Okay, actually, I kind of like this one. [YouTube via NeoWin]

The most immediate (and maybe most promising) is Live Lookup. It'll be on the Wolverine disc (you know, the same one that has the PSPgo digital copy).

Live Lookup allows you to hit a button and be linked to IMDB. Actors can be sorted by scene, allowing you to search for bikini shots of cute, female b-listers later. Check it out in the lead photo.

Load times should be diminished or even eliminated, but at a cost. Fox plans to load BD menus while you watch previews. So things may not actually get faster, but you may have more incentive to sit through all that extra promotional material that shouldn't be on a BD in the first place.

Finally, we may even control a BD player through a remote device, like an iPhone. Not only could you search for content without popping a guide up onscreen, but the BD player could stream additional content to this second, personal screen.

These are all great ideas, but hopefully more studios than just Fox will adopt them. Read more of what Fox had to say on the matter over at: [SlashFilm]

It's not even worth getting into everything that goes wrong here, and anyway, it'll detract from the joy of unpeeling this sad onion of misapprehension on your own. Of course, when I get my first handwritten eeelectronic photo-mail from my grandmother's "Tablet Mac" I will feel like such an ass.—Special thanks to Gawker's crack video-mining team.

It's a media center type of application—like Front Row or Boxee or Netflix or Windows Media Center—that gives you full access to Hulu with an Apple Remote or Windows Media remote or just your keyboard and mouse. In other words, freed from the constraints of the browser, it's like real TV. The app is beautiful, fast, easy to navigate and simply amazing—everything you'd expect from Hulu, honestly.

There are thumbnail previews that pop up as you move alongside the scrubber, like Netflix's streaming app. You can queue episodes too—you need a Hulu account for this. There are bunch of different ways to find content: via search, Hulu channels, by studio alphabetically or just through suggestions.

There are ads, but that's part of it simulating TV, no? Also, all of the usual Hulu catches do apply—only a few episodes back catalog of current shows, your favorite shows could vanish at a corporate whim, that kind of thing, which keep it from totally replacing your cable subscription for some people. That said, it+Netflix have definitely helped me live without TV for the last couple of years, though I still miss being able to flop in front of the History Channel for a couple hours on weekends sometimes.

One other small gripe so far is that the onscreen keyboard looks a bit small to punch with a remote, but ideally, you won't need it very often. It's also not a light application, as you can see:

It's available for Mac and PC, though you need a relatively modern machine (2GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and 2Mbps internet connection). There are a few more goodies at Hulu Labs as well, like time-based browsing. Hulu Desktop's definitely gotten us pretty excited, but at the very least, it's worth checking out, and makes us even more hyped for that iPhone app, since it shows Hulu's not going to stop at just one screen. [Hulu Desktop]

[Hulu via TechCrunch]

Elements of Nerditude:

1. Patton Oswalt. Stand-up who riffs on Star Wars and comic books.
2. Joss Whedon. Nerd legend, creator of many sounds-dorky-but-actually-awesome shows.
3. Tahmoh Penikett. Otherwise known as Helo on Battlestar Galactica.
4. Amazon Kindle. Well, it's a gadget, at least.

Try to control yourselves. [io9's Dollhouse coverage, Dollhouse official website]

For example, Slumdog Millionaire's retail DVD will have deleted scenes and commentary, but the rental will not. It will have the movie (obviously) and trailers (why would they take out ads?). On the other hand, Blu-ray discs will be the same in both version, but lack the digital copy that you can import to your computer.

Each movie will be different. Marley & Me, that movie starring a dog or something, will have special features on both editions. Fortunately enough, rental chains can go to retailers, buy that version, and rent those. But we doubt many customers will really care either way once they get the disc home. [Variety via BBG]

Even the intro is getting a makeover, says FOX, the result of which is available above for your viewing pleasure. It's bigger, longer, and reminds me of a stubborn couch that my friend and I struggled to get into a tiny Boston area apartment yesterday using levers, pulleys and the most important moving day tool of all: Gratuitous swearing. [YouTube - Thanks, Andreas!]

Premiering tonight on Fox at 9/8C, Dollhouse is the story of a young woman named Echo (Eliza Dushku). She's essentially a human wiped of personality, exploited for missions by an underground agency. So each week, her mind is remapped with a new personality and set of skills. Meanwhile, the FBI isn't too happy about it all, which is where Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett, who you may know from Battlestar Galactica) comes in.

Given that our brain is literally shaped by our thoughts and experiences, the idea is only moderately far-fetched. In other words, it should make for great sci-fi.

Fox has only signed for 13 episodes so far, but series creator Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity) has leaked that he has a five-season plot arc in mind. Let's hope Dollhouse is as great as we expect and its complete story comes to fruition. [Dollhouse]

Instead, CBS is looking to redesign TV.com into a Hulu-like streaming site, all while keeping the community that's grown there in place. They're hoping that by incorporating their streaming catalogue into an established site with lots of community features that they'll entice people into sticking around a little while after that episode of How I Met Your Mother is over.

The new TV.com is set to launch sometime next month. And really, it's awesome news, as the more places that offer free, legit streams of TV shows the better. As if I needed yet another reason to make me feel like a smart guy for not paying for cable. [Ars Technica]

You already know about all of the different ways to watch TV online. Now you just want links to your favorite shows (plus all those new ones) as quickly as possible so you can ditch your TiVo and TV once and for all. Our Internet TV remote has the best links to every prime-time show currently streaming online at full length. Bookmark it and check back often, we'll update it as new shows come out... Note: Many of these streams will not work outside of the US, but if you're out of the country and need your fix, you know where to go without any help from us.

NBC
30 Rock
America’s Toughest Jobs
The Biggest Loser
Chuck
ER
Friday Night Lights
Heroes
Kath & Kim
Knight Rider
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Life
Lipstick Jungle
My Name is Earl
The Office
Saturday Night Live
The Tonight Show

ABC
Boston Legal
Brothers & Sisters
Dancing With The Stars
Desperate Housewives
Dirty Sexy Money
Eli Stone
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Grey's Anatomy
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Life On Mars
Lost
Opportunity Knocks
Private Practice
Pushing Daisies
Samantha Who?
Ugly Betty

CBS
Big Brother
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Eleventh Hour
The Ex List
Gary Unmarried
How I Met Your Mother
Jericho
The Mentalist
NCIS
The New Adventures of Old Christine
Numb3rs
Survivor
The Unit
Worst Week

FOX
American Dad
America's Most Wanted
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Bones
Cops
Do Not Disturb
Family Guy
Fringe
Hell's Kitchen
Hole in the Wall
House
Kitchen Nightmares
MADtv
The Moment of Truth
Prison Break
The Simpsons
TALKSHOW with Spike Feresten
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
til Death

The CW
4REAL
90210
America's Next Top Model
Easy Money
Everybody Hates Chris
The Game
Gossip Girl
In Harms Way
Privileged
One Tree Hill
Reaper
Smallville
Supernatural
Valentine

Comedy Central
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
South Park

MTV
The Hills
A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila
Cribs

FX
30 Days
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Nip Tuck
Rescue Me
The Riches
Sons of Anarchy

USA
Burn Notice
Dr. Steve-O
Monk
Psych
The Starter Wife

Sci-Fi
Battlestar Galactica
Destination Truth
Eureka
Ghost Hunters
Ghost Hunters International
Sanctuary
Scare Tactics

• Eight extra minutes of footage in the unrated version of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
• Beyond the Forbidden Zone Adventure Game
• Science of the Apes: scientists, anthropologists and sociologists discuss the first film
• Evolution of the Apes: HD featurette that traces how the Planet of the Apes went from book to screen
• Impact of the Apes: HD featurette about how the story became a pop culture phenomenon
• HD “Making of” features for each sequel
• Commentary by composers, actors and make up artists.
• A Behind the Planet of the Apes documentary
• The original theatrical trailers
• Behind the scenes galleries

... and much much more! The five disk set will retail for roughly $160. [The HD Room]

Sure, this could be a novelty during their daily traffic reports, but more interestingly, the feed will be live any time that the chopper is in the air—including breaking news like fires, police chases and parade balloons gone amuck. WFLD will probably broadcast a better signal of these more intense moments as they go live to TV, but the point is more that viewers aren't defaulting to the choices of producers, directors or sponsors to get information from a major news outlet. Then again, it's such choices that save the average person from staring at webcams all day waiting for something to happen. [myfoxchicago via techcrunch]

Everybody Hurts
It's been discussed at length how brutal this contest was for Toshiba. But the Blu-ray members in the victory circle are licking some pretty serious wounds, too. Sony basically bet their entire company on the format—plowing over a billion dollars into the PS3 trojan horse, plus, as far as we know, another half billion on largesse for studios to put on Blu's stripes, for starters.

Chris Walker, Pioneer's senior product manager for Blu-ray told us he thought that the format war "affected Blu-ray prices substantially," and that "for a new technology to drop the prices by half within a year of coming out" seriously hurt everyone involved. People are still ready to complain about the relatively high price of Blu-ray players, but they are way lower than the manufacturers had planned, and now they can't recoup the high fixed development costs they would have with higher price tags during the first couple years on the market. DVD players were stratospherically priced for several years.

On the studio side, the drawn-out conflict was sapping both HD disc and DVD sales, as consumers waited for a victor and slowed down DVD purchases in anticipation. Everybody was losing, even the winners. It got so bad that we have reason to believe Sony didn't just urge Best Buy, Netflix and Wal-Mart to go exclusively Blu, but went so far as to ask Toshiba directly to please pull out.

Their pain, you're pay-ing
Point is, a lot of money was spent to hoist Blu-ray onto the winner's pedestal. Why do you care? Because it means manufacturers aren't rushing to drop player prices any further than they have already. Walker admitted the only reason players are as cheap as they are—calling $399 a year after the format's introduction a "bargain"—is because of the format war. Interestingly, Walker also told us that low hardware margins are part of the reason Toshiba mostly stood alone in standalone player production: "Why would Pioneer want to build one when Toshiba was selling them at $150?"

So, while Pioneer promises healthy competition between Blu-ray Disc Association members this year, don't expect it to be too healthy—the big price-killer among them is the PS3, ironically. The major force that drove down DVD-player prices years ago was the flood of cheap Chinese models at Wal-Mart, and the BDA is holding them at bay, refusing to license the tech to low-cost manufacturers for the time being. Piracy is implied as a concern, but the more obvious motive is to keep player prices as high as they can, while they can, to recoup the heavy losses incurred waging the format war in the first place. A $199 player with a Sony name on it is definitely at least a year away.

Spec Wars, SKU Times
We've already told you not to buy a Blu-ray player yet, citing the spec issue—if you buy a player without an Ethernet port, you're screwed when it comes to more updated specifications like BD-Live interactive content and picture-in-picture. But it's actually even crazier than we thought. When we finally see a geniune $199 Blu-ray player, it will more than likely be spec 1.1, so you'll get picture-in-picture, but there won't be any internet-fueled interaction, like that sweet-sounding AVP multiplayer game.

That's right, even after Blu-ray spec 2.0 players finally hit the market, new 1.1 spec players will continue to roll out as well, so the potential for consumer confusion will remain stratospheric. (Everyone should heed Sony CEO Stan Glasgow's own comment: "Any confusion curbs consumer demand.") See, the 2.0 spec is not mandatory for manufacturers, though 1.1 is. Consequently, the cheapest players we will see finally hitting shelves will be 1.1 (though all of Sony's actually will be 2.0 "capable" from here on out). Walker confirms that while he personally "would like to see BD-Live players only," even Pioneer "will be offering both types of players."

The different players will be labeled either "BonusView" or "BD-Live," not 1.1 or 2.0, which is good, because Glasgow doesn't "think consumers are that aware of 1.0, 2.0, whatever." Will they even know the difference between BonusView and BD-Live? Will they understand why a player they buy now won't access features on a disc they buy later, just because Sony says "that's the way it goes in the world"?

Content is King Queen
The spec issue is messy on the content front as well—and we're not just talking about clearly labeled discs. The 2.0 spec being optional on future players makes its feature set all the more frivolous—why spend a lot of money creating features only the richest Blu-ray users—a smaller fraction of an already tiny fraction—can access? For example, while Fox is definitely sporting wood for interactivity, others aren't as excited. Sony Home Entertainment biz dev VP Rich Marty told us it's "just the icing on the cake." Icing not everyone can lick.

On the other hand, things are mostly looking up on the new-release front for Blu—all of the major studios we talked to said that pretty much every major theatrical release will hit the format from here on out. It's the back catalog that's the prob, and it's going to be slow coming by most accounts. Not only will Universal probably take a very long time getting its current 150-disc HD DVD catalog out on Blu-ray, but other studios will most likely double dip, releasing the same movie a second time with better features and perhaps a cleaner transfer, before getting around to some of your favorite old chestnuts.

Speaking of Universal, we're currently looking at a months-long black hole of Universal, Dreamworks and Paramount's releases, thanks to their belated integration (or re-integration) into the Blu-ray fold. Not only will it be late spring or early summer before we see any of their flicks hit Blu, we're hearing that they might have trouble buying dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray discs to produce them on, because the more settled Blu-ray studios have already purchased the entire 2008 stock—not hard to do, thanks to the limited number of replication sites and lower yields. This means that they'll only have access to 25GB discs, which could mean fewer features and lower-quality video and audio.

If you don't think capacity is an issue—necessitating the dual-layer discs— a Disney spokesperson (not to mention Metal Gear guru Hideo Kojima) says otherwise: even 50GB isn't enough. Disney's upcoming Sleeping Beauty Platinum release is going to take up two discs: a 50GB double layer plus another 25GB one. While every release won't be a two-disc monster, the company tells us that "franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean or Narnia...also get similar kind of treatments." It also confirmed that, for the moment, Blu-ray disc replicators are "kinda limited."

The Real Enemy
Truthfully, these are all just minor issues. The biggest problem on Blu-ray's hands? DVD. It's entrenched, it's cheap, and for most people, it's good enough (especially upscaled on a 720p LCD from 8 or 10 feet away). Sony mouthpieces and execs laugh off the "threat" of video downloads, but they don't seem to laugh when you talk about the exact same content on DVD. Even while Glasgow assures us they "think [Blu-ray sales] can get up to DVD levels," he admits "there are some issues: upscaling DVDs is getting better and better." Sony continually must "convince people of the value of high definition."

In fact, everyone we talked to—in Hollywood or in hardware—emphasized the need to educate consumers about high def and convince them to make the switch. If it's so inevitable and obvious, why do they need to pour a load of money and ad time into it? Sony's major campaign for the entire year is "HDNA," all about educating consumers about HD.

The Sony brand might "hold up well during difficult economic times" but a recession will keep DVD looking pretty good to a lot of people, even ones who already bought an HDTV. Bundling players with HDTVs—which Glasgow said would happen soon—might spur adoption, but until the Wal-mart masses can easily (read: cheaply) adopt Blu-ray, it's not going to knock DVD players off shelves. That's several years out.

The Dim Light at the End of the Tunnel
Naturally, Blu-ray will only get better—the hardware will improve, the catalog will grow, the feature set will expand. Already standalone players load up much faster than craptastically slow players of yesteryear—one of Pioneer's new players, which will be announced shortly, already boasts a boot time of 14.8 seconds, nearly halving the time of the current fastest standalone player, Panasonic's BD-30, which stands at around 26 seconds. It's on those kind of things that Pioneer plans to compete on in the market, though it'll be asking a heavier price to get them.

Blu-ray will get cheaper though, slowly but surely. Competition between and among BDA members will nudge prices down to the $299 mark this year, and we'll see that mythic $199 mark within a year—with the Chinese cheap-player cavalry not far behind, ready to grind profit margins into oblivion. That's when we'll see mass adoption—when, from a consumer perspective, Blu-ray really "wins." Too bad, on the hardware side, there may not be any spoils left for the victors.

I mean, you can't have it both ways, studios. If you're going to restrict it to streaming and keep people from downloading to watch on their media extenders and portable devices, you can't try to protect your DVD sales by only tossing out a handful of episodes.

Just the other night I tried to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica on there as I misplaced one of my DVDs and found that there were only a few episodes available, none of which from season 2, which I was looking for. I then poked around and tried to check out SNL and found that they only had four sketches and none of the musical performances from the most recent broadcast. And away to Bittorrent I went.

People can tell the difference between something designed only to tease and promote broadcast TV and DVD sales and something designed to be an actual entertainment destination. If you keep it gimped it's only ever going to be seen as the former, studios. Don't blow it. [Reuters]