Since my last TiVoCast post there have been a number of changes. For some reason they’ve dropped the groups for KoldCast content that had been there. So now all of the KoldCast shows are listed individually. When this happened it also seems to have dropped all my Season Passes, so if you were signed up for any you might want to check on yours. The shows broken out now are After Judgment, Crusty Demons, duder, Gemini Rising, Let It Be Heard, Poor Paul, The In-Betweens of Holly Malone, The Sexually, and TV Face.

New KoldCast shows added to the lineup are Average Betty and In The Can. According to a KoldCast press release there are more shows coming to TiVoCast: The Crew, The Hayley Project, Invention with Brian Forbes, and Miles & Ben. More details are in the release.

Also joining the TiVoCast lineup, and not from KoldCast are Entertainment Weekly and National Geographic Channel.

Unfortunately, it looks like jPod was dropped from the TheWB.com shows available via TiVoCast. Shame, I really enjoyed that one.

With all of these shoes you can subscribe online or on your TiVo via TiVo Central -> Video on Demand -> Browse free videos -> All

While I was visiting TiVo’s suite at CES, TiVoShanan was there filming the latest episode of The Badoop Badoop Show, and she spent a few minutes talking to me. A short bit of that conversation missed the cutting room floor - I’m at the end of the current episode, at about the 6:49 mark.

Back in August of 2007 Blockbuster jumped into digital movie distribution by acquiring Movielink. However, they’ve failed to set the world on fire with their digital distribution service, trailing far behind Netflix, Amazon VOD, and CinemaNow. CinemaNow has enjoyed a major resurgence since Sonic purchased them in November, and it seems Blockbuster has taken notice.

Blockbuster is partnering with Sonic to bring Blockbuster branded video services to consumers, including the existing CinemaNow content service. It sounds like win-win for Blockbuster and Sonic. Blockbuster gets a successful service which already has a number of deals with consumer electronics vendors, which Sonic gets the Blockbuster brand, which is still a fairly strong brand in the video rental market. It is also a pretty good deal for the CE vendors who have already made deals to bring CinemaNow content to their devices, as they get the strong Blockbuster brand.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing the Blockbuster brand on TiVo, since they currently use CinemaNow for Disney content, and more content is expected.

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Slipping a little non-CES news in here, Amazon has a few deals on VOD content. First up are $0.99 rental deals on independent films: The Signal, The Host, Broken English, Jesus Camp, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

There is a $5.99 digital movie sale with 43 titles. That’s $5.99 to own, not rentals.

And finally, Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Resident Evil: Extinction are all $7.99 each to own, 50% off.

Sonic, the owners of CinemaNow, have released a new CinemaNow SDK to make it easier for 3rd party vendors to build CinemaNow support into their devices. Along with this, Sonic is working with a number of vendors to bring CinemaNow content to consumers through new channels. This includes the recently announced deal with LG Electronics, the Nintendo Wii (in Japan), a Widget Channel that is part of Yahoo! Internet@TV, and more. It sounds like Sonic is really looking to breathe new life into CinemaNow, which they just acquired last November. CinemaNow had been on the fast track to being an also-ran to Netflix and Amazon VOD, but it really seems to be picking up steam under the new ownership.

Press release:
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NETGEAR is launching two new Internet-connected set-top boxes to bring Internet media to the TV. The Internet TV Player, ITV2000, is just larger than a pack of cards but it packs in a ton of features. Without the need for any PC or Mac, all native, it provides access to a slew of Internet content sites:

It streams content from popular sites such as BBC.com, CNN.com, ESPN.com, EuroSport.com, NBC.com, PGATour and TMZ.com, as well as video powerhouses YouTube, Google Videos™, Yahoo Videos™ and MetaCafe™. NETGEAR’s Internet TV Player supports streaming of live TV broadcasts from Internet sites around the world, and premium, paid movies on demand such as CinemaNow.com, in addition to downloaded videos from sites such as BitTorrent®. Its superior VTap™ video search capabilities enable the intelligent search of Internet videos, including targeting video sites by country, topic of interest, person or popular website. Consumers are also able to play video, music, and photos from a local USB flash drive as well as from the NETGEAR ReadyNAS® family of storage solutions.

And it does all this with an MSRP of $199 - that’s sounds like a pretty good price for a box that does all of this, and I fully expect it to be updated with more content access. It is connected to your network via the built-in Ethernet port, or via a USB WiFi adapter. It will be available in early summer.

The other unit is higher end, the Digital Entertainer Elite EVA9150, slated for a February release with a $399 MSRP. For that higher price you get a built-in 500GB drive, easily user upgradable to larger capacities, and support for Blu-ray quality output at 1080p. It works simultaneously with Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs, as well as NAS devices. And it supports a wide array of formats and codecs:

— Video formats: AVI, DivX, Xvid WMV, MOV, M4V, MP4, VOB, MPG, MP1, MP2, MP4, ISO, IFO, MKV, TS and M2TS;
— Audio formats: MP1, MP2, MP3, WMA, WMA-Pro, AAC, FLAC, AIFF, WAV, LPCM, Dolby AC3 5.1 stereo downmix, Dolby AC3 5.1 passthrough, DTS 5.1 passthrough, Dolby TrueHD Downmix, Dolby+ Passthrough and DTS-HD Master Audio passthrough;
— Subtitle formats: SUB, SRT, SMI, SAMI, TXT and DVD Subpicture; and,
— Video codecs: MP1, MP2, MP4, Xvid, VC-1/WMV-9, H.264 and OpenDivX.

That’s quite an extensive list. It has an Ethernet port, but also built-in 802.11n wireless for high-speed WiFi connections. And it is dual-band - operating in both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz bands, which means you can get higher performance in areas saturated with 802.11b/g 2.4GHz signals. It sounds like a fairly impressive unit, I’d like to play with one.

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 $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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