Truly Free Media Center Software? Try Boxee.

“You are now free to be entertained.”

Who can argue with that?

On your laptop or connected to an HDTV, Boxee enables you to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music, and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.





You can vote for them -- if you agree they deserve it -- in lifehacker.com's five Best Media Center application contest.

Also - see my next post on the 21st about Netflix coming to Tivo, AppleTV, and ... Linux! Would you believe that???

Cybercast credit: Vimeo

HD TV / Web TV Now Playing on a PC Next to You

Livestation's claim to fame is that it features:

• The highest quality live HDTV viewing experience over broadband.
• The world's leading broadcasters and publishers
• All your favorite channels from the Web
• Its own stand-alone player that is always on top, so you can email, network, watch, and chat at the same time.




I get it. I don't do enough now. Digital convergence to the rescue! Thank you (NOT!!!!) Livestation!

What else?

Well, it forces you to download another player, only available for Intel Macs and Windows XP/Vista at this time. Mac PPC and Linux (Ubuntu) versions are in the works, we are told. No rush boyz and girlz!

YouTube and Ilk Challenge Broadcast and Cable HDTV

A growing number of digital video and ad providers are challenging TV's hold on visual quality with better technology and services. The quickened pace of High Definition TV deployment was expected to slow the exodus of viewers to online offerings.

This hasn't happened. Just the opposite seems to be the case. How come?

The reason this strategy doesn't appear to be working is that the online tv and video sites are also upgrading to HDTV quality web casting. And they have a built-in advantage: the cost is much less and the technology much more flexible, being mostly software based, than the (mostly) hardware based infrastructure necessary for the broadcast and cable companies.

Examples abound:

1. THE TOTAL NUMBER OF VIDEOS viewed was 10.1 billion during a record-breaking December 2007, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.

2. YouTube accounted for 3.3 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. in January.

3. Google sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3% share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points vs. the previous month.

4. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6%).

5. Yahoo! sites served 315 million videos (3.2%).

6. Microsoft sites came in with 199 million (2%) videos watched in January.

7. Vimeo, a video-sharing site owned by Barry Diller's IAC, began distributing user-generated videos in HD late last year.

8. The peer-to-peer Web TV powerhouse Joost also offers high-resolution content.

9. Just a few week ago, the NBC/News Corp. co-venture Hulu launched to the public with limited HD content, as one of the first tests of the new Adobe Flash Player, which supports streaming HD.

10.Rumors are also flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers.

BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti actually believes the Web is better suited for delivering HD content than TV. "HDTV penetration is just 33% of U.S. households, while right now advertisers can use HD content to reach over 65% of all Internet consumers." Sacerdoti says. BrightRoll is an online video advertising firm founded just two years ago in 2006.

The way I see it, as an ad serving company they must have the ability and the need to track video viewing statistics and trends very closely -- although I wonder how anyone can define trends on less than two years' worth of data.

MillionDollarWebTV.com Is Going HDTV

June, one of my partners in charge of marketing, showed the rest of us ignoramuses the latest statistics about high definition tv (yes, HDTV) and computer monitor sales some three months (eons?) ago. She was intoning, with a missionary's zeal:

"Digital convergence is now combining the functions of HDTV and computer monitors into one device, in the 16:9 screen dimensional ratio. Sales of these HDTV monitors are climbing fast, making the single function computer monitor obsolete. Here, watch what Robin Heron and Patrick Norton of Digital Life TV, affectionately known in geekdom as DL.TV have to say about everything HDTV:





So. What are YOU going to do about it???" she demanded to know.

We squirmed. (Not really.) "Good question. What do YOU propose we do about it???????" Million Dollar Web TV will be operational for 10+ years. What are we to do about it? We could / should / might / may:

1. Change the home station page ad grid layout to 1250 x 800 pixels.
2. Redesign the other pages to conform to this ratio.

So we have. Our developers outdid themselves - all in midstream of building the site. They probably - surely? - call me a slave driver. If that's what it takes… I can handle that… especially from thousands of miles away….

Broadcast credit: Google Video