Throw your hands up in the air – and wave them at your TV screen: A new open source app makes it possible to control Google Tv devices with a Kinect. The hack shows what’s possible when you let third-party developers toy with remote control capabilities. Read more »
Want to load up your iPad with some movies before you leave for Thanksgiving? Then you might want to take a look at the latest iOS version of Plex: The media center maker just added sync functionality to its iPad app. Read more »
Janus Friis is slowly taking the wraps off his new service Vdio – and it turns out that it’s not a Netflix killer at all: The company just launched a private beta test in the U.K. and the U.S., offering iTunes-like movie and TV show consumption. Read more »
YouTube recently launched AirPlay-like video beaming for Google TV and Android devices, but Google plans to take the technology much further. The company is working on an alternative to AirPlay, which it wants to bring to third-party devices and services – a clear shot at Apple. Read more »
GetGlue just earned a Viggle badge: The two New York-based social TV services are going to join forces, with Viggle buying GetGlue for $25 million in cash plus stock. Both services will continue to be operated separately, at least for now. Read more »
Pandora’s Android users don’t have to wait any longer for features that were rolled out on iOS last month: The new Pandora Android app brings social sharing, activity feeds and lyrics to Android-based mobile phones. An Android tablet app is planned for a future release date. Read more »
YouTube launched on the Wii Thursday, and the app is powered by Google’s open WebM video codec. This makes the Wii app the biggest WebM deployment in the world, and gives Google a chance to show off what WebM is capable of. Read more »
Food Network wants to partner with YouTube to produce exclusive content for the site as part of its professional channels initiative. For the cable network, it’s part of a bigger initiative of embracing online content. But can Food Network find an audience on YouTube? Read more »
Would Xfinity’s iPad app ever tell you if a show is available on Netflix? Jeremy Toeman doesn’t think so, which is why his company built a TV guide app that tries to recommend content from all sources – a kind of Switzerland of TV guides. Read more »
Want a coke with that $3 billion valuation? Spotify apparently does: The company just raised an additional $100 million in funding, with Coca-Cola being one of the more notable new investors. Coke has been experimenting with digital music for some time. Read more »
Google TV is getting advanced voice control, and the technology behind it is being fed by the knowledge graph that also powers Google Now. Speaking of which: The mobile app will soon be much more closely connected to Google’s TV platform. Read more »
Here’s another sign that live, over-the-air broadcast TV is heating up: The WD TV Live line of devices just got support for over-the-air tuners, enabling users to watch free HD TV and even record shows with a basic DVR feature. Check out our first look. Read more »
Vimeo plans to open up its pay-per-view platform to content producer early next year. This week, it debuted the platform with six select movies to showcase some of its features, including flexible viewing windows and additional content not found elsewhere. Read more »
Google TV just got a little more Apple-like: Android users can now use AirPlay-like functionality to send videos from their mobile phones and tablets to their Google TV devices. Google has said that it wants to bring that functionality to other platforms as well. Read more »
YouTube is renewing less than 40 percent of its original content channels, giving them millions more dollars to produce shows for the site. That’s very much in line with the renewal rates of the TV worlds, where 65 percent new of shows get axed. Read more »
SpongeBob SquarePants has a new home: Hulu just opened up a dedicated kids section on its website as well as within the Hulu Plus app on the PS3. That comes after Netflix launched its own kids section on the web and devices last year. Read more »
Wikipedia is getting a new HTML5-based video player that will make it easier to add video clips to the millions of articles on the site. Of course, Wikipedia has been working on incorporating video since 2008. So why has it been taking so long? Read more »
There are few shows on public radio that have a fan base as devoted as the listeners of This American Life. So it makes only sense that the show would circumvent the middlemen and directly go to its fans to sell its most recent video. Read more »
Millions of consumers will soon have access to the open real-time communications framework WebRTC, enabling them to do video calls in their browsers without the need for any additional plugin. Google added WebRTC to Chrome this week, and Mozilla included it in Firefox pre-beta builds. Read more »
Netflix accounts for 33 percent of all of North America’s peak residential downstream traffic, which makes it much bigger than any of its direct competitors: Based on those traffic numbers alone, Netflix sees more than 60 times as much usage as HBO Go. Read more »
Rhapsody’s new Android app features a bit of a different take on content curation: The app keeps track of what you like to listen to at certain times of the day, and then suggests you those exact songs at the right time. Read more »
Watching the results in real time has never been easier than during this year’s presidential election: Numerous TV networks and news sites are live streaming on the web, on the iPad and on Xboxes and connected devices. Check out our ultimate guide for all the links. Read more »
It took Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen seven years to go from the initial idea for the site to its launch – but that’s nothing compared to how long he plans to stick around: Chen said at RoadMap Monday that Kickstarter is a company built for generations. Read more »
Hulu Plus subscribers will get access to a number of CBS shows starting January 2013 — but don’t expect this to include last night’s CSI:Miami episode: The deal only includes episodes from previous seasons, and most of that will also just be made available to paying subscribers. Read more »
Boxee’s new Boxee TV device officially went on sale on Thursday, but we got our hands on one of the units early. Check out our first impressions, as well as some screenshots of the Boxee TV UI and an unboxing video. Read more »
Google’s Project Glass may sound like a bet on a distant future, but wearable computing could become a billion-dollar business sooner that you might expect: Juniper believes that smart watches, wearable fitness gizmos and head-mounted displays will bring in $1.5 billion by 2014. Read more »
Who knew Brazil and Japan had so much in common: Not only are 1.5 million of Brazils residents of Japanese descent – both countries also share a love for Anime. That’s why San Francisco-based Anime streaming service Crunchyroll is now expanding to the South American country. Read more »
Boxee’s new device, the Boxee TV streaming box with cloud DVR, will start selling exclusively at Walmart beginning November 1. This retail partnership is a big deal for Boxee, as Walmart will promote the device with display stations and additional marketing material. Read more »
iTunes will have to wait a little longer for the update to iTunes 11: Apple acknowledged Tuesday that it won’t be able to make the app available for download by the end of October. Maybe it’s trying to avoid another Maps debacle? Read more »
Udacity wants to go beyond an English-language audience – and it’s asking its users to help: The e-learning startup has partnered with Amara to add crowdsourced captions to its video assets. Amara previously partnered with TED, Coursera and the Khan Academy for crowdsourced video subtitles. Read more »
How do you add millions of pages of information to a mobile app without overburdening casual users? That’s a problem Pandora had to solve for its newly-relaunched iPhone app. The company decided that it was okay if many users simply ignored most of it. Read more »
Google Play users won’t have to upload every single song to their music locker anymore. Google just introduced its own version of iTunes Match, which identifies songs on a user’s hard drive and then unlocks them in the cloud. The main difference: Google’s version is free. Read more »
Google’s Project Glass won’t just change how you consume small snippets of information on the world around you – it will quite possibly also lead to a whole new generation of apps that use the real world as a platform and gamify your life. Read more »
Google, Facebook and AllThingsD all have canceled their events in New York this week in anticipation of hurricane Sandy. At the same time, numerous resources to track the hurricane are becoming available online. Check out our list of links and updates on tech vs. Sandy. Read more »
Rdio recently put up big billboards in Times Square and other high-profile places around the country. The ad campaign is part of the company’s efforts to finally introduce itself to a bigger audience after it spent two years working on its product. Read more »
Video chat startup turned real-time communications platform provider Tokbox has been acquired by Telefónica Digital, the international business arm of Spain’s telco giant Telefónica. Together, they want to provide communication services to developers, combining SMS, voice, video and billing with one simple API. Read more »
Soundrop started out as a kind of Turntable.fm app within the Spotify client, but its newest iteration goes much further by adding a social integration that puts Spotify’s own social efforts to shame. But relaunching within Spotify is just the first step for Soundrop. Read more »
Glocal wants to become the Hulu for local news and entertainment content, and help local publishers earn more money than on YouTube. That’s ambitious – but it’s also a good reminder that online video isn’t always about the big hits that are popular everywhere. Read more »
