Sonic (makers of Roxio) are bringing CinemaNow to the Wii. CinemaNow, in case you've forgotten, offers streaming movies (a catalog of about 14,000), short films, and concerts for rent or purchase. They haven't gotten much of a foothold here in the States despite being around since 1999, even after being bought by Blockbuster a few years back. They've got a decent catalog, especially for new releases, and have partnered with all kinds of software, so the Wii should be no problem for them.

It might be more of a toe in the water than a real balls-out jump, but we're glad Nintendo is open to expanding the Wii's media capabilities. Remember, it's Japan-only for now, but we wouldn't be surprised to see this kind of integration appear Stateside. Press release to follow. [CinemaNow]

Fujisoft Teams with Sonic Solutions to Deliver Hollywood Hits to

Nintendo Wii Game Console

Roxio CinemaNow Begins Streaming Movies from Paramount Pictures

Novato, California (June 25, 2009) - Sonic Solutions® (NASDAQ: SNIC), today announced that it is partnering with Fujisoft Incorporated to deliver premium entertainment to the Nintendo Wii game console. Sonic's Roxio CinemaNow® will be providing Hollywood content, beginning with new releases and catalog titles from Paramount Pictures, for Fujisoft's video-on-demand service in Japan, called "Minna no Theater Wii" (Everyone's Theater Wii). The companies will continue to work together in order to expand the range of entertainment available for virtually instant streaming to the TV via the popular game console.

"Sonic is a key content partner, enabling us to greatly enrich the video entertainment options available to Wii customers," said Minoru Yoshida, Executive Managing Director, Fujisoft. "We look forward to continuing our partnership with Sonic and providing consumers trouble-free access to more great Hollywood entertainment at home."

"Increasingly, consumers are looking to access and enjoy movies via their connected entertainment devices, whether at home or on-the-go," said Alex Carloss, Executive Vice President, Digital Distribution, Paramount Digital Entertainment. "Therefore we are delighted to become the first major studio offering video-on-demand through the Nintendo Wii."

Roxio CinemaNow offers a broad selection of regularly updated premium video entertainment for rental or purchase, including new releases from major Hollywood studios often on the same day the DVD is available in stores. CinemaNow's cloud-based media services power devices from multiple manufacturers, forming a connected ecosystem that consumers can use to seamlessly choose, move and view video entertainment.

"Fujisoft is a renowned technology thought leader and major supplier of embedded software for everything from mobile devices to digital home electronics, so we are extremely pleased to be collaborating with them to bring Hollywood movies to the Wii," said Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy, Sonic Solutions. "Thanks to this new relationship with Fujisoft, consumers now have another convenient way to access high-quality entertainment from Roxio CinemaNow."

Premium entertainment from Roxio CinemaNow is currently available on a range of devices including Blu-ray Disc players from LG Electronics, Dell PCs, and Archos portable media players. As well as being available on a range of consumer electronics, Roxio CinemaNow is currently powering internet movie delivery for Blockbuster and is instantly accessible through Bestbuy.com.

Most, if not all, of the same features found in Toast 9 are still available in Toast 10. This includes burning of CD/DVD Video, Data and Audio discs, as well as Blu-ray data burning. Toast 10 also offers disc-based computer backups, streaming audio recording, Tivo2Go transfers and video compression—not only for disc burning, but also for transfer to portable devices. This time around, however, Roxio upped the ante with their software by not only working with your computer and the media on it, but also a handful of consumer gadgets.

Most notable are the new video streaming and transfer capabilites for iPhone and Tivo that Toast 10 will offer. Though Toast 9 offered video streaming to your iPhone, it could only be done over Wi-Fi. This feature now works over 3G mobile internet, streaming movies from your home computer to your iPhone. The new Tivo Desktop feature in Toast 10 is like Tivo2Go in reverse. You pull whatever video files you have on your computer (and want to watch on your TV), and use Toast 10 to encode and send them to your Tivo for viewing. Various open source versions of this feature have been out for awhile, but they tend to be buggy.

There's also a new flash video ripper, which can automatically rip any video you watch on sites like YouTube and Daily Motion, and then encode and transfer them to a variety of phones and PMPs, such as Blackberries, Palms, and yes, iPods/iPhones. In addition, Toast 10 has one-click backup of video from your AVCHD camcorder to DVD or Blu-ray, which can later be imported to video editing apps such as iMovie. Other features include folder syncing between computers, conversion of audiobooks from CD to MP3, and compiling clips from DVD movies.

Roxio will also offer Toast 10 TitaniumPro, which burns full HD video to Blu-ray or DVD discs that are suitable for playback in Blu-ray players. The pro version also comes with a suite of full version audio and video editing apps.

Toast 10 Titanium and Toast 10 Titanium Pro will be available this month for $100 and $150, respectively. [Roxio]

Roxio's crunch is good for non-DVD, video to iPhone conversion and like Handbrake, it does export for most other devices, too. This software costs about $30. Works pretty well. It claims to handle discs, but like most commercial products, won't rip anything copy protected, making this part of the package useless. Best part of Crunch? Fast batch processing of many files.

Visualhub, another paid piece of video ripping software is getting rave reviews, although I've never used it. Most attractively, you can use xgrid to do your compression across multiple networked Macs. Bad ass.

TiVo to Go for the Mac [TiVo]