Boxee will be showing off a prototype of its widely anticipated standalone set-top box at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, according to a source close to the company who asked not to be named, with commercial deployment slated for sometime in the first half of 2010.

Despite announcing just last week at NewTeeVee Live that it was still working with a consumer electronics partner on creating the so-called Boxee Box, our source says that the company will have it ready for demos at the industry trade show in early January.

The onus isn’t exactly on Boxee to deliver it — it’ll be up to an unnamed CE partner to build and manufacture the set-top box, for which Boxee is just providing the software. Even so, the kind of turnaround with which Boxee is expected to go to market is practically unheard of in the CE industry, and suggests that the company has been working on this project for an especially long time.

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The online video revolution will be televised, meaning that it will soon show up on TVs, Blu-ray players and other connected devices, a panel of execs agreed at the Future of Television event in New York on Thursday. But the content that’s available on those devices could affect how much consumers think they’re worth. As Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, put it, “Consumers will pay more money for a connected TV if it has premium video content.”

At the same time, there are some limitations to connected devices. In the short term, most of them carry the same content — Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand, YouTube, Pandora, etc. Zach Klein, chief creative officer for Boxee, said that’s because only so many content partners are willing to work with companies like his to distribute online video to devices.

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I have plenty of questions about the new Sungale Cyberus ID700WTA portable media player. Why does this device have so much trouble connecting to my wireless network? Why do my video clips continually skip and stutter when I’m playing them back? Why is the touchscreen so hard to use?

But most of all, why would anyone pay $279 for this device?

On paper, the Cyberus ID700WTA “Smart Info Engine” sounds great. It’s a portable media player/e-book reader with a big 7-inch color touchscreen. It plays back photos and videos, as well as audio tracks in a variety of formats such as AVI, MPEG4, DVIX, XVID, WMA, JPG, BMP, TIFF and PNG. It has wireless Internet access, and allows you to watch video from YouTube, listen to IP radio, check weather, get news updates and driving directions, check your Gmail, and look at photos from Picasa.

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UPDATED: The next iteration of Flip video cameras will reportedly be WiFi-enabled, allowing users to wirelessly upload their videos. Pocket Lint first broke the news, and CrunchGear claims to have confirmed it. This next-gen Flip will also reportedly have a slide-out screen that reveals the record and menu buttons underneath — the screen will not, however, be a touchscreen. Update: We had a chance to speak with a few Cisco/Flip reps this morning who said they had not confirmed this news and would not comment on any upcoming products.

The addition of Wi-Fi will would be a nice touch for the video camera, and an appropriate marriage with parent company Cisco’s networking tech. (Perhaps the Wi-Fi will even tie into the mysterious forthcoming Flip set-top box.) But the bigger question plaguing the entire Flip line is just how much life is left in a standalone product. Decent video-recording capabilities are being embedded in phones like the Droid, iPhone and iPod Nano. As we learned earlier this year, the video quality of the Nano doesn’t quite match up to the Flip cam yet, but that’s a big yet. Will people want to carry around a dedicated video camera when their phone will do just fine for capturing spontaneous moments?

When we’ve spoken with Flip reps in the past they’ve put on a brave face and said that there is enough room for lots of players in the space, but it’s hard to believe that. With multipurpose devices getting better at shooting video and the high-end HD cameras dropping in price, the better-than-good-but-not-great Flips are getting squeezed out.

The California Energy Commission just approved measures to ensure new televisions are energy efficient. The proposed standards have been a point of contention with the consumer electronics industry and Hollywood, and a decision had been delayed after extended comments from the Consumer Electronics Association.

The standards will apply only to new televisions sold in California starting in January 2011. Further, they are only for TVs 58 inches or smaller. TV makers, with the exception of Vizio, had opposed the measure on the grounds that they expect to make their TVs greener on a voluntary basis, and the regulation is overkill.

California also thinks that TVs are more of an energy suck than TV makers do; the CEC estimates they account for 10 percent of household power use while TV makers say it’s closer to 5 percent. The CEC says the measure will save 3,831 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2011, at a cost reduction of between $18 and $30 per year, per television.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 seems to be continually a day late and a dollar short compared with Microsoft’s Xbox. As we learned at NewTeeVee Live last week, today is the day that social features like Facebook and Twitter integration landed on Xbox LIVE. And the PS3? Well, in a corporate blog post yesterday [via PC World], Sony announced that it too is getting Facebook and Twitter. Kinda. From that post:

The latest update incorporates Facebook into the PS3 experience. By linking your PlayStation Network account to your Facebook account, you will have the option for the PS3 to automatically update your Facebook News Feed with Trophy and PlayStation Store activity. This update also enables developers to set specific criteria in their titles to publish additional game information to your News Feed. You can then check out your updates, and those of your friends, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media favorites through the PS3’s built-in web browser.

Like the PS3’s Netflix solution, which requires a disc to be played in order to connect to the Netflix streaming, Sony’s foray into social media doesn’t seem fully baked. While I’m still unsure about the current role of social media on game consoles, at least Microsoft included Facebook photo sharing on the TV and created a slick user interface for Twitter.

Sony’s social update will be here “soon.”

Chipmaker Amimon today announced the availability of its WHDI modules that can be used in both note-and-netbook PCs. WHDI-enabled PCs will be able to wirelessly transmit uncompressed 1080p/60GHz HD content to television sets with the WHDI chipsets. According to Amimon, together, the new solution enables users to view all of the content on their notebook on their TVs including web video, flash media, photos and PC games.

Of course, this blissful wireless pairing is heavily dependent on having a WHDI-based TV (though Amimon says that the new modules will work with non-WHDI TVs through an HDMI adapter). WHDI is one of many standards including Wireless HD, WiFi and WiGig that are all competing to be the dominant wireless HD standard.

Amimon has raised $50 million in funding to date and says that notebooks with the new WHDI modules will be in the market in 2010.

Dish Network has filed for trademark protection of “TV Everywhere,” as the satellite company is evidently looking to use the term for its upcoming Slingbox-enabled set-top box, reports Multichannel News.

“TV Everywhere” has become the industry’s go-to term for describing multi-service operators’ plans to make more premium TV content accessible online to those with a pay TV subscription. Though individual companies will have their own branded flavor of TV Everywhere, the moniker has become a catch-all.

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