CBS Acquires Last.fm

If you scroll down TechMeme today past all the news about Microsoft’s surface computing concept (way cool), you’ll land on several articles about CBS’s acquisition of Last.fm. I have a very selfish reason for finding this interesting. If Last.fm warrants a buy-out by CBS (to to the tune of $280M), maybe that means Pandora will … Read more

TiVo – Buy, Sell or Waffle

It’s a day full of TiVo. The company reports quarterly earnings this afternoon and apparently none of the financial analysts agree on how investors should react to a predicted $.02 per-share loss. I borrowed the title of this post from a Motley Fool article, which goes on to report that seven analysts recommend TiVo as … Read more

Would You Give Up TiVo For Your Air Conditioner?

TiVo’s remote can do a lot of great things, but apparently Brainfreiz’s remote, includes a little too much functionality. The good news is that he’s able to control his new air conditioner with his TiVo remote. No special hacks, it came out of the box like that. The bad news is, everytime he hits the … Read more

Unofficial Apple TV Development Kit

Whether you like Apple TV or not, last100 (via AwkwardTV) reports it’s relatively easy now to create plug-in applications with the unofficial AppleTV software development kit (SDK). In a closed ecosystem like AppleTV, having a hacker’s SDK is probably crucial to acceptance and proliferation among the geek community. What will be interesting to me is … Read more

What’s Up with Radio?

The argument I hear about television is that we’ll never move completely to a pay-per-program model because the vast majority of people like being able to sit mindlessly in front of a TV screen and channel surf. I agree because that theory has already so clearly played out in the radio world. As popular as … Read more

New TV Stats

Because there’s nothing like an official study to make us think we know which direction the market will go… A study conducted by Canalys (reported on ZDNet) found that 51% of the European adults surveyed were interested in mobile TV. However, the content they reported being interested in varied widely, from live sports events to … Read more

Flash Drive Fun

The state of television today got you down? Never fear, your favorite movies are just a digital download away. Or, enjoy the universe of your favorite flick in an Xbox 360 game. Or, pick up movie extras on a flash drive! Yup, a flash drive. Flash drives have quietly been added to the line of … Read more

Comcast Launches TVplanner

There was a fair bit of conversation at the recent Cable IPTV conference around how Comcast is approaching competition from online video services. Part of the approach involves having its own online video destination, (see news about the upcoming launch of Fancast), and the other part involves using the Internet to push subscribers to cable … Read more