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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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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