PS3 Joins the Facebook and Twitter Party
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.”
Amimon’s Notebook Module Enables Wireless PC to TV HD Transmission
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.
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The Web Series Universe Starts Coming Together Thanks to Too-Wacky Temp Life
- Editor rating:
- Premiere: November 2006
- Length: 6 minutes
- Schedule: Weekly
- Cast
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- Nick "Trouble" Chiapetta: Wilson Cleveland
- Nancy (Video Resume): Taryn Southern
- Stevie P. (Video Resume): Sandeep Parikh
- Crew
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- Co-Writer: Wilson Cleveland
- Co-Writer: Yuri Baranovsky
- Co-Director: Andrew Y. Park
- Co-Director: Jato Smith
For if you’re a true TV nerd, you might be aware of something known as the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, a theory which posits that the vast majority of network television from the past several decades takes place within the same universe, thanks to the multitude of crossovers and spinoffs that have occurred over the years. According to the Westphall hypothesis, Monica and Rachel from Friends live in the same fictional New York as the detectives on Law and Order and the Bunkers from All in the Family — plus, in their future lies the worlds of both Star Trek and Firefly. It’s a theory filled with contradictions and faults, but presents a fresh way of considering the various seemingly disconnected shows we all watch.
Despite the metatextual nature of new media, where stories are often being told in multiple formats across different platforms, no Westphall analog had really emerged in the web series world yet — until now. Two major crossovers come up in the fourth season of The Temp Life: First, struggling temp agency Commodity has been pushed out of its office space by a company owned by the hedge fund owned by the central company of Hedge Fund. (Fund creator/star Chris Murray makes a cameo in the first episode.) In addition, the central characters from the series Groupthink will guest-star in an upcoming episode. The result is an expanded universe that not only creates the sense that these shows, all created and produced independently, do not exist in a vacuum, but provides them an opportunity for greater exposure. Read more of this story
Movie Monitor: Find a Movie to Watch Online. That’s It.
Lately we’ve checked out sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week. But perhaps their pretty interfaces, organized channels and personalized recommendation systems turn you off. Maybe all you want is a simple database query of what movies are available online and how much they cost.
Enter Movie Monitor, a New York-based startup which just launched. Search for movies by title or genre, and you get a simple list of links to where they’re available to stream or download on Amazon On Demand, Blockbuster, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, and Vudu. The company says YouTube is coming; I also wouldn’t mind if it indexed libraries from sites and devices like EpixHD and ZillionTV, even if they’re a little harder to access (though not if you use one of the trials Epix gave our readers). But then, this is a no-frills service, and that’s the charm.
Streaming Media West Roundup: Internap, Ankeena, HD Cloud
Online video platform providers, CDNs and other media infrastructure companies have gathered in San Jose., Calif., this week for the Streaming Media West conference. Here are some highlights from vendors releasing news on Day One of the show:
Internap Updates Its CDN Offering
After a lengthy silence, Internap is announcing new features to its content delivery network that it believes will help make it competitive again. The features are primarily focused around improved ease of use for its enterprise customers, including new “set and forget” capabilities such as single-upload transcoding and continuous bitrate adjustment. The CDN has also been tweaked to leverage Internap’s Managed Internet Route Optimizer technology, which it claims delivers better performance by making sure that content is delivered from the right point of presence. Finally, the company updated its reporting features to provide more granular analytics.
While Internap has struggled to compete in the CDN market ever since it acquired the assets of Vitalstream two years ago, the company’s VP of marketing, Peter Evans, says the latest update may finally make the company competitive in CDN. “Now we have a product that we’re comfortable standing behind,” Evans said. “Do I think we’re going to go head to head with Akamai or Limelight? No. But I do think we can compete with them in an RFP, and I think we can go up against Nos. 3 through 50 in the CDN market.” Read more of this story
iPhone Video Streaming: A Must-Have Feature?
In just the few months since it was released this summer, Apple’s video streaming to the iPhone has become a part of many business plans. Two announcements were made on that front today:
Multicast announced full support for transcoding, managing, delivering and displaying content on the iPhone, both live and on-demand. However, the company’s customers tend to be corporate — from internal teams like investor relations, human resources and sales that put on live events — while the iPhone is still mainly a consumer device. Nevertheless, it’s useful to have your main online video platform provide extensions to all sorts of devices.
Meanwhile, Stickam, the live video community site, today launched an iPhone SDK of its own. The idea is that other companies, for instance partner 211me, which works with celebrities, can build their own iPhone apps that include Stickam live streaming and chat. 211me’s first Stickam-powered app will be for Twilight star Peter Facinelli. Competitor Kyte already simplifies this process even further, enabling stars and their entourages to make video apps for various mobile platforms.
In other recent iPhone video news, Brightcove pre-announced an iPhone SDK and Livestream added iPhone streaming last week at our NewTeeVee Live conference.
Vid-Biz: NBC, ABC News, Fliqz
NBC Launches Social ‘Communicator’ Tool; new ad-supported application allows users to watch full-length episodes of NBC programming, with built-in texting and unlimited VOIP calls. (paidContent)
CBS High School Sports Site Inks Deal With Comcast; MaxPreps.com will produce hundreds of short-form video features on local high school sports teams for Comcast’s Houston affiliate. (MediaPost)
Fliqz Launches Video SEO Product; new SearchSuccess tools will be sold as an add-on to the company’s Gold Edition hosting solution. (FierceOnlineVideo)
ABC News Partners With Ustream for Nightline Twittercast; anchors and correspondents from the show will participate in a half-hour web program once a week streamed by Ustream. (emailed release)
Cox Tests Dynamic VOD Ads With NBCU; the companies will dynamically insert ads against episodes of The Office and Monk that are viewed on Cox’s MyPrimetime video-on-demand service. (Multichannel News)
Tinychat Launches Ustream Competitor; the new Tinychat.tv service will allow users to share their live video conversations with anyone on the web. (TechCrunch)
Pirate Bay Tracker Really Shutting Down Now; founders want to encourage other BitTorrent sites to move away from torrents. (TorrentFreak)
NPD: Consumers Sticking With Entertainment Subscriptions
Newspapers and magazines may not be faring so well in this economic climate, but consumers are holding onto their entertainment subscriptions, according to a new survey from The NPD Group. The research firm says that monthly per-capita entertainment-content subscription spending rose to $115, which is up roughly 7 percent since last year.
As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribe to a TV service (cable, satellite, etc.), NPD found. The company also discovered that 14 percent of consumers subscribed to a home video subscription service like Netflix, up two percentage points from last year. Additionally, the increased smartphone adoption has bumped up the number of mobile data subscribers to 9 percent of U.S. consumers, up from 6 percent last year, NPD said.
YouTube Direct Launched to Bolster Citizen Journalism
YouTube has launched a new tool, called YouTube Direct, that aims to connect news organizations with citizen journalists producing web video.
Built on YouTube APIs, the tool will provide an easy way for news agencies to collect and broadcast clips that users submit for review. By adding a customizable upload button to their web pages, those organizations can solicit user-produced videos on a variety of subjects.
YouTube Direct provides another advantage for cash-strapped media companies: Because all videos are hosted on the YouTube site, participating companies don’t have to go through the trouble of building out the infrastructure required to ingest, encode, store and distribute videos that have been uploaded. Read more of this story
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