After being acquired for a song by Arris in Sept., Digeo released the latest in a string of improvements to its product portfolio today, starting with an HD DVR that can stream live or recorded video to up to three rooms in a user’s home.

In the latest update to the Moxi brand of products, Digeo added a new three-tuner HD DVR, which will allow consumers to record up to three programs at once, while having the ability to watch a fourth recorded program. Or, when combined with the company’s Moxi Mate products, users can now watch up to three live or recorded shows from different rooms in the house.

The ability to stream live programming to the Moxi Mate is also a new addition, correcting one of the biggest things missing from the product. Prior to the latest release, users could only watch pre-recorded programs through their Moxi Mates.

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Have you ever wondered what goes on at your house when you’re not home? Thanks to Avaak’s Vue personal video network, it’s now easy to find out. This $299 kit features wireless video cameras that you can set up almost anywhere and view over the Internet. It’s incredibly easy to use, and the hardware is well-designed.

Avaak says the system is designed for a variety of uses, including keeping an eye on pets or elderly parents; monitoring vacation homes; checking in on latchkey kids; securing a small business; and more. And it’s so easy to set up that anyone can use it. Unfortunately, the web-based surveillance tools are too limited to be a truly useful remote security system; at this point you can only watch live video, though the company says it plans to add recording scheduling soon.

The kit includes two tiny wireless cameras and a wireless gateway that connects to your router. You just turn the battery-powered cameras on, press a button to pair them with the gateway, and you’re good to go. The four included magnetic mounts are so well-designed — they’re the shape of a ball, cut in half — they impressed me with their simplicity. They grab the camera and hold it securely; it really couldn’t be easier.

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That beautiful 1080p picture you’re enjoying? Well, you may as well just chuck it in the garbage, because Ultra High Definition is coming. Research firm In-Stat put out a report today saying that while it will take some time before the UHD market hits a critical mass of 5 percent household penetration, over the next five to 10 years, companies in the TV ecosystem will be able to experiment with business strategies to turn UHD into a strong business for the long haul.

UHD offers 16 times the resolution of Blu-ray along with 22.2 multichannel three-dimensional sound. Current proposals for UHD have the technology coming in two flavors: 7680 x 4320 pixels (8k resolution) and 3840 x 2160 pixels (4k resolution).

Based on its research, In-Stat predicts that broadcasters will begin offering UHD content to an addressable market of UHDTVs between 2017 and 2022. UHDTVs will approach 5 percent of European homes until 2021 and will then shoot up to 28.2 percent by 2025.

Many of you might have already been planning to dump your 2-D TVs when 3-D sets hit the market. Michelle Abraham, principal analyst for In-Stat, said during a brief phone chat that they expect 3-D TVs to hit the market first, but the 3-D peanut butter will get into the Ultra HD chocolate as the desire to create a more immersive experience will mean that UHDTVs will incorporate both 2-D and 3-D technology. And then your mind will be officially blown.

Flip video cameras are known for being stupidly simple, but the product’s migration to the big screen looks to be a pretty complicated affair, if what Dave Zatz is reporting is true. Flipping through FCC product announcements, Zatz found a “FlipShare TV” product manual.

From the looks of it, the set-up has three components: a box you plug into your TV, a remote control and a USB stick. Plug the USB stick into your computer and the box into your TV (via composite or HDMI) and wirelessly stream recorded video to your television. No other details, such as a ship date or pricing, were included. When we contacted Cisco for comment, a rep emailed us with:

We do not comment on alleged products coming to market. As with all our products, we will announce through proper disclosure channels when products are ready and available to our customers.

Granted, we know next to nothing about this supposed box, but it seems clumsy for the usually elegant Flip line. And while this product appears to be targeting families that want to share video easily and may not want to upload it to the Internet, do people really want yet another box under their TV for the sole purpose of watching home movies? Plus any simplicity you gain from not uploading is essentially lost when you have to use two separate devices. It would be cool to see Flip develop its own Roku channel and eliminate the extra set-top hardware. We’ll see if a formal announcement comes in time for the holiday season.

Apple released a software update for its Apple TV set-top box today offering a redesigned interface and support for iTunes LP and iTunes Extras on big screen TVs.

From the press release:

The redesigned main menu on Apple TV gives you instant access to your favorite content. Recently rented or purchased movies, as well as other content including TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube, are accessible directly from the new main menu.

Along with these nice new visuals, the update also lets users access Internet radio stations through their TVs, and some photo viewing enhancements, including the addition of iPhoto Faces, which uses facial recognition to organize photos. For more on the update, visit our sister site, TheAppleBlog.

An interface refresh is fine and all, but Apple will need to do something much more bold to set itself apart from the highly competitive over-the-top video space. The OTT on-demand rental market will hit $2.1 billion by 2014, and Apple hasn’t been innovating along with its competitors in the TV space. Television manufacturers are baking all kinds of widget functionality directly into the TV, the Roku is expanding its channel partners, and Netflix is getting on every TV-connected device under the sun…except for the Apple TV.

Of course, maybe Apple is bypassing the whole set-top thing entirely by turning its iMacs into TVs.

If you have tons — and I do mean tons – of multimedia content bogging down your computers, Iomega’s new NAS drive could be your storage solution. The StorCenter ix2-200 is a high-capacity, high-powered network hard drive that’s easy to use. It’s aimed at the pro-sumer and small business markets, and for good reason: The average home user may be overwhelmed with all the StorCenter offers.

Iomega’s ix2-200 is available in three versions: 1TB ($269.99), 2TB ($369.99), and 4TB $699.99). All of these are double drive products, meaning they have two hard drives stored in one enclosure. As such, the ix2-200 is thicker than your average network hard drive, but not egregiously so.

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Though the world got an unauthorized sneak peek at it last week via Engadget, Roku officially unveiled its new HD-XR player today, along with a new entry-level set-top box at a lower cost.

The new Roku HD-XR adds 80211.n wireless support (the regular HD Roku supports 802.11b and g). The new HD-XR also has a USB port “for future use,” according to a Roku rep. The Roku HD-XR will run you $129.99, with the existing HD player remaining at $99.99.

The company also today introduced the low-end Roku SD, which only supports SD streaming and has no HDMI, component, S-Video or Optical audio outputs, and costs just $79.99.

We haven’t had a chance to put the HD-XR through its paces yet, but you can enjoy these lovely product shots!

HD-XR with remote front

HD-XR back

Roku SD back

And don’t forget that Roku CEO Anthony Wood and I are having what will surely be a fascinating fireside chat at NewTeeVee Live on Nov. 12! Get your tickets today.

Available for pre-order tomorrow, The OWLE Bubo is a fun kit of hardware to add to your iPhone 3GS so you can upgrade video capture from the device. You could instead buy a nicer camera…but the iPhone is a pretty great, connected platform that’s already in quite a few pockets. For a $99.95 early adopter price, Bubo purchasers get an anodized billet aluminum device to encase and stabilize their iPhones, with a flash mount, four tripod mounts, a 37mm wide-angle lens and threading for other lenses, and a microphone.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based OWLE was only founded earlier this year and won the “Most Promising Startup” award presented by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ iFund at iPhoneDevCamp 3 this summer. The company says it has a “couple thousand units” ready to go, and that it plans to raise the Bubo price to $129.95 for later batches. When you’re talking that price range, there are some pretty cheap digicams out there that take great video out of the box…but what they don’t do is connect to the web and the iPhone’s ecosystem of applications. Check the video below to see what the final product looks like, both in front of the camera and used with the camera itself.