I realize this makes back-to-back Amazon Blu-ray sale posts, sorry about that, I just caught this deal. Through February 9th there is a buy two, get one free deal on 29 titles. There are some good (IMHO) titles in there - Underworld, The Fifth Element, Black Hawk Down, Hellboy, and more, as well as a number of music titles from David Gilmour, Foo Fighters, and others.

Amazon is running another Blu-ray sale with some good deals. With 18 titles to choose from eleven are $11.99 each while the remaining seven are only $9.99 each.

Today’s Amazon Gold Box Deal of the Day is the complete Band of Brothers series on Blu-ray for $34.99. That’s 65% off the $99.98 MSRP.

Amazon is running a Gold Box Deal of the Day on Blu-ray 3-packs, 65% off. There are three collections to select from and all three are $34.45 today:
- British Action 3-pack Bundle (Casino Royale, Layer Cake, A Knight’s Tale)
- War and Politics 3-pack Action Bundle (Vantage Point, Black Hawk Down, The Patriot)
- Sci-Fi Superheroes 3-pack bundle (Ghost Rider, Underworld, Resident Evil)

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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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.

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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Welll, in just under 10 hours I should be on a plane to Las Vegas, NV for CES. The show properly is Thursday-Sunday, but there are press events Tuesday and Wednesday which I’ll be attending. During the show itself I’ll be splitting my time between working Sling Media’s booth and trying to visit other vendors as a blogger. As is usual for me, my first victim, er, target of the show will probably be TiVo. Since I’ll be working half the show my time for seeing the rest is cut in half, but I’ll try to do what I can.

Going into this CES I’m not sure what the big deal is going to be this year, if there is one. The economy is down and I haven’t really felt any particular buzz about any given area of the market. HDTVs get bigger while getting thinner and faster (refresh rates). We may see some interesting 3D technologies which will start to enter homes in the next few years. Palm is expected to announce Nova and new hardware, but I’m not excited. I was a die-hard Palm OS user for many years, since 1998, and still carry a Treo 680. But after five or more years of waiting for Palm OS 6 Cobalt Nova I just don’t feel that inspired. I’m already focused on Android as my next likely platform, and it would take a lot for Palm to sway me. Even if they produce an incredible OS, they have an uphill battle ahead to win over developers. I don’t think they have a real chance at this point to gain significant market share. And without that the developers won’t come - and the apps really make the platform.

Going forward I think the mobile market will effectively be, in no particular order, Windows Mobile Professional, BlackBerry, Symbian S60, iPhone, and Android. The original Palm OS is the walking dead, and I don’t see Nova/Palm OS II carving out enough market share to be viable. Symbian UIQ is effectively dead as SonyEricsson and Motorola have pulled out and the Symbian world is focused on the S60-based open source effort. Windows Mobile Standard (aka Smartphone) is rapidly dying as Professional-based touch screen devices move into the lower end of the market where Standard used to focus. I expect Android, which is basically just coming into the market, to post the biggest gains as more devices land. I think the LiMo/LIPS effort will falter and expect to see some of the vendors who have been working on it switch to Android. I think those five platforms will provide the bulk of the smartphone market, anything else will be a small niche.

We’ll probably see more tru2way devices on display from a number of vendors this year, but I don’t know that we’ll see anything revolutionary in that market. I’m hoping TiVo may be showing off their ‘Series4′ tru2way-enabled model, which they’re believed to have been working on for a while. And they may be showing their new DirecTV software, which I expect will be running on the HR20/21/22 DirecTV DVR Plus hardware. I’m not expecting anything else major, maybe some new content partnership announcements and perhaps plans to bring TiVo to more countries. (I’m surprised they haven’t re-launched in the UK yet with the DVB-T model actually.)

The past couple of years the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD fight provided some interest. But that was effectively over with CES2008, and officially ended when Toshiba threw in the towel in February. There aren’t likely to be any big announcements in the Blu-ray world, aside from more content partnerships like LG adding CinemaNow and YouTube to Netflix on their players. Maybe someone will be showing off higher density disc or 3D content concepts.

I’m hoping to be surprised by something at the show, something just unexpected. If you know of something I should be on the look out for, do let me know. And if you’re going to CES drop by the Sling Media booth and say hello. I believe I’m on the afternoons of Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on Friday morning. I’m also scheduled to present for Sling Media at CntrStg on Saturday. Frankly I’m nervous as hell about that. It has been years since I’ve done a presentation or talk at a tradeshow and never at anything as big as CES.

OK, off to finish packing.

One of today’s Amazon Gold Box specials is 64% off the Die Hard Collection on Blu-ray. That’s Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Die Hard with a Vengence, and Live Free or Die Hard on Blu-ray for just $46.95 - MSRP is $129.98. That’s roughly $11.74 per film, a good deal.

LG Electronics announced they’d be bringing Netflix to their Blu-ray players just in time for CES 2008. That support shipped in the form of the BD300, announced in July and shipped in the fall. Now, just in time for CES 2009, LG is announcing their next additions - CinemaNow and YouTube. YouTube seems like an obvious move, it is showing up on just about every connected device out there. Pretty soon I think YouTube will just be a default feature on any networked device, which should make Google happy.

But the real interesting addition here is CinemaNow, and not so much that it is being added but how it is being added. CinemaNow will be streaming to the Blu-ray players. That’s very interesting - as far as I’m aware this is the first indication we’ve had that CinemaNow was adding streaming support to their content. To date CinemaNow has been all download-based, not streaming, including on TiVo. Right now on TiVo only Disney content is available from CinemaNow, but it has been stated that additional content would be added. Since TiVo supports streaming, as used by YouTube and Netflix, I have to wonder if CinemaNow content will also be available via streaming on TiVo.

In general we’re certainly going to be seeing more of this kind of thing, adding content sources to devices to make them multi-function. Just to support Blu-ray content and to comply with the BD-Live specification a Blu-ray player has to be capable of decoding MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 video in high definition, as well as handing a number of audio formats. The hardware used to do this is more than capable of handling most online video formats. BD-Live requires an Ethernet connection and 1GB of local storage, which is plenty to handle streaming buffers. And the BD-J programming environment allows for complex applications. It makes a lot of sense for Blu-ray players to pick up additional features like streaming video to make them more competitive and appealing to consumers.

Press release:

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