Monsoon Multimedia continues to add to their client suite for their HAVA placeshifting boxes. They currently officially support Microsoft Windows on PCs, while clients for Windows Mobile (Pro & Smartphone) and Nokia’s Internet Tablet Maemo Linux-based OS are in beta. A client for the Symbian S60 platform has been announced with an availability in 3Q08, according to a press release posted at jkOnTheRun. By way of comparison, Sling Media has released SlingPlayer for Windows and Mac OS, and SlingPlayer Mobile for Palm OS, Windows Mobile (Pro & Smartphone), and Symbian S60, while SPM for Symbian UIQ is in beta now, Blackberry is in development for release later this year, and the iPhone SDK is being evaluated.

Picked up from Zatz Not Funny.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media, for whom HAVA is the leading competitor.

I can never leave things alone, and that includes my WordPress installation. I make a few changes to WordPress to get to to suit my needs and preferences a bit better than it does ‘out of the box’. For example, I don’t used the advanced editor (TinyMCE) because I prefer doing my markup by hand. But I do use some of the simple editor buttons on the basic editor, and I change them to better suit me - for example, I have the ‘img’ button prompt me not only for the URL and alt text, but also the width, height, and border, because I always include those. So I thought I’d share the diffs between WP2.5.1 and my changes, simple as they are. As well as some tweaks to the Sociable and reCAPTCHA plug-ins.

I’ll put this under a cut since it is long, and not interesting to most I suspect. Though I hope that this might encourage other WP users to try getting their hands dirty and tweaking things a bit.
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Earlier this week, The Onion posted a parody documentary video on YouTube about the “Blockbuster Video Living Museum,” as if brick-and-mortar video stores were a thing of the distant past, a quaint relic to be remembered. Video rental shops aren’t quite dead yet, but Netflix and Amazon Unbox are each having a go, in their own respective ways, of making such retail outlets obsolete.

One new edge for Netflix, which prides itself on giving customers plenty of information about their movie-watching habits, comes from a third-party developer. FeedFlix is a clever new service that takes the readily available information Netflix provides in personalized RSS feeds (your feeds will appear if you’re logged into your Netflix account) and displays that info in more digestible format.

How fast do you watch and return your videos? Are you one of those Netflix dream customers that pays month after month, hardly ever watching and returning a disc? FeedFlix will tell you how long you’ve had each disc out, what you’ve recently returned, and what’s coming up soon in your queue. None of this is info you couldn’t figure out yourself with Netflix’s tools, but FeedFlix provides a convenient summary.

Beyond the personalized report, FeedFlix offers a public link that allows you to show others what’s in your queue and what Netflix recommends for you. These links reveal nothing about your identity, unless you post the links in a way that identifies you.

As more and more people join FeedFlix, the service has been able to generate fun aggregated info such as average rental length and shipments by weekday. (Not surprisingly, about a third of all shipments go out on Tuesday — replacing videos mailed back Monday after the weekend. Thursday’s the day Netflix ships the fewest videos out.)

Whether you use FeedFlix to see if you’re making the most of your Netflix subscription, or just as a fun diversion, it’s worth trying out.

Western Digital already has eSATA MyDVR Expander models for Cisco/Scientific Atlanta DVRs and TiVo, and now they’ve released a USB model for Dish Network DVRs. The $149.99 500GB USB drive adds up to 60 hours of HD capacity or 300 hours of SD capacity to the Dish Network ViP Series HD DVR.

Picked up from The Gagdetress.

Well, I guess there is a little bit of acquisition fever going around the technical press. Yesterday CBS acquired CNet Networks, and today Conde Nast acquired Ars Technica. Conde Nast owns Wired, and this means that Ars Technica will basically become part of Wired.com. The news was broken by TechCrunch, who report they’ve confirmed it. The price is unknown, but TechCrunch believes it is around $25 million.

So, where’s my buyout offer?

Here’s a marriage of old and new - CBS just made a deal to buy CNet Networks for $1.8 Billion, according to MarketWatch. CBS is paying a 45% premium for CNET, they must want to expand their Internet presence rapidly.

“CNet Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience,” CBS Chief Leslie Moonves said in a statement. “Together, CBS and CNet Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives.”

Upon closing, CNet Networks’ sites will be combined with CBS’s interactive businesses, which include CBS.com, CBSSports.com, MaxPreps.com, CBSNews.com, last.fm, Wallstrip and MobLogic.

I really, really hope that CBS doesn’t screw CNet when ‘combining’ it with their existing properties. I rather like CNET content. I’ve been using last.fm since the early days, and it doesn’t seem to have suffered under CBS, so I have some hope. I’d just hate for this to end up like TechTV after they got merged into G4.

It has been a busy week and I haven’t had a chance to cover this yet. Last week a new player in the content distribution broke cover and announced their plans - Sezmi. Sezmi had been operating in sealth mode as ‘Building B’ prior to their announcement. Sezmi has grand plans to operate as an alternative to cable and satellite, using terrestrial boadcast and broadband. They don’t plan to offer their products directly to consumers, but rather they’re looking to partner with 3G and broadband providers who would offer the Sezmi products to their customers.

In many ways the Sezmi architecture reminds me of XStreamHD’s plans, only where XStreamHD uses satellite Sezmi uses terrestrial broadcast. The terrestrial component seems, on its face, to be very similar to the now defunct Moviebeam system. Where moviebeam used ’spare’ NTSC bandwidth, usually piggybacked on PBS stations, Sezmi will be ATSC to broadcast their digital signals. Broadband will be used to distribute additional content. The plans to partner with 3G providers seems to indicate that they could use 3G, or the forthcoming 4G networks, such as WiMax for distribution as well. The recently auctioned 700MHz spectrum would be perfect for this kind of use.

The Sezmi system uses a main receiver in the home, which acts as a DVR with 1TB of storage. It will also have eSATA and USB ports for storage expansion. While client boxes attached to TVs in the home provide access to the content. Sezmi is looking to offer a ‘TV 2.0′ experience, with personalization for five different users in the home. Each person will see a customized menu of their own selected program. The Sezmi system will also be able to record OTA ATSC content, and access web video from sites such as YouTube.

Frankly, I just don’t see how this will succeed. Terrestrial frequency availability is limited, and even if they used H.264 they’d only get maybe 4-6 HD channels per frequency, to get more would mean highly compressing them. Providing SD content instead of HD would allow for several times as many channels, but the market is shifting to HD. And most broadband services lack sufficient bandwidth to provide a full channel lineup. I’m guessing they’ll do something like cable systems using SDV. The broadcast will be used for high demand content that is needed by more users, while the broadband will be used for content on demand - so if a user requests a specific program that isn’t ‘mainstream’ it will come over broadband. That would allow them to avoid sending the majority of the lineup into each home all the time.

But it remains to be seen what content licenses Sezmi will be able to obtain, to offer a lineup competitive to cable and satellite. As well as the pricing, which will have to be highly competitive to get users to convert. And it will only work for those who have solid ATSC reception, and it seems like broadband will be required as well.

From a technical perspective it is interesting, but as a consumer I don’t see the appeal in what they’ve announced to date.

For more information see PC Magazine, Light Reading’s Cable Digital News, and U.S. News & World Report.