Silicon Valley Insider thinks that Unbox support is unlikely on account of its status as a direct competitor to Netflix streaming, but TiVo supports it so I wouldn't rule it out completely, plus a $99 provider-agnostic box would fill a conspicuously empty gap in the market, and my heart. [Forbes via Silicon Valley Insider]

Today, as new boxes and services are announced, there has yet to appear one that can give you every movie, let alone a single format you can use on your various everyday devices. Thankfully, what we're hearing now is that while this infinite format war may not go on forever, the state of video will suck for the next five years until every service has the same baseline catalog. If you believe the studios. In the meantime, you'll be looking for the set-top box with the best catalog, and the one that can deliver you your films in the best way possible.

If you thought the HD DVD/Blu-ray split was bad, at least there was an easy order to it, an alignment by studios. Warner, Universal and Paramount were on HD DVD, everyone else (plus Warner) put their movies on Blu-ray. Sure, no Big Lebowski on Blu-ray, but at least you knew why. There is nothing even approaching logic when it comes to the movie options from VOD set-top box to the next, at least not from the user perspective. Warner Bros. put out Ocean's Thirteen. You can watch it on Vudu and Amazon Unbox, but not iTunes. Warner also put out I Am Legend, which is on all three, and Xbox Live Marketplace. Paramount's Shooter is on all three, but only for purchase, not rental (and totally MIA from Xbox). And you could rent Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille a few months ago, but now it's only for purchase. "WTF?" is a natural response. (On a side note, it's a bitch to really search or go through any of the catalogs, so it's even harder to tell if it's an accidental or intentional roadblock.)

To explain our current clusterfuck, you need a quick trip back to 1999. Remember the state of digital music back then? It was messy and ugly. The music industry had no idea what to do with this whole internet thing, and they were involved in assorted, competing ventures. Then along came iTunes, which basically organized the music universe and, to the chagrin of the RIAA, set up a sane pricing structure, too. It's not a complete catalog of all music ever (Beatles, hello?), but it's the closest thing there is, and it's pretty damn good. It brought order to the chaos, and now claims 85 percent of the legal download market. So it has the music industry by the balls, enough to speed their efforts to fortify a worthy number 2—Amazon, which was the first store to boast a catalog exclusively made up of DRM-free music from all four majors as a result, a perk deliberately withheld from iTunes to curb its power.

We're basically at that same, nebulous 1999 point with video, though Hollywood has learned from the music industry's mistakes—and iTunes is not the guaranteed champion in the case of online movie sales. The industry is eagerly putting stuff out there, and on as many services as it can—we're at the point now that most of the major studios release movies on online services on the same day they release them on disc.

A problem gumming up our dream of the one box is that each service requires a different format—one studio told us that a big issue is digitizing and formatting a film to meet each service's specs. It just takes time, though they're going as fast as they can. And new releases are gonna take priority, obviously. We are at least a little skeptical of this claim—we don't think it takes that long to digitize a flick

From what we were told, there's surprisingly little worry of a single company dominating digital distribution. A studio we talked to said that it's all so new, the fear of a monopoly (by Apple or otherwise) is at worst simply a thought skulking around in the back of their mind, not an actual concern. So no service is getting any favors to promote one over the other, or keep another in check. (At least not yet, though Blu-ray-happy Sony may well have the most incentive to keep the online space anemic.) Again, here, we're a little suspicious—obviously they wouldn't come right out and tell us they're afraid of iTunes, but when you look at the measly catalog and consider the studios' close study of how the music industry complete botched online music, the idea of Apple becoming the single biggest distributor of most digital media and holding serious sway over the entire entertainment industry has to weigh on their minds.

I mean, if you were in their shoes, and could prevent making iTunes into the all-powerful Walmart of the digital video generation, wouldn't you?

The one bit of protectionism going on that was copped to is the push to purchase, rather than rent. It makes sense that a studio gets more money when you buy a movie than rent it, since it's the same set of bits headed to your hard drive, and both are guaranteed you'll watch the movie at least once, but one costs three to four times as much as the other. So you are going to see a lot of them not open a flick up to online rentals until a month after it's available for purchase, and even see rental options disappear, as recently happened across the board with Pixar movies.

Ultimately, and somewhat shockingly, Hollywood does have the same vision we do—a single god box that'll deliver the entire catalogs of all the studios. Only, unlike in the iTunes hegemony, every home could have a different god box, be it Xbox, TiVo, Vudu or Roku.

Forgive the buried service journalism. Enough of this theoretical talk. So, what does it take to get a decent download collection? Until the god box, you will need several, two at least. Right now, Vudu is good for latest and greatest plus some older favorites; Netflix Roku has better TV options and some interesting deep cuts (plus a $99 box price and unlimited streaming for 10,000 so-so titles for any plan over $9 with discs by mail as a backup); Xbox 360 has a surprisingly large amount of HD movies, and a nice catalog geared towards the gaming demographic; Apple TV has its own legion of fans for its ability to move movies to iPods and computers, though it still has a lot to prove in the catalog section. That's not even counting the TiVo with Amazon Unbox or the cable box you likely already have, each with their own assorted VOD options. Even if you owned all of 'em, you still might not find what you want, even if it's something that should be slapping you in the face. Take Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, for instance. We could not legally find it on any service, even though the sequel hit theaters just a few weeks ago—and got a surprisingly good buzz from usually snooty critics. Did Warner miss the perfect opportunity? They wouldn't say.

The other major issue is the state of broadband and the guys controlling the pipes. For the online video revolution to fully take off in HD, we need bigger pipes. For most people, that's years away. This is deeply threatening to the cable companies, and they're pretty clear that they're not happy about content moving online—you can see the fear in the recent moves to limit all kinds of data consumption (most of which is already video), not just the supposed protocol of pirates. What if limits or overage charges were put in place for people who were simply doing their best to buy copyrighted video? Why would someone give up DVD and Blu-ray rentals from Netflix in order to pay twice—for both the bandwidth and the content—and have to wait somewhat impatiently for the download, too?

So friends, while all of this gets ironed out, the infinite format war rages on: Lots of boxes, lots of online services, none of them complete, none of them that'll fully satisfy your wife's desire to rid the shelves of DVDs. Hollywood just can't move fast enough for this revolution, as arguably eager as it is, and the ISPs may not clear the way when the show does get on the road. From what we can tell, the stuff will all get sorted out in time. How much time? Give it five more years. If you believe the studios. [Insert groan of impatience here.]

No, you don't have deja vu: Two companies you never heard of launched similar-sounding interactive TV boxes within a few hours of each other. But this one is quite different: It doesn't mess with antennae or try to get in bed with cable or DSL providers. It's just a nice tidy box that sends all the world's content to all TVs in your house—without set-top boxes in each room. There are some catches, of course.

The first catch is that the box-and-remote combo costs $500. Sure, you only need one kit for the whole house (unless you want additional remotes, but every TV would get the same experience anyhow, so there's no point). But $500 is pretty steep.

Another catch is that the content itself is a little up in the air. Yes, there are plenty of services that let you buy or rent movies on a PC, and many more coming along that give you piecemeal content for free. But everyone does it differently, and you will have to become master of many interfaces with that one remote.

The launcher app, called Zviewer (what else?), is useful to aggregate all the different programs you'll want supplying you with video, and it also lists all of the BitTorrent and other video on your hard drive, not to mention photos and music. But there's no way to bring all web video into one seamless interface, and though ZeeVee will try to do just that, they admit that the beginnings will be a tad humbler.

I do like this concept. As soon as you connect your VGA out to the ZvBox and connect that to the coax network in your house, it scopes out the channels occupied by your cable box, and picks one that's not. Any TV with an ATSC tuner will see the ZeeVee stream as a high-def channel, and display it as such via the coax input most cable and satellite customers have generally forgotten about. You put the ATSC tuner to use, your coax cable gets new life, and you get an easy way to toggle from your other cable content to your PC's video bidness.

At this point, it's still a work in progress. Though the company promises a June ship date, the hardware shots are just renderings. The software, barely in beta, will only run on Windows XP and Vista, though ZeeVee assures us a Mac version will be out this year. I am a little leery of trying to use PC apps while sitting at my couch, so hopefully the software itself will handle most of my needs.

Promotional screenshots shown below depict some pretty nice media management, but the company admits that these are more aspirational, and will not represent the initial user experience:
If you think about it, the PC is kind of arbitrary here. I asked Brian Mahoney, ZeeVee director of marketing, if the company couldn't all the same turn this into a whole-house extender for my TiVo HD, or maybe a video iPod, and he said, "We can indeed take the video inputs from any device. That is a path we're looking at in the future."

My question for you, dear Giz readers, is this: Remote and PC software aside, how easy is it to build the box ZeeVee is talking about? And is it worth $200 to $250? Maybe it is. If you're really eager, it's going on pre-order at Amazon today, with plans to ship in June. If I were you, I'd wait until your friends at Gizmodo at least saw the thing in person before shelling out five bills. [ZeeVee]

No, p2p is no longer the single biggest traffic whore, responsible for only 20 percent of total traffic. It's streaming video, like YouTube and Hulu, which is now 50 percent of total traffic. During peak congestion—the times when Comcast will slow you down for hitting the pipe too hard—70 percent of it is http.

Which explains Comcast's flip on network management and why it's a total smokescreen. P2P is no longer the number one leech on networks, it's streaming video across regular old http. So they don't need to throttle p2p exclusively anymore—they need to slow the whole pipe down, hence the new "protocol agnostic" scheme. But they can look good showing off how much they love p2p. It remains to be seen how much of it the FCC will eat up. [GigaOM]

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]

"You don't need to pour a sh-load of money into entertainment to find an audience." But having an audience and being good are not the same thing— YouTube, reality TV and Air Bud have taught us this, if nothing else. [NewTeeVee]

The Contenders:
Hulu: NBC Universal/News Corp.'s mutant is a sandbox-y YouTube for their properties. Joost: Streaming P2P service from Kazaa/Skype founders that wants oh so badly to be real TV. It's got deals with Viacom and other name players—News Corp.'s rumored to be at the table as well. Miro: Open-source Cory Doctorow-anointed Joost-slayer. You download, rather than stream. It uses RSS-based channels and BitTorrent for its P2P workings.How They Look (and Feel):
Joost's translucent black interface wins hands down in the Slickness Dept., and its channel grid layout is the standout of the three. One issue is that player controls disappear when you're going through channels or shows, so you can't mute or pause a video playing in the background while surfing. But in terms of intuitiveness, on Joost, it's naturally apparent how to click around then start watching shows. (The "oh no, we can't play this now" error message assailed me more than a couple of times, showing there are still some P2P kinks to work out.)
Miro is more powerful for tweakers and creators, which contributes to it being less straightforward. It's not immediately obvious how you start watching stuff. Since its channels are RSS-based, you have to subscribe to them first, and then pick episodes to download. I should add, the best (though perhaps non-legal) content might require you to hunt outside Miro's interface for a torrent. Miro's the least flashy, using a modified browser scheme that takes longer to zoom through than Joost or Hulu, which is a problem when it overwhelmingly features the most content.
Hulu's good for a browser-based streaming player, as I've said, with a clean, mostly easy-to-navigate system.

In the end, no one's really nailed the content organization bit. None of them are bad, but they don't make surfing for new stuff particularly intuitive or fun. It can be a chore, and sometimes it feels like a long one.

Ads, I mean uh, "Revenue Model":
Miro is blissfully ad-free, but the other two are not. Joost's bumper ads are quick and not overly annoying. The ones that occasionally interrupt shows without rhyme or reason, however, are too long and randomly timed. They'll drive your head into your monitor. Hulu's gotten worse since its debut week, where I saw a single 30-second clip per 40-minute show. Watching Heroes the other night, I got slammed with an ad at each of the dots in the timeline.

The Meat:
Joost has 356 total "channels," though some aren't channels in the traditional sense. There's stuff from MTV, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, CBS, Warner Music, as well as channels of CSI, Happy Tree Friends, Transformers and GI Joe. There's offbeat stuff, too, like the Really Terrible Film channel. Used within legal boundaries, Miro lacks solid mainstream content. Comedy Central's "channels" are stand-up clips and web shows only, and Adult Swim just contains their video podcasts. But Miro boasts 2,756 channels, with everything from "Ask a Ninja" and National Geographic to NASA and Wired Science. But yes, you can start your own channel—all it takes is a torrent and a dream.

Hulu's the slimmest, but it has the most recent episodes of the best shows: House, Battlestar Galactica and any other popular shows from NBC Universal and News Corp., like SNL, The Office or Family Guy. There's no indie or offbeat content whatsoever—it's a totally corporate venture.

Across the board, scattershot content is still a major issue. Joost has a Comedy Central channel but no South Park or Chapelle's Show. Miro's kind of defined by being whatever from whoever. Hulu's trimmer offerings at least have an internal logic, with the newest five or six episodes of current shows available, and full seasons of past shows like Buffy.

What You Now Know:
No matter what service you pick, you won't find everything you want, thanks in part to corporate hang-ups and in part to the primitiveness of these early stages. They're maddeningly incomplete, like a crappy library in a rural town. Joost is probably your best bet in terms of quantity and quality, with Miro working better if you want a ton of new programming but don't care about corporate quality. And if you want Battlestar, well, the choice will be made for you. [Joost, Miro, Hulu, Flickr]

As Ars called it, Hulu is a "corporate sandbox" loaded with content from NBC, News Corp., Sony, MGM, as well as their various subsidiary channels like FX, Sci-Fi Channel and so forth, offering anything from full episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buffy to SNL Digital Shorts and an entire Russell Crowe flick, Master & Commander. It's Flash-based, it streams, just like YouTube, and it's ad-supported, with bumpers and "commercial breaks," just like the TV it's trying to ape. Despite the potential of being a corporate bomb, Hulu actually succeeds in a lot of ways. For one, the interface is pretty slick, the site itself not overwrought and easy enough to navigate, which is something of a miracle given how FUBAR productions of this sort typically turn out. The animations are smooth, with lots of scrollover popups and transparency, and buttons for all of the few things you can do with a video. Grays and blacks surround the video in a widescreen format, making it easier on your eyes.

Video and sound are clean, the 520x295 resolution for widescreen format clips definitely tolerable for the 42 minutes required to watch House or the like. More importantly, the streams have been exceptionally smooth. Bouncing around within vids is snappy, on few occasions taking longer than a second, and more often than not instantaneous. However, and it might be my imagination, video isn't quite as nice as it was on launch day a few days ago—a touch more pixellated—and seeking takes a bit longer. Still impressively small, more noticeable now.The potential deal killer here, the ads. (Also the best reason to wait for a review: I saw nary a frame of ads on launch night.) Their timing seems to be totally random. The initial three-second bumper is painless, promising "limited commercial interruption" thanks to X sponsor. But the in-show ad—so far in my experience no more than one 30-second clip per episode—could come at any time: within seconds of the bumper, halfway through, the first time you click ahead or so on. In that sense, it's maddening.

So why put up with ads? The content—and that's where Hulu's value and potential lies, but also its biggest shortcoming. Ars' problem with Hulu was the fact that it was a sandbox. I don't think that's necessarily bad, depending on what's in the sandbox and the playground rules—and what you expect to get out of it. I actually don't care to pull content out of Hulu's garden, beyond embedding clips on Gizmodo—I just want to be able to catch the Heroes ep I missed or peek a show I've heard about with a couple of clicks and no waiting.

Shortfall #1: It doesn't put shows up quickly enough after they air. It's still faster to grab a torrent right after Heroes airs on the East Coast than to wait for it to drop on Hulu (not that I've done that, lovely denizens of NBC's legal department). Solution? Air it on both simultaneously. It'll also help solve the tricky dilemma of measuring new vs. old, medium-shifting viewers.

Shortfall #2: It's an incomplete archive, with new episodes pushing off older ones. This is a balancing act because they don't want to cannibalize TV-on-DVD sales, but personally, if I haven't already bought a series on DVD I'm not going to. For instance, Buffy Season One is available in its entirety, but nothing beyond that, even though I wanna watch the musical episode. Heroes now only stretches back to the second ep of the current season.

The truly bold step to take in this little experiment is to throw open the content doors: Put up everything, and watch what happens. My guess is that it wouldn't adversely affect DVD sales—maybe iTunes, but according to NBC, they weren't making any money there anyway. Hell, throw in two thirty-second spots per clip, but bump the resolution. In other words: Make it more like TV.