Many of the traditionally impenetrable television networks are dipping their toes in to online content on the web. Most of this seems to be on a trial and error basis.

Many are now providing full episodes of their big shows online, but CBS seems to be going further than that, and has noticed the shorter attention span of its web audience compared to television viewers.

In what seems like a step backward, CBS has now launched EyeLab, a service with a collection of short clips from several hit shows that air on the network.

The videos will appear to be more along the lines of the user-generated content on YouTube, which CBS is hoping will keep viewers entertained and serve marketing purposes.

Tom Huntington, a spokesperson for DivX has announced that DivX, a growing video compression software company, has signed a two year deal with Yahoo! that replaces a previous agreement that DixX had with Google.

As the terms of the contract state, DivX software will now be offered with a co-branded Yahoo Toolbar and a version of IE7 pre-configured with Yahoo tools. Yahoo!, in exchange, will now provide links to DivX and its online video service, Stage6, within the Yahoo toolbar.

Could Yahoo! possibly be a better partner for DivX than Google?

Microsoft have announced the forthcoming release of Internet TV, a feature which will allow people to enjoy a range of television and video content on their PCs and TV sets without a TV tuner in their PC.

On September 28th 2007, US users of Windows Vista Home Premium edition and Windows Vista Ultimate edition will find the new beta release inside Media Center.

The free service will be supported by advertising from YuMe Networks, which, interestingly enough, is a competitor of Podaddies which has recently been working with Apple.

At launch, expect over 100 hours of streaming content including full episodes of various television shows, full-length music concerts by popular artists, movie trailers, MSNBC news segments and sports clips from FOX Sports.

Snapstream have now officially released the latest version of Beyond TV, their flagship Home Theater PC software.

This version is finally out of beta and has several very nice and noticable feature upgrades.

Here’s a list of some of the bigger ones:

1. Faster HDHomeRun Tuner - QAM tuning with Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun is now much faster. Before there was a delay when you first started a QAM channel. 

   Now with a setting change in the BTV webadmin, starting liveTV and changing channels for QAM channels are significantly improved.

2. Enhanced Line-up and change detection/correction.  Ability to edit a custom TV lineup.

3. Auto Load Shows to iTunes - As Snapstream mentioned on their blog, this might help out those people who were relying on iTunes to get their NBC programming (no longer available on iTunes) You can now showSqueeze to h.264 (this is for all of those Apple iPods and other Apple devices) including a podcast rss feed for iTunes.

    From the release notes “For you non-apple fanbois, we’ve also included a 1280×720p h.264 profile that you can send your hd content to and save a ton of space whilst still looking good.” Note this is a paid plugin packaged with the DVD Burning plugin (if you already have the DVD burning plugin, you’ll get this feature also).


4. Transcoding Support for iPod and PSP format.
(more…)

BudTV has got a reprieve, and I must admit that on first reading about it being saved from the ashes, and having its lease extended to next year, my first response was: Why?

The site, an attempt to create a Funny or Die-style comedy video destination, was so painfully lame — despite the estimated $20-million that went into setting it up and getting various artists to create content for it.

For this reason, I thought it would be better to euthanize it, and put it out of its (and our) misery.

That was my first reaction. But Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has managed to convince me that BudTV should live on to fight another day.

It seems that Sling Media is about to be acquired for the princely sum of approximately $380 Million.

Dave Zatz is reporting that Echostar Communications Company, the people known for its Dish Network Satellite TV will be shelling out that amount for the company.

Sling Media is the maker of the Slingbox and Slingplayer which allow you to placeshift your TV programming from your home across the internet to allow you to view that content anywhere there is an internet connection.

Any time an innovative company like Sling Media is purchased by a larger media/distribution company there are concerns about the future path of that innovative company and this will be no exception.  

Demonoid, one of the largest and most respected of the Torrent tracking sites has gone offline, allegedly having been shut down by the Canadian recording Industry Association (CRIA).

The site has now been down for almost 24 hours and counting.

Although the exact circumstances of the shut down are still unclear, rumours suggest that the CRIA are responsible for the current downtime. Even the Demonoid administrators are currently unaware of what exactly has happened.

That makes it seem likely that Demonoid’s Canadian ISP have pulled the plug after being pressured by the CRIA. While the server is still pinging, both the main site and forums are unresponsive.