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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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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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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Back in January Netflix announced a partnership with LG Electronics to embed the Netflix streaming player in various LG products. At the time it was expected to be included in an LG dual-format player, HD DVD and BD, of course HD DVD has since died. Today LG announced the first product to bear fruit from this partnetship, the BD300 Blu-ray player.

The BD300 is a full-featured Blu-ray player with BonusView / Profile 1.1 and BD-Live / Profile 2.0 support, with 1080p DVD upscaling, and, of course, Netflix instant viewing support. Netflix, and BD-Live, support use a built-in wired Ethernet connection. As with the Roku Netflix Player, users will add titles to their queue via the netflix website, then they’ll have instant access to those titles from the LG deck. When a title is selected playback will begin in as little as 30 seconds. You’ll also be able to read synopsis and rate movies from the interface.

The full press release is below:
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I posted this morning about LG Electronics signing the cable MOU on tru2way. Well, it looks like Funai Electric has also signed it. You may not be familiar with the Funai name, but Funai markets their products under the Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania, and Emerson brand names and also provides ’store brand’ units such as Insignia for Best Buy and Pye for Circuit City.

Picked up from TWICE.

Originally announced as an agreement between Sony and the cable industry, and then signed by additional CE vendors, the tru2way MOU has now been signed by LG Electronics. They’re planning to release tru2way-enabled HDTVs starting in 2009.

Press release below:
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LG Electronics has introduced three new high-speed Blu-ray drives, with 6x read, 6X BD-R write, and 2x BD-RE write, 16x DVD-R/RW and 40x CD-RW speeds. The BE06 is an external USB2.0 writer with a $379.95 MSRP, the GBW-H20L is an internal writer with a $279.95 MSRP, and the GBC-H20L is an internal reader with a $199.95 MSRP. They all feature LG’s SecurDisc™ capabilities, and the writers support LightScribe™ to enable burning labels on compatible media.

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Lately you have have been seeing promo spots for a new TV series Scarlet, which looked like some kind of spy thriller with a female lead, similar to Alias. I’d been catching the spots mainly as a promo inserted into some TiVoCast content such as The Onion. The spots looked fairly high budget with explosions, etc. I was actually thinking of checking out the show just to see what it was like. It has a website and even an entry in IMDB. Here’s one of the versions of the teaser:

Well, there is no such series. It was all an elaborate hoax that is part of a marketing effort for a new line of HDTVs from LG Electronics called, of course, Scarlet. See, it is a ‘TV Series’ as in ‘a series of TVs’. Clever, but at the same time I feel kind of disappointed that I was misled. It feels dishonest to me, and leaves me with a bad feeling about LG. Certainly not what they were going for, I’m sure.

How do you feel about such deceptive viral marketing tactics? Did you get taken by Scarlet?