Verizon Wireless through its FiOS program and HBO has just announced a deal that would bring free, unlimited online access to HBO programming for FiOS and HBO subscribers. Dubbed HBO Go, this online video hub delivers over 600 hours of movies, featured programs and other HBO goodies to you if you’re a FiOS TV and FiOS Internet.

HBO GO will go live starting tomorrow. And if you already have a FiOS TV credentials, you can simply log-in to FiOS TV Online Web site or at www.hbogo.com to enjoy setup the service on your account.

Once setup, you can now enjoy HBO programming not only at your home but anywhere there’s broadband connection in the U.S. Now here’s the exciting part. HBO Go allows you to create up to 3 simultaneous subaccounts per household. These subaccounts will enjoy the same browsing and viewing options while at the same time allowing parents to enforce restriction on certain programming with user-friendly parental controls.

In addition, HBO also allows you to create a Watchlist that serves as a bookmark for contents that you want to watch later. You can also get exclusive bonus material, soundtrack and cast information by setting up a Series Pass with notifications about new and upcoming HBO series episodes.

If you’re interested with this entertainment service and you’re not yet a member of FiOS, check out this link for information on how you could join.

Tonight marks the most important game of the year in all of American sports scene. Super Bowl XLIV kicks off in exactly 11 hours from now. Most if not all of you are probably gearing up to watch it where ever you may be tonight.  But tonight is not only the most important sports gig in all of America but  also in the advertising industry.

Aside from the game, the Super Bowl ads that will be airing tonight are also highly anticipated. It is perhaps one of the most prestigious advertising spot that every brand have been eyeing for in their entire lives.  Even Google is rumored to be airing their own “search stories” ads tonight. That adds some more excitement to the event later.

And while we wonder whether Google is indeed airing a commercial tonight, YouTube on the other hand has also prepared for the event via its AdBlits channel. Co-sponsored by Kia Motors  YouTube AdBlitz is your one-stop shop for everything about Super Bowl XLIV.

Later on as the Super Bowl commercials air one by one, YouTube will be posting them on the AdBlitz wall for everyone to rate and vote for their favorites. Voting ends Monday, February 15, and the winner will be announced  on Thursday, February 18.

 

Comcast is about to give its products and services a huge boosts – from visual improvement, speed enhancement and more control for consumers who partake of what they offer.  The company has just announced a new branding for their technology platforms and products called XFINITY.

According to a post on the Comcast Voices blog, XFINITY will provide their customers with more than 100+HD channels, 50 to 70 foreign-language channels, almost 20,000 Video-One-Demand choices, 50mbps to 100+mbps internet speeds and of course thousands of shows and movies online.

Once it is is officially launched, all of Comcast’s products will now be called XFINITY TV, XFINITY Voice and XFINITY Internet. Comcast’s new branding will be rolled out in 11 markets - Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Hartford, Augusta, Chattanooga, parts of the Bay Area and San Francisco, plus more to come next year.

The decision to rebrand their products and services was brought about by the sudden explosion in Comcast’s service delivery since the day they have launched their VOD service sometime in 2003. Since then, the company has served 14 billion views comprising of movies, TV shows, music videos, and more. Even its Internet service has grown so fast that they can now provide up to 50mbps speed and will continue to increase some more.

And as technology continues to improve, Comcast and its XFINITY products and services will also grow and keep up with the changing demands of consumers in terms of partaking various media content. Hence, XFINITY seems to be a very appropriate branding.

UStream, the same video service which made some significant ground-breaking feature earlier with the Avatar premiere and their New Year’s Eve  live coverage is offering yet again another new service. This time it’s a live video streaming format with specific featured performers.

But don’t get your hopes so high yet though, as this new service will be on a pay-per-view basis. Just like in any live performance acts, you need to purchase a ticket to be able to watch the shows on UStream’s Live Video platform. Ticket prices for UStream’s Live Video events will start from $5 and could possibly go higher depending on the featured acts.

To kick off the its new Live Video Platform, UStream is bringing in comedian Dane Cook with his stand-up routine entitled “ISolated INcident.” Tickets are available for $5 and the event  is happening on February 6, 6:30 p.m. EST.

Aside from being able to watch the whole show online, paying users will also get other freebies including the chance to chat with other fans right on the Live Video Platform itself. You can also ask Dane Cook questions as well as access some backstage content. All in all, UStream promises to bring in 5 hours of entertainment in exchange for your $5 bucks.

But this is just the start. UStream hopes to get some other big acts to be featured on their Live Video platform.

Interested?  you may grab your tickets to this gig by visiting this link.

Once again, the Internet community are exerting every efforts that they can to help alleviate the impact of the recent earthquake that devastated the small country of Haiti. I’ve seen what online technology can do to mobilize the people in helping out calamity victims having recently survived the great flood that hit Manila last year.

And just like during that flood that struck Manila, Google is once again mobilizing all its web resources to help in the disaster relief effort in Haiti. Google has established the Google Crisis Response to Support the Disaster Relief in Haiti. On the site you’ll find useful information on how you can donate to International Organizations who are helping out the disaster relief effort in Haiti.

You can use the Google Checkout faciilty to course your donation for Haiti to either CARE or Unicef, or choose from any of the following sites to channel your donations.

• UNICEF (1-800-4UNICEF),
• Direct Relief,
• Yele Haiti,
• Partners in Health,
• Red Cross,
• World Food Program,
• Mercy Corps (1-888-256-1900),
• Save the Children,
• Lambi Fund,
• Doctors Without Borders,
• The International Rescue Committee, Care

You can also send your donations via SMS: (for US only):

• SMS text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts
• SMS text “YELE” to 501501 to Donate $5 to Yele Haiti’s Earthquake Relief efforts

And for information and real-time updates on what’s happening right now in Haiti, you can check out the following useful sites:

• Resource updates: Google News, YouTube, Real Time updates on Google Search
• Local media websites: TNH, Le Nouvelliste, Radio Metropole Haiti, Radio Galaxie, Radio Ginen
• US State Department: Americans seeking information can call 1-888-407-4747, Latest information
• Other resources: Haiti Situation Tracking Form (provided by Google), Ushahidi (online tracking tool), Le3900.com (Haitian business directory)

And if you want to get a glimpse of the how it looks right now in Haiti, Google has put up a satellite imagery of the country using Google Earth layers.

 

What would you get if you combine the forces of one of the leading local cable telecomms service provide in the U.S. and a next-generation multiplatform premium entertainment channel backed by the movie industry’s biggies such as Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate?  Some, if not most of the blockbuster movies of all time available on your TV screen. That’s what’s going to happen after Mediacom and EpixHD roll out the conditions of their partnership.

The two media companies has just agreed on a distribution deal.  Epix will be making available its blockbusters to Mediacom customers across multiple platforms. That means that come April when the deal is launch, Mediacom customers will have viewing access to movie hits such as GI Joe, Star Trek, Paranormal activity, to name just a few of the most recent Hollywood movies.

The deal is actually a perfect fit. Epix has acces to more than 1,500 movies from its partner studions, while Mediacom has a wide reach among U.S. Cable TV audience.

If you want to take a peek at what Epix is offering, you can visit its linear channel at www.EpixHD.com. Through this site, Mediacom customers will be able to watch more than 150 films and other online programs on demand format at anytime and anywhere.  EpixHD.com even offers studio exclusive, behind the scene footages and other movie extras.

If you’re into great movies, you should watch out for the materialization of this Mediacom and EpixHD deal. It’s just a couple of months to go of waiting.

Mark Greenberg, president of EPIX, has this to say about their deal with Mediacom:

“We are focused on providing a compelling and unique entertainment experience in a way that every consumer can enjoy — whether that’s a traditional television viewing experience, on demand or on the Internet where video consumption is growing. Mediacom is a great distribution partner that serves a unique marketplace in our country – smaller towns and rural communities. We are particularly excited to work with them and to demonstrate the on demand and online capabilities that EPIX has developed.”

Universal Music Group (UMG) has teamed up with ad-sponsored digital music download service FreeAllMusic to provide a facility for music fans to download freely and legally music tracks from UMG’s stable of artists. The deal will give users up to 20 free music downloads per month, five per week starting every New Music Tuesday.

In case you’re not aware, FreeAllMusic is a fairly new music service offering downloadable, high-quality, iPod-compatible MP3s of popular songs that are advertiser-paid, free, legal and DRM-free. The catch? You have to watch a short video commercial before you can download an MP3. You have to do that to let FreeAllMusic continue providing the service. It is after all what’s paying their bills to keep the site running.

The good thing is, after watching the video commercial and downloading the MP3, you can now enjoy it anytime, anywhere minus the ads. Fair enough, right? Ok, before you folks jump for joy, let me just tell you that FreeAllMusic is a for US-only site. So bad luck for all of us non-US citizens of the world. But of course there are other alternatives to this service, if  you know what I’m referring to.

If you’re from the U.S., you need to register at FreeAllMusic.com and then simply select a participating brand, then watch the short video commercial. After which you can start downloading the mp3. You can also share your downloads to friends but they have to download it for themselves. And they should also watch the video commercial. Or post your music download to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that others may know about FreeAllMusic.com’s service and be compelled to watch video commercials in exchange for free music.

Source

 

For its share of the news in the ongoing CES 2010, Yahoo is spiking up the delivery of web content through its Widget Engine for connected TV. Yahoo has announced partnership gigs with various consumer electronics companies including Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics and VIZIO. In addition, Yahoo has also teamed up with Intel to make its Widgen Development Kit available to developers to bring in more Internet-TV applications.

Yahoo’s TV widget brings popular Internet services and online media to reach viewers with applications specifically tailored to the needs of TV watchers. In other words, it’s like having a multimedia hub that you control on your TV screen. If you’re a couch potato like me, you’d definitely want to try this one out. That is of course if you have the supported consumer electronic products from the brands we mentioned awhile back.

And to make the user experience even more exciting and fun, Yahoo has also released the Widget Development Kit containing the Yahoo Widget Engine.  This WDK uses industry standard tools such as Javascript, XML and HTML to make it easy for developers and manufacturers to develop and deploy TV widgets of popular Internet services.  If this is the part of this news that interest you, check out more about the WDK here.

So, there. CES 2010 certainly brought us many new options for home entertainment.  Which is going to be for you? Boxee Beta? Boxee Box? Pophub Box or Yahoo Connected TV? Mind you, these are just some of the new options that you can use to spice up your home entertainment system. There are definitely many more which were announced at the CES 2010.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

After several months, social media center Boxee is finally available in beta. Boxee lets you play media from your computer and other devices in your home network as well as stream or download moviews, tv shows,  music and photos  from Internet sources to your TV.  If you don’t want to buy the Boxee Box which was launched recently, the Boxee software will allow you to do all the things you can do with the Boxee Box using your computer.

To kickstart the release of Boxee Beta, which you can download right now here, Boxee has also snagged partnerships with several content providers including TV.com, Blip.tv,  and IGN. TV. com has several great shows including Family Guy, Heroes and more. Blip.tv is a great source for independently produced content and IGN is of course for gaming content.  In addition, Boxee is also bringing in an app for the upcoming awesome movie Wolfman.

Boxee Beta is available for Windows, Linux and of course Mac OS X. For more details on what Boxee can do, check out an earlier post from the Boxee blog.

To get started using Boxee, you need to sign-up at this site, grab the software, connect your PC to your TV or get wait for the D-Link Boxee Box to be released, grab a popcorn and then sit back, relax and enjoy watching media content on your 32-inch HDTV.

It looks like CES 2010 will be dominated not only by netbooks and tablet PCs, and e-book readers but also of multimedia entertainment hub that brings various content from multiple devices to home TV viewing.  We’ve covered AXAR technology and Popbox Hub recently, and now here comes another one straight out of CES 2010 announcement – D-Link Boxee Box.

The Boxee Box brings movies, TV shows, music and photos from your computer, home network, and the Internet to HDTV. Aside from this, Boxee Box also has social networking features including direct access to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

The Boxee Box takes the popular PC, Mac and Linux software in the form of a HDTV device to bring access to a huge library of content direct from the Internet. You can also add your own content through RSS or XML feeds. Users will also have access to music sites including Pandora, last.fm, shoutcase and We are Hunted as well on photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa and Facebook.

In addition to Internet content Boxee Box also works with your digital media content that you have accumulated on your computer hard drive or home network. It finds relevant cover art, synopses, reviews, and other information about your digital content to form your multimedia libraries.Boxee Box supports various formats as well and supports Wi-Fi 802.11.

And finally, Boxee Box lets you discover multimedia content of your Facebook and Twitter friends as well as share your own multimedia list to them.

Boxee Box is expected to ship later this year.

Update: The Boxee Blog official announcement.