E. Stephen Mack announced the latest addition to the TiVoCast lineup, Barely Political. From their ‘about us‘ page:

BarelyPolitical.com puts up weekly videos. Our debut video, Crush on Obama, was recently named one of 2007’s 10 best videos by Newsweek, People Magazine, the AP and YouTube.

As always, you can subscribe online or on your TiVo in TiVo Central -> Find Programs -> Download TV & Movies.

The official press releases go out in the morning, but Dave Zatz of Sling Media dropped me an email to let me know about two new products. I also spoke to him by phone to clarify a few points and to get some additional information. First is the Slingbox PRO-HD, pictured here. As the name implies, it is a new version of the Slingbox PRO which supports HD streaming.

It has been fully updated. The internal tuner is now digital and supports ATSC and clear QAM. It no longer needs the HD Connect cable, instead it has integrated component video inputs, like the Slingbox SOLO. It also has a coax digital audio input and can stream 5.1 audio. (There is no optical digital input.) The biggest change of all is the ability to stream content at resolutions of up to 1080i, bandwidth allowing. All current Slingboxes stream at a maximum resolution of 640×480 progressive. Speaking with Dave, he believes it will stream at the resolution fed to the box (up to 1080i), so a 720p source will be streamed at 720p. And these HD streams are also available remotely for those with fast enough broadband connections, such as the higher end FiOS service options.

Not only will it stream HD content to the SlingPlayer clients, but it will also stream HD to the forthcoming SlingCatcher - more details of which will be coming soon. The Slingbox PRO-HD is slated for a 3Q2008 release with an MSRP of USD$399.99, so start saving those pennies today.

The other product announcement is SlingPlayer Mobile for Blackberry. Unlike the Slingbox PRO-HD, which has been a well kept secret, the BlackBerry software has been a known project. Sling will be demonstrating SlingPlayer Mobile on the Blackberry Pearl 8120 at CES. It is similar to the existing SlingPlayer Mobile clients for Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Symbian, and will support viewing over 3G cellular networks and WiFi. SPM for Blackberry will be available later this year with an MSRP of USD$29.99.

Sling has more news yet to come when CES kicks off Monday. Though if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog you might have a good idea of what to expect.

EDIT: Engadget got some hands-on time with both products and have more photos.

The CES press releases keep rolling, and both Broadcom and ViXS have announced new chips which have direct applications in the DVR market. This is particularly interesting to me as TiVo has been using Broadcom SoCs since the second spin of the Series2, right up through the TiVo HD, and in the TiVo HD they also began using a chip from ViXS. So the capabilities of these new chips could indicate potential features in future TiVo models.

Broadcom’s BCM7335 SoC is aimed at satellite DVRs, of the sort used by DirecTV, DISH Network, and other satellite services worldwide.

The BCM7335 is Broadcom’s next generation satellite set-top box system
on a single chip manufactured in the 65nm process. It integrates a dual
tuner/demodulator from the BCM4506 front-end device and the latest
generation of AVC decoders that supports multiple video formats.

It operates on a dual-threaded MIPS(R) CPU core running at 450 MHz
resulting in over 950 DMIPS in performance. The BCM7335 is designed to
support UMA and non-UMA memory architectures, utilizing a 400-MHz clock, 32
+ 16-bit wide double date rate (DDR2) memory interface for enhanced
performance and allows cost effective memory implementations.

The BCM7335 supports several interfaces for TV output on-chip that is
integrated on-chip including the HDMI, baseband composite, component or
S-Video, and incorporates Broadcom’s advanced 2D graphics engine that
enables true studio-quality text and graphics, efficiently using its memory
and bandwidth.

While this chip is aimed directly at satellite, normally Broadcom will also release other family variants which are targeted at cable and other sources.

ViXS has announced two new chip families, the XCode 3290 SoC and the XCode 3106/3108/3111 companion chips. The TiVo HD currently uses the XCode 2115 companion chip.

    XCode(TM) 3290 Features:
    ----------------------
    - 400 MHz Dedicated Application Processor
        -  Multi-processor architecture
        -  Availability of additional processing power via multi-processor
           architecture
    - Multiple Integrated Peripherals
        -  Dual Ethernet, Dual SATA, and Dual USB ports
    - Multiple Interconnects:
        -  PCI, PCIe, and Host Bus Interface (HBI)
        -  DDR2 and NAND Flash
    - Multi-stream HD/SD Video Transcoding, Decoding and Encoding
        -  MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 Part 2, MPEG2, VC1
        -  Bitrate Reduction, Resolution Reduction and Format Conversion
        -  High-speed Transcoding up to 16x real-time
        -  Support for iPOD, iPOD Touch, iPhone, PSP and other portable
           device formats
    - Fully integrated security
        -  Cable Card, Smart Card and DVB Common Interface (DVB-CI)
        -  Multiple Encryption and Decryption Engines (including 3DES and
           AES)
        -  Multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme support

    XCode(TM) 3111 Features:
    ------------------------
    -   Integrated Peripherals:
        -  USB, UARTs, Transport Stream in/out
    -   Interconnects:
        -  PCI, PCIe, and Host Bus Interface (HBI)
        -  DDR2
    -   HD/SD Video Transcoding, Decoding and Encoding:
        -  MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 Part 2, MPEG2, VC1/WM9
        -  Bitrate, Resolution and Format Conversion
        -  High-speed Transcoding up to 10x real-time
        -  Support for iPOD, iPhone, PSP and other portable device formats
    -   Software Applications:
        -  Time-shifting (View and Record)
        -  Place-shifting (Remote TV)
        -  WebCam
    -   Fully integrated security:
        -  Cable Card, Smart Card and DVB Common Interface (DVB-CI)
        -  Multiple Encryption and Decryption Engines (including 3DES and
           AES)
        -  Multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes support

And the chips continue to gain power and capabilities, vendors such as TiVo will have an easier time incorporating additional features in their products. Chips like these will make it easier to support additional video formats, play Internet video, transcode video to shift to other devices, incorporate place shifting, etc. It is basically a given that these chips will be in new products, though given product development time lines it may not be until late this year or even 2009, but it will be interesting to see which new products they power, and what those products bring to the market.

Another CES press release, this time the WirelessHD consortium is announcing the release of the 1.0 version of the WirelessHD, or WiHD, specification. The consortium consists of Intel Corporation, LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), NEC Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, SiBEAM, Inc., Sony Corporation and Toshiba Corporation. Initially announced in October 2006, the specification is finally ready for use in consumer products. WiHD uses unlicensed 60GHz spectrum to transfer data at speeds of 4Gbps to stream HD video wirelessly between devices in the home. It is intended to provide a standardized way to wirelessly connect HD source devices - DVRs, Blu-ray players, HD DVD players, cable STBs, etc - to HD displays, replacing wired connections such as HDMI. It would additionally allow users to view HD content on portable displays, within the range of the transmitter.

We may see WiHD in devices later this year, but it isn’t the only proposed system for wirelessly connecting HD displays. But with the backing from major vendors WiHD has, it has a good chance of becoming the de facto standard.

The press release:
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