Redbox Hits Milestone
On Sunday, Redbox announced that the company had rented its one billionth movie. For those who care, the movie that put them over the top was “Clash of the Titans”. Go figure. The important point is that the first Redbox movie kiosk appeared just six years ago. Now there are more than 24,000 of these convenient, [...]

iTV: iDon?t Get It
The Internet is buzzing with the news about Apple’s iTV. At the very least, this is a refreshing change from it buzzing with rumors about iTV. We all know that Steve Jobs is the master marketer of our time; he can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse just by talking about it. The [...]

Mobile TV: Going Nowhere Fast
In a press release, The Diffusion Group (TDG) announced its new report, “The Possibilities and Challenges for Mobile TV”. In the release, TDG states that mobile TV subscription services are forecast to double their subscriber base by 2013. This sounds exciting until you find out that this means increasing from 1.6 million this year to [...]

Roku Price Drop
What’s a Roku? It’s a media player that you connect to your home network, through which it accesses the Internet to get streaming content for your television. It’s a whole lot easier than setting up a full-blown computer, and at about 5 by 5 by 2 inches, it’s a lot smaller too. The box lets you [...]

Monitor vs. TV: What?s in a Name?
I long for the old days, when things were simpler. Back when a computer monitor was a computer monitor, and a TV was a TV. It’s not that way anymore. Almost all TVs now have a way that lets you connect it to a laptop or desktop computer: either a VGA connector, or an HDMI [...]

Netflix in Your Pocket
Last spring, I wrote about Netflix demo’ing its streaming service on a Windows Phone 7 operating system. Now comes word that Netflix is releasing free applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that will let subscribers access streaming content on these portable devices. The free apps can access the streaming service across either a WiFi [...]

No-Glasses 3DTV This Year?
There’s been a buzz caused by a news item from the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. According to the story, Toshiba has plans to release 3DTV models later this year that will not require the special glasses used with other 3D displays such as those from Panasonic or Samsung. Here’s the key section from the story: Toshiba [...]

Get Connected at Your Outlet
According to a press release from Western Digital, research by Parks Associates indicates that 42% of the consumers unwilling to connect their TVs to the Internet felt that either the router connection is too far away, or that it would be too complicated to set up, or both. WiFi does help solve the connection problem, [...]

Survey: Most Have Seen 3D Movies
TWICE commissioned a survey about consumer opinion about 3DTV, and the results have some interesting highlights. A good place to start is the fact that about 78% of the respondents have seen at least one 3D movie in a cinema. This is interesting because nearly the identical 78% have never seen a 3DTV. Now, nearly the [...]

Gefen Levels the Audio Field
I know I’m not the only one who gets peeved about this; you’re watching a show, then a commercial comes on and blasts you out of your seat with a high volume setting. It’s not just broadcast video; I’ve also noticed this (with dismay) on streaming sites such as Hulu. I’ve written about this problem [...]