Many consumers have figured out they can save a bundle by cutting out cable/satellite service in favor of streaming media. Hulu Plus, for example, runs $8 per month and gives you access to many of the same TV shows that appear on cable TV networks, including extended director's cuts of sitcoms like Parks and...Read more...
Despite a horrendous first half by the San Francisco 49ers, the Super Bowl turned into a nail biter and almost sparked talk of "Powergate" following a power outage (and subsequent delay) that shifted the momentum. The Baltimore Ravens were able to hold on, however, living up to their billing as a team of destiny. But...Read more...
Wondering what you can expect from Hulu in 2013? The streaming video service answered that question today by releasing a handful of trailers for new original and exclusive programming, including its first animated original series called The Awesomes. Co-created by Saturday Night Live's head writer Seth Meyers and SNL alum Michael Shoemaker,...Read more...
Exposing one of the troubles inherent with cloud computing, Netflix on Christmas Eve coughed up a hairball and left its paying subscribers without streaming video service until the next day. The outage affected subscribers in Canada, Latin America, and the United States. According to Netflix, the fault belongs to...Read more...
Netflix investors are apparently keen on the idea of a Microsoft takeover. How so? Following online chatter that Microsoft may be making a move to acquire the video streaming and DVD-by-mail rental service, shares of Netflix jumped by more than 13 percent. The spike in share price, which sits at $69.58 heading into...Read more...
With zip, zero, and zilch ballyhooing from Apple, Hulu today made its premium Hulu Plus app available on Apple TV. Hulu Plus joins the likes of Netflix, YouTube, and other popular streaming services already available on Apple TV, adding the hardware device to its portfolio of supported products that include Roku, various tablets, PlayStation...Read more...
It doesn't matter if you're a Mac fanatic or if you're anti-Apple to the core, there's no denying the Cupertino company knows how to market and sell a product to the masses. Steve Jobs, if nothing else, created a consumer culture where iDevices are in such high demand, people will line up for blocks to purchase the newest iPhone or iPad tablet....Read more...
YouTube announced a new face blurring feature that makes it easy for video uploaders to obscure faces when a level of privacy is needed. It's a bold step forward for YouTube, which is the first video sharing site to offer such a feature. In fact, no consumer hardware manufacturer currently offers a face blurring...Read more...
VideoLAN's VLC Player is considered by many to be the best media player on the planet. Well, the best just got better with the release of VLC 2.0.2, which VideoLAN classifies as a "major update that fixes a of regressions of the 2.0.x branch of VLC." Mac fans will be happy to know that one of those fixes includes Retina Display support. In...Read more...
Give it another couple of generations and America's young folk will think of DVDs the way the current generation thinks of VHS. DVDs are a dead format in the making, and they've already begun their march down death row. Find that hard to believe? Consider this -- according to IHS Screen Digest, in 2012 Americans will...Read more...
You can't very well call yourself a power user if you don't have VLC installed on your desktop system, the popular media player that will play anything nearly anything and everything you throw at it. Wouldn't it be rad if VLC was available on Android? The answer is 'yes' and, to an extend, VLC for Android has arrived. It's an unofficial build,...Read more...
Do you want to know why Google forked over a whopping $1.65 billion in stock to acquire YouTube a little over five years ago? It's because the sultan of search recognized back then that YouTube had the potential to be more than just a hub for crappy quality home videos. Either Google was right, or YouTube viewers simply don't care about quality....Read more...
We'll admit it, the Internet's a better place because of YouTube, the online video sharing site acquired by Google in 2006 for a cool $1.65 billion. YouTube, which turns six today, has its flaws -- what six-year-old doesn't? -- but for the most part, we still find ourselves watching the occasional video. We're far from alone. In celebration...Read more...
The Android Market now has movie rentals. One problem for those who take the popular step of rooting their devices: those devices can stay home, as they won't be able to view any of the movies. End users attempting to rent a movie from the Android Market even get a clue as to why, based on the specific error message they receive: "Failed to...Read more...
Google has decided to renege on its promise to support both H.264 and open source codecs in its Chrome browser, dropping support for the former and vowing to completely back the latter. This change will take place in the next couple of months, the search giant said in Chromium blog post. "We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media...Read more...
You can add another product to this growing list of media devices that play content on your TV: the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 digital media player. The O!Play is a relatively small (1.9x7.1x4.9-inches), unassuming black box with rounded corners. It doesn’t have any onboard storage, but is designed to connect with media stored on attached drives or...Read more...
Perhaps one the more significant defining digital attributes of the first decade of the the 21st Century could be the size of the ginormous digital media collections so many of us have amassed--media collections made of up a disparate assortment of video, photos, and audio files from a wide variety of sources. The advent of digital...Read more...
If you are old enough to remember what MTV was like back in the 80's, then somewhere in the far recesses of your mind--sandwiched between memories of Pet Rocks and scrunchies--you once knew that when MTV first launched, "MTV" actually stood for "Music Television." With seemingly back-to-back reality shows and teen dramas now, you'd think that...Read more...
Today's Web search engines are driven primarily by searching for text keywords. This works fairly well when what you are searching for is words; but it fails pretty miserably when you are searching for video. Video search is almost entirely dependent on someone taking the time to manually (and accurately) add text tags to videos to make them...Read more...
It was only a month ago that we reported how various police departments are setting up systems for receiving anonymous tips via text messaging to help solve crimes. Now the New York City Police Department's (NYPD) Commissioner, Ray Kelly, is embracing another social media technology to help police solve crimes: asking people upload "video...Read more...
For the month of May, comScore reports that U.S. users watched over 12 billion videos over the Internet--a 45 percent increase in the number of videos viewed online a year ago. Not surprisingly, YouTube garnered the lion's share with almost 35 percent of May's videos viewed online--that's roughly 4.1 billion YouTube videos watched just in...Read more...
A common knock on the wildly popular Guitar Hero console gamer is that it's a shame that people don't just learn how to play the guitar instead. It's easier to play the actual guitar than many songs on Guitar Hero on its most challenging setting, after all. Perhaps the critics were wrong about Guitar Hero siphoning off interest in the actual...Read more...