Roxio Monday launched Toast 10 Titanium for Mac OS. This new update to Toast adds a number of features, but most significantly for Mac OS users it includes an implementation of ‘TiVoToComeBack’, video transfers to a TiVo, which they’re calling Mac2TiVo. This has been sorely missing from any official solutions for Mac OS using TiVo owners.

Toast 10 Titanium also includes AVCHD Archive, which makes it easy to burn content form HD camcorders to BD or DVD, Web Video To Go, which allows users to grab video from websites to save locally or transfer to portable devices, place-shifting support which streams content from the Mac to a Streamer application on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and a number of others.

Toast 10 Titanium goes on sale today at http://www.roxio.com/ for $99.99, with special pricing at MacWorld Expo January 5-9. The High-definition/Blu-ray Disc (HD/BD) plug-in, which is required to author BD discs and is normally $19.99, is available free to those who purchase Toast 10 Titanium from http://www.roxio.com/ through February 5, 2009. Toast 10 Titanium Pro is also available for $149.99.

Press release:
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DivX has come full circle, what started out as a reverse engineered version of Microsoft’s non-compliant implementation of MPEG-4 Version 3 over ten years ago with DivX 3.11 is now a full-featured product based on H.264 (aka MPEG-3 AVC) with the release of DivX 7. It sounds like DivX 7 is a full featured H.264 application, including support for advanced file formats such as Matroska (.mkv) which has been growing increasingly popular for online video distribution as it allows for packaging of multiple video, audio, subtitle, etc, streams in one file.

Along with the new player and new feature support comes a new DivX certification, the DivX Plus Certification. Hardware vendors who certify their products at this new level will support the new DivX 7 formats, while older DivX Certified products will likely only go as far as the DivX 6 equivalent.

The press release:
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Broadcom has partnered with Adobe to embed Adobe Flash Lite 3 into several of their latest System-on-a-chip (SoC) platforms for TVs and STBs. This will allow vendors who use Broadcom’s chips to easily add Flash support to their products. Along with announcing the chips, 2Wire announced that their recently launched MediaPoint digital media player is one of the first products to use the BCM7405 - one of the Flash-enabled chips. The 2Wire MediaPoint is the first STB that supports Blockbuster’s broadband VOD service.

The first four SoCs to be Flash-enabled are the BCM3549, BCM3556, BCM7400 and BCM7405. I find this intriguing as the BCM7405 looks like a newer generation of the BCM7401 which is the main chip in the TiVo HD. It has basically the same features - plus more: Flash support, DivX support, faster CPU core (400Mhz vs. 300MHz), etc. Makes me wonder if maybe this could be used in TiVo’s rumored ‘Series4′ model. But that’s just idle speculation.

With the announcements from LG, Samsung, Roku, and now this, I think one of the major trends this year is getting Internet/broadband content onto the TV screen.

The press releases:
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The Huffington Post is running a column by Jack Myers entitled The TiVo Imperative: Educate and Entice Viewers to “Want to Watch” Commercials and New TV Series. It is about the erosion of ad viewing as DVR use increases, and the urgent need for TV executives and marketers to address this looming crisis through new and creative marketing efforts. And the focus is, unsurprisingly, on TiVo, including a strong push to use TiVo’s unique advertising offerings:

In this context, I am urging marketers and TV executives to adopt The TiVo Imperative. For marketers, commit a small percentage of your TV advertising budgets, and for TV programmers, commit a small percentage of your promotional budgets with TiVo to engage DVR-users and educate them to want to click their remote to watch advertising and to test-view new TV series. The multiple options and research capabilities that have been developed and implemented by TiVo make it the most viable option available for marketers and networks to begin addressing the imminent crisis facing the industry.

And for TiVo owners there was an interesting piece quoting TiVo CEO Tom Rogers:

Rogers believes “there are many ways to catch the viewer’s eye to entice them to click into an ad. There are many ways to engage the fast forwarding viewer: with tags, with full screen billboards, with entry off the user interface, with insertions when a viewer is asked if he wants to delete a show when he is finished watching… any of which can lead to incredibly effective advertising. There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control.”

I’m especially interested in that last sentence: There are many more forms of inventory to come, including making product placement immediately actionable right off the remote control. That sounds like what I’ve been saying TiVo should do for a long time, most recently when they announced the ‘Product Purchase’ feature with Amazon. I think it should be something the user can enable and disable at will, but I think it would be interesting to be able to get more information on products that appear in a program and purchase them if wanted. The example usually cited is to be able to buy outfits worn by the characters - but I’m a typical geek. I own several nigh-identical pair of black Timberland hiking boots, several pair of nigh-identical black denim pants, and an assortment of T-shits and polo shirts. A GQ model I’m not.

Personally I’d be more interested in the music I hear in shows. I love music, and I often hear songs in shows and ads and wish it was easier to track down the artist and check out more. Even when shows include the “Music in this episode by” tag at the end I admit I rarely manage to jot down the info and then track it down later. But I’m a sucker for impulse buying, they’d definitely get me with a link to iTunes or maybe the Amazon music store to download. (CD’s are just an inefficient transport mechanism to get the music into iTunes for me.)

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, read the entire article.

Amazon is running a huge Blu-ray sale - Buy Two, Get One Free with 247 titles to select from! That’s one of their largest sales in a while, so if you we lucky enough to get a Blu-ray player for the holidays, this is a good opportunity to pick up some content.

I reported on the release of SuperSync 2.3 back in April, but now version 3.03 is being announced in conjunction with MacWorld. SuperSync is an iTunes library manager for PC, Mac, and iPod.

SuperSync makes it easy to create a main library, and have a subset on computers and laptops around the house. By offering an easy way to visually compare and merge multiple iTunes libraries, all music, movies, and playlists can be synced across all devices. Any new content that is added on one computer can be uploaded to the master library.

Use SuperSync to:
* Keep track of all music across multiple computers - Mac OS X, Windows, and iPod
* Compare and merge any two music libraries
* Move music, videos, and playlists from one iTunes library to another
* Export all or a subset of a library as a well-organized directory of tracks
* Find partial albums, duplicates, missing tracks, corrupt files, and other common music library problems
* Intelligently import media from a hard drive, iPod, or network drive without duplicates
* Easily move a music library from Windows to Mac, Mac to Windows, or any combination
* Access a home music library from anywhere - upload/download songs, movies, and playlists
* Share a common library with multiple iTunes users on a network drive
* Access your MP3’s and playlists from Tivo

More information in the full release.

Back in October Comcast started rolling out Tuning Adapters, and Time Warner was offering pre-orders, but it looks like it is spreading.

Yesterday Hank, a reader from Spencer, MA, contacted me to let me know that he’d received a notice in the mail from Charter that they will be switching to SDV on February 2, 2008 and that, as a TiVo user, he could claim a free Tuning Adapter on or after January 5th. Spencer is very close to my home in Worcester, MA, where I also have Charter. I haven’t received the notice yet, but it may well be waiting for me when I return from CES next week. I’m kind of hoping it is, I’d like to get some hands-on experience with the Tuning Adapter to see if it works as well as promised.

And today TVBarn.com is reporting that Time Warner has begun deploying Tuning Adapters in Austin, TX.

It is about time, but it is nice to see this finally getting into the hands of TiVo users to allow them to tune SDV content.

The $100 Roku video player, often referred to as the Roku Netflix Player, or just the Netflix STB, will have to change its reputation. No longer just a client for Netflix streaming, Roku is adding Amazon Video On Demand to the system. That’s certainly a nice bonus for those who’ve purchased the system as Amazon VOD has an extensive library of newer content which is generally missing from Netflix. Unlike TiVo, which offers Amazon content as download-to-view, the Roku box will stream the video.

Picked up from Gadget Lab at Wired.

LG isn’t the only one souping up their HDTV models, Samsung is getting in on the act too. While LG is partnering with Netflix for streaming video, Samsung is partnering with Yahoo! for a wider variety of web content. Samsung will be embedding the Yahoo! Widget Engine into some of their new 2009 HDTV models. This enables the TV’s to run ‘TV Widgets’ written with XML and JavaScript, branded as ‘Internet@TV - Content Service’.

The TV’s can be networked with their built-in Ethernet ports or via a USB WiFi adapter. The TV Widgets will come from Yahoo! properties such as Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather and Yahoo! Finance as well as third parties like USA TODAY, YouTube, eBay and Showtime Networks. They claim it will be extended to include video streaming and other content.

The most interesting piece of this, I think, is that the platform is open to 3rd party developers to create their own TV Widgets. It sounds like interested developers will be able to create their own widgets and provide them to Samsung TV users with an open market. And I suspect Yahoo! will be looking to license this platform to other vendors as well.

In addition to the features reported in their press release, last week Electronista spotted a post in AVForums.com that Samsung’s new HTDVs would also have some very interesting network content support:

# Now supports playback of movies in the following formats upto 1080p: MKV/ WMV/ VOB/ AVI/ TS/ 3GP/ MPG/ ASF

# Now supports the following video codecs:

* XviD
* DivX 3.11/4.x/5.1/6.0/
* H.264 BP/MP/HP
* MPEG-1
* MPEG-2
* MPEG-4 SP/ASP
* Motion JPEG
* Windows Media Video V9
* VC1

That’s quite extensive format support. Models in the 7, 8, and 9 series will also be DivX Certified with support for DivX Video On Demand.

Press release:
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A year ago LG Electronics announced a deal to bring Netflix streaming content to their set-top boxes, which materialized on the BD300 Blu-ray deck. Now LG and Netflix are taking it one step further, by enabling streaming right to new LG HDTV models.

The new ‘Broadband HDTVs’ will support HD Netflix streaming directly over their built-in Ethernet connections. These new LCD and plasma HDTVs, along with five new Blu-ray players and home theater systems, will join the BD300 in LG’s Netflix-enabled lineup.

The press release is below:
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