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Score a small victory for Fair Use and the rights of cable TV viewers (at least indirectly). Today, in an obscure agreement, administrative oversight consortiums representing cable companies (CableLabs) and electronics makers (5C), and with the approval of the content industry (TV/Film studios),  agreed to support an encryption and data management standard for streaming content within home networks.

At issue is the ability to watch and record digital programming within your home and then stream it from one device to another on a local network.   Imagine, record a TV show on your DVR, stream it live, or delayed, to your home office computer, or shift it to the TV in your bedroom.  Store it on a network hard drive rather than the drive on board your Tivo box.  Watch it in one room, while recording something else in another.

But wait you ask? Isn’t place shifting technology already here?  Isn’t this already possible?  The answer is, yes, it is available but with caveats. Click to Read More

After a year of deliberating, the New York Times has finally begun to embrace the changes sweeping the media industry.  Their personalization service, MyTimes officially launched Thursday

The project originally began in April of 2006 with a beta launch.  For the past year they were testing the customizable front page and  RSS reader against pools of users to figure out what level of functionality best fit their customers.  The offering released today is light compared to competing services but it does embrace Web 2.0 features. MyTimes allows editors to make content recommendations and readers can indulge with widgets (mini-feature applications) like Flickr photos, bookmarks, and weather data to add additional functionality.    Multiple pages, organized by content or otherwise, are also possible.  Click to Read More

Amidst continually bullish forecasts for the gaming industry, NPD Group released its monthly hardware U.S. sales data for June. Taking seasonal slowdown into account, the numbers were again incredibly strong, especially for Nintendo, which for the first time saw the Wii beat out even the portables as the top selling platform of the month.

For hardware, sales was up 77% over last year to $380.8m. Nintendo, attention to the user experience and efforts to reach out to new gamers again dominated both full–size and portable hardware categories. In Jul6, Nintendo sold 425k Wii units and 381.8k DS. . The numbers are particularly impressive considering the July include 4 weeks of data and the June numbers included 5. Readjusted for weeks, Nintendo sold about 106k Wii’s a week this month, last month they totaled about 76k.

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Over the years, Sony’s sometimes made it easy to question their strategies and management.  Whether it’s been missteps with trying to market  proprietary technology (Betamax, Memory Stick) or betting heavily on the future at the expense of the present (PS3 platform), the technology giant has made bold, and sometimes bad, decisions.   One thing is clear, however, Sony’s ambitions are huge; especially when it comes to our living rooms.  Sony wants to be a hub in the wheel of connected entertainment.  And that’s never been more clear than today.

In Europe, Sony has unveiled a Playstation peripheral that is both TV Tuner and Digital Video Recorder.  The device, called Play-TV  brings an added set of features to the already powerful platform.  Click to Read More

There’s been a lot of activity on the financing front lately.  With big deals like Metacafe’s $30m round, and smaller deals with celebrity investors like,   Exabre (The Filter) some other smaller round deals haven’t gotten a lot of press.  Two that were almost overlooked are game company Conduit Labs and discovery-agent software company uPlayMe

Conduit Labs:
Conduit Labs has raised $5.5m in a first round for an internet gaming site.  Click to Read More

Borrowing a page from IPTV company Joost, YouTube is embracing interactive overlay advertising as a way to monetize their popular video portal.

Beginning today, Google will display the semi transparent, interactive ads on the bottom of select user-generated videos hosted on the YouTube site.  The ads will reportedly occupy no more than the bottom 20 percent of the screen.  They will appear after a fifteen second delay and disappear after a ten second presentation (unless the viewer engages the ad with a mouse click).

Unlike pre-roll ads, a competing ad format which holds a viewer hostage before the desired content is played, overlays are a relatively unobtrusive solution   aimed at minimizing the negative impact on the user experience.

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Eight figure funding rounds for net video companies are starting to become frighteningly familiar.  Joining Joost, Brightcove, and Veoh,  Palo Alto based Metacafe has become the latest winner of the high-valuation funding lottery.

It was announced today that the company closed a $30m 3rd Round of financing.  The deal was led by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures.  Previous investors Accel and Benchmark also participated (Accel has also invested in Brightcove).  The cumulative investment in the video portal now exceeds $50m. Click to Read More