Netflix has done a deal with Starz Entertainment, immediately adding 1,000 titles to Netflix’s streaming service, with 1,500 more to follow in the coming weeks. Following on Netflix’s deals with Disney and CBS to stream current and back episodes of TV content, this is a solid step towards increasing the relevance of their streaming service. The largest drawback to the service to date has been the dearth of first tier content.

From The Hollywood Reporter.

Web video from Hulu, CBS, ESPN, etc, is great, but it is generally stuck on your PC. Sure, you can hook up a PC to the TV, and some web video is available on set-top boxes, such as YouTube on TiVo, but it is still limited. There are are some devices which allow access to more of the sites, like the D-Link DSM-520, but then you need Yet Another STB in your A/V stack. What to do? Well, PlayOn from MediaMall Technologies can help.

PlayOn installs on your Windows XP or Windows Vista PC, and acts as a kind of transcoding proxy for web video. It retrieves the web video and streams it to DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) compatible devices such as the PlayStation3, Xbox 360, and HP MediaSmart TVs. While those are the officially supported devices, they state that they will work to expand the list, and since they’re using DLNA I’m thinking may work on other DLNA devices even if not officially supported. They currently tout support for Hulu, CBS, YouTube, and ESPN, and promise Netflix support “just down the road”. They’ve also promised playback on the Nintendo Wii “by the end of 2008″. PlayOn is currently in beta, and MediaMall plans to charge $30 for the final product when it is ready for release.

MediaMall also has a blog where you can keep track of their development efforts. In a post there they reiterate that Netflix will be added before GA (that’s general availability, aka the official release for the non-geeks), and also state that CNN will be in before GA. MediaMall also develops the ActiveTV platform that powers the above mentioned DSM-520, which supports a plethora of web video sites, so it seems logical that they’d be bringing that know-how over to PlayOn to add more sites over time. After all, PlayOn was only released to beta on Monday.

Picked up from EngadgetHD.

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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The LA Times has a small blurb about TiVo being subpoenaed by the Missouri attorney general over their rebate practices:

Missouri’s attorney general subpoenaed TiVo Inc. in April for information related to the company’s rebate program.

The maker of set-top boxes that let users fast-forward through commercials is cooperating with the probe, the Alviso, Calif., company said in a regulatory filing. Atty. Gen. Jay Nixon is investigating whether the company was involved in unlawful merchandising practices with its rebates.

“We are not aware that we’re doing anything wrong,” said Matt Zinn, TiVo’s general counsel.

An unrelated blurb on the same page reports that Netflix has sold out of the $100 Roku boxes for streaming Netflix’s Watch Now videos, due to stronger than expected demand.

The rumors started way back in February, 2006, reappeared in June, 2007, and got another boost last October. And now it is a reality.

CNET is reporting on the Netflix Player by Roku. It is a very simple device that allows you to stream Netflix’s ‘Watch Now’ content right to your TV, via the box, over your broadband connection. No PC required. It is very basic, that’s all it does - allows you to stream Watch Now content you’ve already placed into your queue. But they did get something major right - it retails for $100, which means it will almost certainly be available for less. And the Watch Now content is available ‘free’ as part of a standard Netflix membership, so there is no pay-per-view pricing to deal with.

The biggest issues are the lack of content, there aren’t many first tier titles available via Watch Now, and the quality - no HD here, it is all 480i. This is all about convenience. As CNET put it:

We watched video on TVs ranging in size from 19 inches to 50 inches. While there wasn’t a huge difference in sharpness on any of the sets, the picture did look a little better on the smaller TV. Still, as long as you sit far enough away from a larger TV, the picture will seem OK. Just don’t expect the same kind of sharpness you’d get from a high-quality DVD. Think in terms of watching programming on one of the stations that your cable company doesn’t devote quite enough bandwidth to, and that’s the sort of picture you’ll be looking at.

The box is very simple. It has a wired Ethernet connection and built-in 802.11g WiFi. Output includes HDMI, component video, S-Video, composite video, optical digital audio, and stereo audio. So it should work with pretty much any TV shy of an ancient one with only coax RF input. CNet does say that you want a broadband connection that can sustain 1Mbps at a minimum, and ideally 2.2Mbps. So those with slow connections need not apply. The streams use the VC-1 codec, same as used when streaming to a PC. (Interestingly, the TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD have a decoder that can handle VC-1… I’m just sayin’.)

CNet has a full review if you’re interested. Since we know this capability will be coming to other platforms via partners like LG, I think I’d recommend holding off. It’d be a much better value to get an upscaling DVD player, or Blu-ray deck, with Netflix streaming built in. And Netflix hasn’t revealed all of their hardware partners yet - we could yet see Netflix streaming to TiVo, Xbox 360, etc.

EDIT: Gizmodo has also just posted a review which offers some more details.

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.

Toshiba, and the rest of the HD DVD camp, have done a wonderful job of completely ignoring the piles of bad news heaped on HD DVD over the past couple of months. They’ve continued to issue basically the same statement about how they see HD DVD as the better value, vow to continue the fight, etc. Well, the news today is perhaps the bleakest yet. Wal*Mart is dropping HD DVD completely and going Blu-ray exclusive, according to