Products we've seen to date—namely the Intel Media Processor, Yahoo! Connected TV platform and smattering of proprietary connected sets—have offered up a taste of what Flash support means for TVs, albeit through often-clumsy widget systems and the tolerable Flash Lite. Now—through another offshoot of its Open Screen Initiative—Adobe wants to expand Flash support to all kinds of hardware, in what looks like a bid to set a new VOD standard, inking deals with companies as diverse as Comcast, Broadcom, Netflix and Intel.

In theory, this means we'll see a wave of Flash-enabled DVRs, set-top boxes and HDTVs by the middle of this year, and they told us you'll see new Flash applications for the framework early next. Since Yahoo actually uses Flash in their own widget framework for TVs, they're not exactly competing—Adobe wins either way. Adobe's goal is to be just as ubiquitous on embedded devices as it is on computers connected to the web: Over 90 percent have the Flash plug-in installed.

The above is just one concept of how a Flash-based UI could look. Hulu just inched closer to millions of living rooms, and there's really no downside to that. [NYT]

Bloomberg says that Sony would be the first studio to support a wide launch of full length films on a video service such as YouTube. They currently offer 60 movies on Crackle, while MGM offers a small number of films on YouTube along with Hulu's selection of ad-supported flicks. And logically, Electronista thinks that most the initial films will be older ones, which would make total sense. [Bloomberg via Electronista]

This is the latest one-up to occur between the two companies, who have been dueling over Hulu's TV accessibility.

Also noteworthy is that Boxee's new API allows fully XML and Python program for complete customization of Boxee app UIs. One of the first apps to make use of this API is Pandora, which will launch soon, and give you the same online experience on your TV screen. [Boxee]

That's not to say that ZillionTV is drastically more versatile than any number of existing set-top arrangements. It does, however, look attractively simple. Here's what it is, in a nutshell: a set-top box that streams free content, a la Hulu, except directly to your TV. After a $100 setup fee, it's mostly advertising-supported—again, like Hulu. The company claims a wide range of content partnerships, which is clearly necessary to compete in this field.

But it's not just ad-supported TV that Zillions is focused on, as paid content will be available as well. They hope to offer up premium TV and film content for individual purchase or rental, though your payment won't net you an actual file—the system is entirely stream-based.

If all this sounds familiar, that's because none of it is distinctly new. ZillionTV hasn't created something that anyone with some time and a Boxee install couldn't patch together themselves—but it might be able to provide it in a simpler, more accessible package. The company is promising lots of features, including a motion-sensing remote (by the whizzes at Hillcrest) instant-on streaming on anything better than a 1.5mbps connection, that will make the system attractive as a do-it-all set-top box, but until we have more than promises and renders, we'll have to reserve full judgment.

For what it's worth, Jon Healey at the LAT has tried the system, and found it impressive. He does—and this is crucial—note that ZillionTV might be having some issues securing rights to all the content it wants, but again, we'll have to wait and see. [ZillionTV]

I've got particularly weak AT&T reception in my house, so any news on Femtocells, useful for improving coverage by bridging cell call data over a fixed internet connection, is good news.

The employee came upon this information as internal news of landline and wireless business integration. In this case, specifically, landline workers would be used to do low level wireless installs and wireless workers would soon be tinkering with U-Verse.

The box is supposed to come in the next year or so and hopefully, U-Verse's rollout will have progressed somewhat by then. More news is that the 3G Microcell, AT&T's stand alone Femtocell pictured above, is confirmed to be hitting by Q2 of this year. (Timing was previously unknown, although AT&T hinted at the Web 2.0 conference that movement would occur sometime in 2009.)

At CES 2009, Microsoft Mediaroom PR reps, while doing their little spin dance, did manage to let slip that "multiple carrier field trials" were, in fact, in progress. When questioned specifically about the U.S. market, PR did their thing and asked the questioner to go bug someone else. In this case, AT&T, presumably because the carrier was considering the platform or it is in the running to support it in the U.S. with U-verse.

As for the U.K., IPTV on an Xbox 360 looks a little more certain in 2009 than for other markets. BT was confirmed as the carrier for the service in that region, with deployment possibly this year, possibly not—no details were given on timing. If trials are indeed ongoing at this very moment, however, it could bode well for a 2009 rollout (E3 fodder? Perhaps!). Just find some British friends fast if you happen to live Stateside or elsewhere.

As noted by the source, that pic from he CES show floor is Mediaroom running on a Motorola set-top box. The service will look very similar when running on an Xbox 360. [Zatz Not Funny]

For those unaware, Slingplayer lets you watch streaming video over the internet from any source connected to a slingbox. Some of these features, like the online ID system, are already present in the Slingplayer 2.0 release for Windows. But the revamped mac version, which promises HD streaming, isn't quite ready, so this will have to do in the meantime. Download it over at [Sling].

Since AT&T is going to have in-store kiosks and drones for the U-Verse setup, it actually lends more credence to the rumor that Walmart will be peddling the iPhone 3G next month. High-speed internet, IPTV and the iPhone—at Walmart, the last store it's cool to beat your child in? It boggles the mind. [TMCnet via DSL Reports]

One, Vudu's AVN channel will offer high-def porn—FyreTV is only DVD-quality, at best. (Merits of HD vs. SD porn aside, at least Vudu can deliver either HD if you want it.) Second, a Vudu box is way more discreet (though its remote does kind of look like a sex toy). And besides, if you already have Vudu, it's one less box you have to deal with. [CE Pro - Thanks Julie!]

FiOS, as you might know, is Verizon's fiber optic television service (which is now officially invading all of NYC). It's not full-fledged IPTV yet (since it's not delivered entirely as data packets, as I learned a few weeks ago), but Verizon is implementing a lot of the same feature set that IPTV makes available.

Version 1.5 was mostly about meeting regulatory specifications, so they're just now popping in the big features. The onscreen interactivity feature set is a lot like what cable and IPTV are doing—a pop-up will offer bonus or expanded content like clips or info—and it'll debut with a bunch of NBC Olympics interactive content, which will be the Verizon framework's first major test. Essentially any network can dump content into Verizon's framework, and voila, interactive content ahoy.

FiOS TV 1.6 also adds in RSS feeds from content partners, providing live info like traffic, weather and horoscopes (apparently their test groups really wanted them). Unfortunately, right now, you can't add in your own feeds (like Giz) but the framework is there to do it in the future. Currently, weather and traffic are the ones you'll actually check out. One weird quirk is that you have to pause whatever you're watching before you start reading feeds—you can't pause TV while you're reading.

Starting with 1.6, you'll be able to stream two HD streams to multiple rooms in the house, even with the current boxes—Verizon's goal is to have feature parity across all hardware. But one of the more awesome, though subtle, features is the ability to pause a channel, swap to another one, pause it, then go back—so you could juggle two football games or Heroes and football, whatever. They've also added in filters, so you can have the menu show you just your HD channels, just family channels or just movies, to cut down on the amount of crap you have to scroll through. A fully personalized setup like AT&T showed off is probably a version or two away, though. Scheduling recording by web and phone is in the works too, though it'll start out as a premium feature set and trickle down.

What Verizon is doing that's somewhat unique is a hidden form of social networking. There's a new section called "What's Hot on FiOS." It tells you the top five most popular shows in your area at that second, live. So if you don't know what to watch, you can just check out what everyone else is. This works for On Demand stuff too.

And now for the future stuff (which is actually built into the 1.6 update, but it's hidden, so if you hacked your box....): Integrated web video, of course. YouTube, Veoh, Break and Blip.TV for now. It's sectioned off in the menu, so people don't expect to be blown by awesome vid quality, I'm told. The setup actually uses your PC as a proxy, so you actually have to have it turned on to watch web video. But you can also stream pretty much any video, any codec flavor on the fly, from your PC to your TV. The search engine isn't that great yet, and typing is annoying, but it's nice to see this stuff integrated and easily pushed to your TV. If trials all go well, you'll see this stuff on boxes as early as spring 2009. If not, well, things get murkier.

The fact that most of this stuff will be in people's houses by the end of this year does seem to put FiOS ahead in the feature war, even though Time Warner actually has a bunch of its suped-up tru2way boxes in the wild. Either way, it proves that TV as we know it is going to change, at least a little bit, by letting in stuff from outside the garden, no matter who your provider is.

There's a chance you won't, actually, see this TV in a few years, at least served up from AT&T. Only 379,000 subscribers are currently hooked up to U-Verse TV, and it's not available to a whole lot more than that. Rollout is slow. But listening to Peter Hill, VP of voice and converged services, talk about what the company is working on for U-verse, you'd never know that everything he was showing me was just for a tiny, privileged sliver of TV viewers. (BTW, for a great hands-on cable vs. U-verse review to see what they're getting, check out this piece.)

The first thing I spot—and ask about—when I walk in is the Xbox 360 on the shelf, a ghostly reminder of the promise of a ubiquitous IPTV box. The status? Microsoft and AT&T have to "come to terms" on it. Whatever that means, but the shaky laughter dotting our exchange implies you'll probably never see it in the States. On to the real show.

Integration is the key to AT&T's IPTV vision—integration with the internet, with your home network and media, integration with AT&T's services. But that doesn't mean TV itself is taking a backseat. Whole home DVR is arriving soon, so that one DVR box will stream content to any and every TV on the network (currently, only the TV directly jacked into the DVR can play back DVR content). You'll totally be able to pause something in one room, and pick it back up in another. With whole-home DVR, the box will be able to simultaneously stream eight feeds to every TV in your house: Three hi-def plus one standard-def stream from the DVR, plus 2 HD and 2 SD streams of live programming. All those TVs are getting all that content from one box. (For the nerds, each HD stream is encoded in MPEG-4, running at a variable bit rate that hovers around 6.5Mbps. The U-verse pipe is built on a 25Mbps profile, which is divvied up by high-end QoS for TV and your internet.)

Next, we go into some of the media sharing stuff, which probably looks familiar to anyone with an Xbox 360 or media extender since U-Verse uses Microsoft's IPTV platform. Music, movies, pictures, streamed to your TV from a standard Windows Vista or Media Center PC on the network—basic, but nice, since this is all just pumping into your set-top box. They've also got TVersity running off their network, which basically will stream anything to any device with a web browser, be it PSP or iPhone. It's running over Wi-Fi and it's actually damn snappy. I'm not really sure how this fits into the IPTV platform, other than their vision of a totally networked home.

All of this is "six to nine months" ahead of the field now. So, you could expect this stuff in the next year, though it's not officially announced yet. It's all about mainstreaming media streaming and sharing—a baby step, but probably necessarily to get, say, your parents ready for what's coming after it. This is when Peter pops on the "ultra-bleeding edge box" though he warns me none of this is actually guaranteed to become a TV reality.

Fire up the box. Welcome to Peter's favorites. Yep, like Sezmi, everyone gets their own personalized TV setup, with recommendations, favorites, etc. You can also log in and control the set-top box from the iPhone, like a sweet multi-touch remote. It's running over Wi-Fi and it's as responsive as any other remote control. But you know, sexier. An app for streaming to the iPhone? Not yet, I'm told, since there are "certain areas of the iPhone" where "Apple is keeping the experience..." "Controlled?" I volunteered.

It's a good transition to the more internet-y stuff they've got going on. Integrated RSS feeds—you can read Giz on your TV and have it not look like crap! Video RSS feeds are where it's at though, like a feed of CNN clips that constantly refreshes. It's like Headline News, without the waiting. Course, it can also pull in YouTube, though I'm more interested in Hulu.

Here's where AT&T benefits from being AT&T here, with your phone jacked into your set-top box. Maybe more "cool" than critical. A message asking for a video share call from a local Atlanta 404 number appears on the screen. Caller ID on the TV. We smack yes, and we're looking through the eyes of an LG Glimmer on our TV. Yeah, it looks like shit on the 60-inch DLP set, but it really works. Next, I call Peter's cell and leave a voice mail. A few seconds later, we're informed by the TV we've got a new voicemail waiting, so we flip over to a list of incoming calls. We can remotely check out the voicemail or add the contact to our address book.

The finale: It's basically Twitter TV. You jump into a chat room with your friends (or invite them) and you can bleat out IMs that are collected on a timeline as you watch Leonidas atomically kick effeminate Persians into bottomless pits. And lest you were worried about text-typing via a crappy remote control, I actually used an iPhone to input the text. Later you can go back and scour the conversation timeline like regular IM, looking for a nugget of insight that might've accidentally slipped out during the orgy of violence (or whatever else you and your friends are simultaneously watching). BTW, the cheesy avatars will be updated to look less like late-'90s Messenger, I'm told.

While these are all, by themselves, just little bits of coolness, taken together, it is a shift from the mostly passive way we watch TV. We actively time and place-shift now, but once we're plopped in front of the screen, input from us stops, despite decades of prediction that TV would become more and more interactive. U-Verse is not wholly revolutionary, but it's a stride toward true TV 2.0, with content from multiple sources, fueled by the internet. TV's got to do something, after all—there's less and less reason to be drawn to that particular idiot box, when there are so many boxes out there for so many different kinds of idiots. Of course, cable's got its own ideas about the future of TV, and soon we'll be looking into that too.

But first, the basics. The difference between the TV you're used to and this fancy IPFreelyTV stuff is that IPTV is delivered to you like any other data sent over the internet—in data packets. You even plug an Ethernet cable into your receiver box/DVR. Of course, the internet's a messy place with lots of muck bouncing around the pipes and you'd be really pissed if the Yankees game stuttered or crapped out, so this is all running on the telco's "walled garden" network with a fat, dedicated lane for video. (Your internet service, which is bundled since it's running on the same network, runs on a different lane, delineated by quality-of-service, or QoS, protocols.)

Now that that's out of the way, back to why its good for HD. With a standard cable setup, the channels are basically always being piped into your home, whether you're watching or not. To add more channels, they've gotta compress 'em down farther or open the pipe up, especially since HD eats up a lot of bandwidth. Since IPTV is sent in regular ol' data packets and the system is two-way (the nature of internet protocol), they're basically only sending what you ask for, when you ask for it. So theoretically, they could offer way more HD channels than cable, since they're not as limited here. Also, like that mythical Xbox 360 IPTV box, the number of streams you can watch/record simultaneously is basically only limited by your bandwidth.

The two-wayness of the infrastructure is another point of awesomeness. It can be used for actually useful interactivity—one of AT&T's apps for the Olympics can bring in a stats feed you can check out while watching the game. Or regular internet video, like YouTube, can be piped in and integrated with the other video on your box. It's all just regular data over standard internet protocols, so there's a lot of flexibility to do stuff you simply can't with a traditional setup.

The problem is that building the infrastructure necessary for IPTV service is slow and expensive, largely cause it requires a heavy fiber optic component. Verizon runs fiber all the way to your door (which is why it can offer those crazy FiOS internet speeds), while AT&T runs it to the node, which you're then connected to with copper and (which is why U-Verse internet is slower). So right now, both have puny subscriber numbers—1.2 million FiOS TV customers, and a scant 379,000 on U-Verse TV.

Still, there's a lot of potential in IPTV, even if it's taking forever to get to your doorstep. AT&T actually showed me some of the stuff that could be at your door in the 6-9 months—and beyond—and it's definitely worth getting excited about. We'll be telling you all about it later.

Something we missed, or you still wanna know? Send any questions about IPs, TVs, chewing gum or anything else to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

First, let's go over the features that Mediaroom offers now. With a simple set-top-box, you can grab high quality HDTV that's better quality (seeing as Comcast has been compressing their HDTV shows like mad) than what you'd otherwise get on cable. If you've got two set-top-boxes, you can stream shows off of each other so you don't have to record a program twice to be able to watch it in your living room and bedroom. This feature is called DVR Anywhere, and will be available whenever operators roll it out.

You can even watch the same TV broadcast or recorded shows on your Windows PC or Xbox 360, a feature that's been announced since CES by Microsoft, but is up to the actual service provider (AT&T, BT) to roll out. In AT&T's case, it won't be available until the second-half of 2008. Update: Microsoft tells me that the details here were a bit off. The Xbox 360 support was announced at CES and will be rolled out on BT's Vision service in the future. AT&T hasn't announced Xbox 360 support. Viewing shows on a PC is something I saw demonstrated in Microsoft's labs, but I'm clarifying with Microsoft as to what it was.

This leads us to the new feature Microsoft showed off: Applications. Since IPTV is a two-way street, your Mediaroom set-top-boxes are able to pull down information from the net, leading to very interesting interactive programs that people can code up for shows. For example:

• During a boxing match, you can pull up different mics, view fighter stats, and even view/vote in polls.

• Nascar races will let you bring up the cockpit cams of your favorite driver (as long as the driver is being tracked by TNT), or listen to the pit crew shout directions.

• During a primary event, CNN allows you to bring up voting results, bios, and other information about each candidate.

And so on. These apps are coded by the shows' producers, then sold to the provider in order to enhance your viewing experience. You could even code up your own app, tack it onto Lost, and try and sell it.

No service provider currently has applications in place now, but they're lightweight and should be able to be run on set top boxes out there today. It's just a matter of your local provider getting these features from Microsoft and integrating it into their service plans. [MeidaRoom]

Releasing a statement about a survey? Sounds like someone's trying to jockey a better negotiating position while talks are still underway. On a similar note, Netflix's online site seems to have been down for most of Monday, which makes the case for streaming media even stronger. [Reuters - Thanks David!]

You've already seen the details. The FyreTV streams you DVD-quality adult IPTV from major studios, letting you enjoy content without having to store it locally. You've got three packages to subscribe with beyond the mandatory $9.99 monthly fee that gives you a certain bucket of minutes.

• Buying more on-demand minutes to use as you watch, which will be somewhere between $0.17 to $0.24 a minute.
• Buying a specific movie to get unlimited viewing.
• Buying a monthly pass to get unlimited access (for that month) to a specific studio's content, which gives you all the movies in their catalog. This will be somewhere around $24ish, depending on the studio.

The box performance was great. DVD quality video was good on the cheap Vizio set they were demoing it on. The remote control was super responsive, and when you queue up a video it streams incredibly fast (probably because of their setup on the floor, so we'll have to see how it performs in the real world when we do a hands-on at home).

Other great functionality include bookmarking, favorites, playback history, playlists, scene ranking (1 to 5 stars), combination tag searches (Blondes, Boobs, Blondes + Big Boobs were the ones we used) and easy fast forward/rewinding through scenes.

FyreTV's best news is that their box will have no stickers (as shown in the pictures) or markings on it, so you can hide it in plain sight next to your DVR and have your in-laws be none the wiser. Why watch porn on your little computer monitor when you can watch it on a 150-inch HDTV in your living room? Oh and if you've read this far, it means you're definitely interested in this thing. We're going to have a special code soon for Gizmodo readers that will get you into the expanded beta (they went from 5,000 to 10,000 beta units) ahead of everyone else. [FyreTV]

Photo credit: FyreTV

When the update hits December 4th, current Xbox 360 owners will be able to download original Xbox games for $15. Initial titles will include Halo, Fahrenheit, Fable, Crimson Skies, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath Of Cortex and Burnout 3. There's not a bad game on that list...hopefully those of us with 20GB hard drives can find the room.

Also, Europe will finally get Video Marketplace downloads, though we're not certain how localized the content will be (we're guessing there will be some difference in what's offered). But in the interest of full disclosure to our fine European readers, we have no sympathy that it's taken this long considering the endless piles of great tech you get before we do. And no, we are so not even now so don't even play that card. [kotaku]

But with no exact details or pricing info, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Still, KT is excited about the potential of working with Sony's platform through the future, promising, "We will seek more cooperation with SCEK to create synergy." Hopefully it's totallyunbelievablyawesome and US services will follow. [Korea Times via engadget]

In other words, according to Digital Arts Services' complaint, it "indisputably meant that purchasers of advertising time were paying for FiOS subscribers who did not exist." Naturally, Verzion's calling BS, calling it "a garden-variety business dispute initiated by a customer who wants to be released from a contract they agreed to." Guess we'll let the courts decide. [Broadband Reports, Image via Flickr]

The setup experience is so amazingly simple, it makes TiVo look complex. (Of course, compared to what this simple, broadband-connected video server does, TiVo is complex.
Speaking of TiVo, Vudu's remote is incredible, with five buttons and a clickable jog dial that you can intuit in record time. It's weird how quickly you can use it without looking. By the way, the remote is RF, not IR, so you don't have to point it at the box for it to work.

One of Vudu's setbacks is that it is, alas, a set-top box. In a world where game consoles and cable boxes are inevitable, this box, though small, still presents a stacking challenge.
But there is a cool solution: since Vudu's remote is RF, and talks to that little metal antenna you see at the back of the box, you can stash the box anywhere that you'd stash any device with a video processor and a spinning 250GB hard drive. Like a cabinet drawer...
Hiding it away (with or without my cat Wade) means one less thing you have to look at. While we can thank the RF remote for this, an RF remote does mean one more thing (*cough*PS3 Blu-ray remote*cough*) that you can't replace with a standard universal.
The home screen, which pops on 20 seconds after you first power up, and is instantly on in most occasions, is a nice example of how organized the Vudu interface is.
Though it's the home screen that you see when you first get started, there are some tweaking options, should you dig into them. I loved the overscan adjustment—you'd be shocked how helpful it is.
When you scroll through the constantly changing promoted movies on the home screen, you can see which ones are for rent...
...and which ones you can buy.
I found that most studio films at this time are rentals, mostly at $3.99. There are plenty of foreign and/or "special interest" movies you can buy, and some of those that you can rent for less, say $1.99. Frankly, the rental aspect of this proprietary box appeals much more than the ownership one.

There are many easy ways to hunt for a movie in Vudu. The genre search is fun, because you can select more than one genre to find interesting combinations like Sci-Fi Documentary...
...and yes, Gay & Lesbian Horror. (You know you were curious.)
You can search for a director or actor by name. In this search of Spielberg, you can get a sense that the Vudu catalog is not totally up to snuff. Yes, that is the entire Vudu Spielberg collection.
Some actors and directors are missing entirely. Being a Back To The Future fan, I had to search for Robert Zemeckis, but typing in his name, or even just ZEME, yielded zilch.
My main criticism with the Vudu is that while there are plenty of extra-sweet options like these...
...there just aren't enough good hits when you go searching. Here's a clue: in a search for "Coppola," Sofia had two movies, and Francis Ford had 3, none of which were the Godfather.

The good news is, Vudu has designed an excellent interface and a very satisfying alternative platform for delivering movies. I love browsing and watching movies on this thing—the instant gratification is awesome!

As we told you before, the system operates with both a central server and a P2P network, balancing each other to ensure an instant on-demand experience. During my week-long testing over both DSL and cable connections, I never once had more than a tiny video hiccup, and though you can't fast-forward straight away, the video can get to be 20 or 30 minutes ahead of you as you continue watching, so eventually fast-forwarding is an option.

And the picture looks stupendous. Even though the source material is (currently) 480p, that little box upscales that stuff to your desired resolution. In both 720p and 1080p tests, it looked great, perhaps better than a DVD. Here's a look, though even Ben Stiller getting slapped by a monkey doesn't truly do this thing justice:
Beyond my loudly voiced complaints about content, all I can say is, I wish it were a lot cheaper. Yeah, that's right, Vudu is selling these things for $400. So you can pay more money to buy or rent movies from them.

You could save the money by connecting your PC to your TV and renting from CinemaNow or Movielink. At the moment, both have slightly better catalogs, though that will change. Normally I don't whine about high prices, but I think $400 is a little too much for a box that doesn't come with any free content. There's never been a better case for the razor-and-blades model. With a pricetag like that, Vudu is certainly not going to scare the bejeezus out of Blockbuster Video—not nearly as much as it rightly should.

WiMAX seems like an ideal delivery method, given the range it covers and its beefy bandwidth, so what Building B wants to do is definitely possible. But, the service launches in the fall, and WiMAX won't exactly have most of the country blanketed by then.

Either way, their vague assertions without hard specifics leave Om Malik (and us) "inherently skeptical of their claims." Topping off our saucer of skeptic's milk is the fact that their targeted ad partner is Claria, better known in its past life as Gator Corporation, proprietor of the eponymous adware client that plagued tens of millions of PCs in the late '90s.

The bottom line is that we'll believe in the One True Box when it's sitting atop our TVs—we've heard way too many empty promises from far too many prophets to be true believers before then. [Building B via NewTeeVee/GigaOM]

As I said, it's a hybrid peer-to-peer network, built to deliver instant playback of any of any of the 5,000 movies in its planned library. The first few seconds of each movie will already be stored on your box, so that you get a satisfying instant-play feeling even as its caching the download. A central server should mean satisfactory playback from the beginning, when there aren't many boxes deployed. The same system should also guarantee Vudu won't have the same high-demand p2p choke-up that Joost suffered recently. (Congestion-wise, it also helps Vudu that this is a pay-for-play service.)

Since Vudu makes every box and knows their exact capabilities, as well as all of the content coming and going, the "load-sharing" distribution will be easier to manage than a Joost-type PC based service. Vudu stores the most popular movies throughout the network using a predictive system to speed up delivery. On your home network, any background data sharing will have a low priority over the other internet activities, but when you kick on the Vudu and demand content, it takes your router's center stage.

The actual product announcement, including movie availability details, will happen later this summer, though we are told it will definitely ship this year, and for a price somewhere under $500. You will be able to buy or rent movies: 99 cents to $3.99 per rental; $4.99 to $19.99 per purchased movie, which will reside on the Vudu box and nowhere else. Vudu promises to let you download a purchased movie again, in the event of a hard-drive failure or some other catastrophe.

It's a very cool application of the technology, though coolness doesn't guarantee success, especially in the set-top box world. (See TiVo, then see Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD.) To check out the user interface, click through the gallery to see how you drill down through genre, select a movie, then watch the trailer or get actor and director info. (My apologies if the shots are out of order—that's actually 100% Flickr, but I will say sorry anyhow.)

Exclusive Pics of the Vudu - Video Store In A Box [Gizmodo]

With Mediaroom, Microsoft's interface brings together lots of existing technologies into one set-top box offered to customers of IPTV services such as AT&T's U-Verse, letting users instantly access TV shows, Internet video, and practically any multimedia content that's now available on the Internet, on cable TV or broadcast. This will allow service providers to compete against the burgeoning Internet TV offerings such as Joost, as well as cable TV providers.

Of course, there's TiVo-like digital video recording. Also, you can get shows when you want them with video on demand, and now Microsoft folds in personal media sharing similar to what's already on the Xbox 360 and Windows Media Center, letting you grab music and photos from other PCs in your house and watch them on your TV.

The platform will also let you completely annoy everyone else watching TV with you by letting you punch up multiple screens, channels, programs and camera angles on one screen. Never mind that the show you're watching already has one director—you can be a second director, and you can completely ruin everyone's viewing experience but your own.

And oh yeah, also added to the mix is DTT support, meaning digital terrestrial television, where you can also receive regular old broadcast TV channels. So there it is, come full circle: This ought to put a fire under the asses of cable TV providers. There's Internet TV, multimedia access around the home and outside, too, and you can watch the Super Bowl, too.

It's going to be a brave new world. In fact, IPTV is seen by many analysts as the successor to cable TV; right now IPTV subscribers number just 3 million, but that number is expected to jump to 50 million by 2010. – Charlie White

Press Release [Microsoft via Daily Tech]

Apple TV? Not doing so hot. IPTV? Not doing so hot. Apple TV and IPTV together? What makes you think that this will be hot?

AppleTV's main purpose, in our view, is to get Apple's content from your computer into the living room. Whether it's iTunes music, iTunes movies, or iTunes TV shows, it seems like just an extension of Apple's ecosystem.

Now, with the recent addition of YouTube to Apple TV, it seems like Apple's making a bold step in working other content providers into the box. However, by adding IPTV to the mix, it would cannibalize Apple's own TV show section of their iTunes store, which doesn't quite make sense to us.

But, while we're talking about long term predictions, we've also heard that Apple TV's getting a HAL voice chip and a huge red light by 2010. And by 2029, the last remaining Apple TVs will be retrofitted with time machines to send the then recently deceased corpse of Governator Schwarzenegger back in time to veto some more immigration reform bills.

But yes, we IPTV is a nice option to have even if it's lame. Which is why people are looking forward to it on Xbox 360s. – Jason Chen

AT&T planning IPTV for Apple TV in 2008? [Engadget]

Basically, you can recommend a show to any (or all) of your friends on your list, and it'll simply pop up in their friends channel. It also works to some extent like a Flickr pool, so you check out what your friends have been watching.

The other Flickr/YouTube-like feature is the ability to tag shows, which is potentially extremely cool and incredibly useful, more so than automated recommendations. I just wonder how long it would take for every show to be tagged "09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0." Video demo after the jump.

Ambient TV [Project Page]

The box is about the size of a hardcover book and delivers video streamed in MPEG-4, which is upscaled to HD. It has HDMI, composite, and S-Video ports. Vudu goes online via an ethernet cable, and the media stream is managed through a load-sharing distributed network, which should guarantee instant access to the movies without stutters. The remote control has a scroll wheel (nice touch) and appears to have just five buttons. There are plenty of open questions about Vudu—like the size of the hard drive—which won't get answered until closer to the launch this summer. The price is going to be competitive with Apple TV, but probably a bit more expensive.

The chairman of the Vudu, Inc. board is Alain Rossman, the guy who made it possible for you to browse the Web on a mobile device (WAP). He got his start at Apple, then founded Phone.com (now Openwave Systems), EO Corporation, and C-Cube Microsystems among others. The founder of Vudu, Tony Miranz, comes from Tahoe Networks and AT&T Bell Labs. The COO and VP of Engineering both come from TiVo. Vudu is funded by Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.

How will it stand up against Xbox 360, TiVo Series 3 and Apple TV? I can't wait to find out.
–Noah Robischon

Vudu [Teaser Page]

Press Release [AT&T via Phone Scoop]

This jibes with what I was told back in January when I asked Microsoft reps during the IPTV demo about a souped-up 360 to more adequately handle the demands of IPTV—namely a high-def output (HDMI) and a larger hard drive, which was to "stay tuned." With VOD (which is built into the IPTV setup, along with Live Marketplace, obviously) and DVR, 20 GB just doesn't cut it, regardless of how good the compression is.

VOD? IPTV? DVR? Media streaming? The 360 is looking more and more like the best convergence box of its generation. I'm all over that Elite, whenever it drops. Of course, it helps I didn't already spend $400 on the soon-to-be lame-o regular 360. Suckers. — Matt Buchanan

Image note: The IPTV screenshot is real, the Elite mockup probably isn't

Microsoft To Announce The Xbox 360 Elite [Mercury News via Guardian Unlimited]

"No. They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn't know what they were doing. They said the Cell is the video processor. But they turned to Nvidia at the last minute, but Nvidia can't do embedded DRAM. Go look at the bandwidth problems. Go ask the guys running ... now. They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to Nvidia at the last minute. It's a very unusual thing."

CES Interview With Bill Gates: Part I of Transcript On Video Games [The Mercury News]

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Product Page [Joost]

Quality depends on the users bandwidth, which can range from 1-3mbits, the higher equating to DVD quality. A stream can be watched in 10-15 seconds. The new service will rollout to about 250k users a month, as they scale up their delivery service to satisfy the entire Netflix user base of 6 million. That should happen, according to the website, by June.

IP video livingroom solutions by Sony, Apple, Microsoft and all the cable providers are on their way or here. So, we'll see how fast Netflix jumps to the livingroom. Could be time for that Netflix Set Top box we asked for at xmas. –Brian Lam

Netflix [Netflix]