Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Although we have already seen the migration of YouTube video content into our living room TV. HP wants to up the notch a step higher by bringing you a better video watching experience with its HP MediaSmart Products that include the MediaSmart Connect digital media receiver and the high-definition MediaSmart TV.

Yes dear readers, with this tie-up between HP and YouTube, you will be able to watch and share full-screen videos on your HDTVs. You can also create multiple playlists from anywhere you watch TV. Even sweeter is the fact that just like the old habit of slacking on your couches and watching your favorite TV shows from morning till dawn, you can do all these things using your HDTVs remote control,. Only this time, you have a full YouTube video database to watch, which if you would calculate, could probably last you a lifetime to finish watching.

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Look who’s playing catch up with Apple’s iTunes?  Microsoft has confirmed the rumors that it will start selling TV shows in its Zune Marketplace, possibly to compete with the recently announced iTunes movie download offerings. For starters, Microsoft has sealed a deal with NBC, which incidentally is coming off the recent break-up with Apple’s iTunes.

Although Microsoft’s move maybe a little bit late, lagging behind Apple’s iTunes which started selling TV shows two years ago, Microsoft is confident that its Zune Marketplace will be able to make some headway over the iTunes especially now that one of iTunes biggest content providers has decided to move over to the Zune Marketplace. NBC and Apple had previously disagreed over pricing which caused NBC to stop offering their content in iTunes. 

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GodTube, a video sharing site for Christians is preparing to take their business to the next level.  According to paidContent.org, GodTube has secured $30 million in funding from hedge fund GLC Partners.  This funding augments the $2.5 they raised privately.

How popular is GodTube?  The company says it has 2 million visitors per month, compared to 138 million for YouTube last November.  Still, clearly this niche is growing.

For churches wishing to stream its services live to the net, the site offers subscriptions which adds to their advertising sales (both secular and religious).  The site also offers user-generated content and social networking feature to bring more of a community feeling to the site.  And their traffic is booming, leading the pack back in August of ‘07.  Each and every video is reviewed before posting.

Ah, the forces of good and evil at work on the web.

Read: [paidContent]

A recent purchase from a Best Buy of a PureDigital Flip camera offered a little more than you would expect from a standard retail version. This camera in particular was an open box item, and true to the word, you never know what to expect when you buy something that has already been used and returned.

In this case it was two stupid kids, who forgot (and when you read on its easy to understand why) to delete their footage before returning the camera. They left three videos which ran a total of about 40 minutes worth of footage on the camera of themselves smoking up. Hence the, making it easy to forget to delete the footage comment.

In what could possibly make the perfect anti-drug ad, or if at the very least should make you think twice about filming yourself doing something illegal, acts as nothing more than entertainment for the rest of us. While I was not able to sit through the nearly 13 minutes of footage uploaded by the new owner of the Flip, the first few minutes were quite entertaining, especially the parts when the camera was shaking due to the bass, not to mention their goofy attitudes. When will people learn not to film themselves doing illegal activities, I am sure this will make their parents more than proud. If you feel so inclined you can check out the videos over on Viddler.

Read [Skippy.net] Via [CrunchGear]

Here’s a cool service that shows how the union of mobile technology and entertainment industries can bring benefit to each other and ultimately to consumers. CinemaNow, and uVuMobile are making this possible with a new service that lets consumers preview movies on their mobile phones and then remotely download them to an internet connected device at home. I don’t know about you, but having this feature on my mobile phone is my idea of cool. 

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May 5 is a very crucial date for AT&T, as the company will begin offering their mobile TV service to 58 markets in the US, which include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, DC and more. To prepare for this new service, AT&T is also introducing two mobile handsets, the LG Vu and Samsung Access specifically to serve the purpose of providing AT&T customers a great experience when watching TV programs on their mobile phones. This service will be made available by AT&T in partnership with Qualcomm’s Media FLO subsidiary.

For its opening salvo on live mobile TV programming, AT&T will be offering TV programs produced by leading US news and entertainment brands including CBS Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Fox Mobile, NBC 2Go and more. What’s so interesting about these TV programs is that most of them are either news or entertainment programs.This was a result of an AT&T study which showed that these two genres are the most popular type of programs that users would want to watch on their mobile phones.

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Although Apple started offering customers movie rentals through iTunes back in January, some customers have found the service less than appealing because most of the movie titles, both from major film studios and independently produced titles, took much longer to be released as compared to DVD’s. Normally these new titles are released in iTunes 30-days after their DVD release. But Apple is pretty determined to get a sizeable share of the movie download market and possibly do what it was able to do with music downloads. Thus, it has officially announced that new movie releases can now be downloaded from iTunes on the same day that their DVD counterpart.

So, now we are talking. With the new service, iTunes customers would have access to new releases and catalog titles from major film studios including 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount and more. Customers can purchase new releases for $14.99 and most catalog titles for $9.99.

To kick off this service, iTunes has announced some new titles available for purchase this week, coming from its collection of around 1,500 high-quality films. These new titles include recently released in DVD formats - Juno, Cloverfield, I Am Legend and more.

Read [Apple]

Two legendary movie producers, Samuel Goldwyn and Jack Warner, are both credited with telling some studio underling, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”
It now appears that the men (and yes, it’s still mostly men) who now sit in the corner offices at the studios that Goldwyn and Warner built are sending a clear message to consumers: we’re willing to roll with the digital tide.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told those listening on his company’s earnings conference call that Warner Brothers will release movies to video on demand (VOD) on the same day they become available on DVD. And the Hollywood Reporter tells us Apple now has a deal with nearly all the major movie studios to sell new releases on iTunes at the same time they hit brick-and-mortar retailer’s shelves.

Corporations as big as Warners, Sony, Disney, et al don’t suddenly “get” this digital revolution thing; most of them have been experimenting with day-and-date releases in some form or fashion. They’ve been studying sales figures to determine just how much a digital movie release eats away at real-world sales. The answer, at least for Warners Brothers, appears to be only 3-5 percent; not enough, it seems, to continue the 1-2 month window that has traditionally existed between DVD release and a movie’s appearance on your Comcast, Time Warner or Apple TV digital service.

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While we have heard the rumors, it now looks like it will soon be official. During a recent conference call, the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings announced that because Blu-ray discs cost more money to purchase, that they need to charge a higher rental rate for them. He also went on to state that “consumers are used to paying more for high-definition.”

Personally I think consumers are used to paying more to own high-definition, I am not so sure how eager they will be to pay more to rent it. Currently Netflix has a small amount of subscribers who choose Blu-ray over standard DVD’s and with a price increase it seems that small percentage will remain small.

While the statements from Hastings seemed pretty clear that the price increase was going to happen, there has not been any official statement as to just how much the increase will be. As for when it will take effect, customers can expect to see it “later this year.”

Via [Crave]

With Hulu fresh out of the private beta status, there are now talks that they are looking to expand to other platforms, such as mobile phones. Overall it seems like a logical place to go and although Hulu CEO has made some comments they have been pretty generic up to this point. During the recent NAB video production expo, Jason Kilar was quoted as saying that “anything connected to the Internet” would be a possible match in the future, he also briefly mentioned the possibility of cellphones but failed to commit to any specific platform or device.

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