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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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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The SD Card Association has announced the latest generation of SD standards - SDXC, for Secure Digital eXtended Capacity. This takes SD beyond SDHC (High Capacity) to two terabytes (2TB) and read-write speeds of up to 104 megabytes per second, with growth planned to 300 megabytes per second. This is a capacity and interface specification, which is a layer on top of the physical specifications. So we had SD, miniSD, and microSD, and then with SDHC came SDHC, miniSDHC, and microSDHC, so now I fully expect we’ll have SDXC, miniSDXC, and microSDXC. Oh, and of course SDIO is still around for device connections, which will also benefit from SDXC’s higher interface speeds.

Clear as mud?

Short version - the cards will hold more and respond quicker. Of course, you’ll need new devices with SDXC support to take advantage of the new capabilities.

I do have to stop for a moment and just hold one of my SD cards and stare at it and think of something like that holding 2TB - and how my first hard drive was huge and held 40MB, 80MB with Stacker! (Hands up if you remember Stacker.)

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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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.

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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