved a painless hack.

Minor problems

One of the big problems I had with Boxee’s alpha release was stability: The menus would choke often, and the app would freeze a few times a day, requiring a reboot. The beta is much more stable. It still crashes, but far less frequently (and usually without requiring a reboot).

My installation of the Boxee beta had a hard time playing discs. I went through a stack of DVD-Rs filled with .avi files, and Boxee wouldn’t load any of them. Likewise with .avi and MP4 content streamed across my wireless network. I found it easier to drag the files onto the local hard drive, where they played flawlessly. Actual DVDs played OK most of the time, but the subtitles would sometimes switch on, and Boxee wouldn’t let me turn them off. In those cases, I would have to watch the DVD in Apple’s Front Row.

But Boxee’s goal isn’t to replace your DVD player — it’s to bring a wealth of streaming web video content to your couch. And in that role, it truly excels.

Sign up to download the free beta at Boxee.tv, and expect to see it released in early 2010.

Apple is planning to offer television subscriptions over the internet, according to multiple industry sources, and so far CBS and Walt Disney are considering the idea.

The subscription service would involve allowing customers access to some TV shows from participating networks for a monthly fee, anonymous sources have told The Wall Street Journal. The subscription content would presumably be integrated into the iTunes Store and iTunes-compatible hardware. Though Disney and CBS are rumored to be interested, the companies have not officially commented on their plans.

Assuming the rumors are true, a subscription model would be Apple’s second major move to seize the digital video market. The Cupertino, California, company introduced the Apple TV in 2007, which stores and plays video content downloaded through iTunes. However, Apple has repeatedly referred to the Apple TV as a “hobby,” implying the product has not made a serious dent in the entertainment market.

Also, the iTunes Store’s offering of video content pales in comparison to competitors’ catalogs. In March, Apple reported the iTunes Store had accumulated 40,000 downloadable TV episodes and 5,000 movies. Around the same time, Netflix, which offers a rental service in addition to streaming-video hardware, had amassed 100,000 DVD titles and 12,000 choices of streaming content.

Apple’s rumored subscription strategy, if successful, could reshape the TV industry by offering a compelling (and cheaper) alternative to the pricey bundles sold by television providers. However, it will be tricky for Apple to get TV networks on board, said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst who focuses on the consumer video market.

“It’s very hard to walk into these folks’ door and say, ‘I’m going to deliver revenue to you,’ when in the past few years they haven’t been able to do that,” said McQuivey, in a phone interview.

How could Apple persuade networks? The video-subscription strategy could work if Apple implements a streaming model, McQuivey said. That would involve allowing iTunes customers to stream TV shows without downloading them straight to their hard drives.

Studios typically prefer streaming technology over direct downloads. Streaming video is not only difficult to pirate; it also enables studios and networks to track their success. With streaming video, they can insert dynamic advertisements, create interactive experiences that can be measured, and report on success of promotional campaigns and content strategies.

McQuivey added that Apple could possibly offer to handle the bandwidth for streaming TV shows so that a subscription service could cost networks next to nothing.

“Apple could say, ‘We’ll pass revenue to you, and we won’t burden you with a single drop of cost,’” McQuivey speculated.

That would be a plausible gesture, since Apple is currently building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could handle the bandwidth required for streaming video. The corporation also recently acquired Lala, a music streaming service, whose infrastructure could be shared with video.

However, McQuivey noted that streaming is getting “dirt cheap” thanks to technological innovations, and it’s poised to get even cheaper — so Apple will have to think hard about how to sell the idea of a subscription service to enough networks in order for the model to ever come into fruition.

TV networks will be especially defensive against Apple, in light of the corporation’s takeover of the digital music market. For the first half of 2009, iTunes-purchased songs accounted for 69 percent of the digital music market; Amazon is in a distant second with 8 percent. iTunes also accounts for 25 percent of the overall music market — both physical and digital — according to research firm NPD Group. iTunes is slowly chipping away at CD, still the most popular music format with 65 percent.

“You can’t get away with that in the video industry because they watched what you did, Apple, with music,” McQuivey said. “[TV networks] are going to be looking for short-term deals and offering no exclusive for content. It’s going to be difficult for Apple.”

See Also:

• Why Apple TV Must Evolve to Avoid Extinction
• Apple’s Next Media Frontier Will Be Streaming Video
• What We Want in an Apple TV
• The 27-Inch iMac Is the New Apple TV
• 5 Reasons Why Apple TV Rules, 5 Reasons Why it Sucks

Photo: niallkennedy/Flickr

Continue reading Hulu to stream reality show internationally, incessantly

Hulu to stream reality show internationally, incessantly originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After taking some time in limited beta, Comcast has renamed its TV Everywhere streaming venture Fancast Xfinity TV and made it available nationally to all customers with internet and cable TV subscriptions. A simple browser plugin authorizes up to 3 computers per account, but now that it’s live we’ve found more has changed than just its unfortunate new name. Users won’t need to be at home to activate their computers for viewing; all that’s needed is a login and with plenty of cross browser compatibility it should work easily no matter your setup anywhere within the U.S. For us, the Comcast Access installer worked flawlessly on one Windows 7 equipped netbook while failing with an error message tech support couldn’t decipher on a similar desktop. Once up and running, there’s even some high-definition streaming video available (Juno, Max Payne, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary and others) with more on the way. All told there’s about 2000 hours of content online including HBO and Starz restricted items, peep the full list on Fancast.com or check out the setup and viewing process in our gallery below. Technical glitches aside, for the price of absolutely nothing over our current cable and internet bill with HD streaming already active, we may have a new way to keep up with our stories while on the go.

Comcast On Demand Online renamed Fancast Xfinity TV, now streaming nationwide originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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