BIT RATE

January 9, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Las Vegas -- While the mood is a bit subdued at this year's CES, the industry's gadgeteers managed to hype a hot new tech: 3-D television.

Sony's Howard Stringer featured 3-D in his keynote yesterday, and Panasonic's Yoshi Yamada earlier this week called the advent of the technology as big as the move from standard-def to HDTV.

Both companies have demos of 3-D TV prototypes on the show floor, and I checked them out today. (Both, incidentally, featured clips from Disney's Bolt.) 

...Read More

January 8, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Las Vegas -- Tom Hanks gave his sometime-employer Sony a not-so-gentle ribbing in his appearance during chairman and CEO Howard Stringer’s CES keynote address on Thursday.

Hanks -- star of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Angels & Demons, the Da Vinci Code sequel set for May release -- delivered a warm-up routine during which he mocked the script he’d been asked to deliver.

He began by jokingly expressing regret that he had picked VHS instead of Sony’s Betamax years ago: “What a different world this would be if I had chosen differently!”

Things went downhill from there.

Before delivering the canned intro, Hanks said: “I will now read the lines some low-leve...Read More

January 8, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Las Vegas -- Dish Network has finally done what everyone expected it would do when Charlie Ergen bought the Slingbox guys in September 2007: It's rolled out a DVR that includes the Sling place-shifting features, the first such offering on the market.

The ViP 922, developed by EchoStar Technologies, will be available to customers in spring 2009. The "SlingLoaded" DVR, just like a Slingbox, lets you watch any programming or recording over the Internet, even on an iPhone (but you'd probably want to be on a Wi-Fi connection).

Other fe...Read More

January 7, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Las Vegas -- Personalized TV is a sometimes-flaky technology, as any hapless cable subscriber wrestling with a VOD menu can attest.

Certain VOD technologies aren't even able to scale to handle a fully packed Boeing 757.

On my Continental flight to Las Vegas today, the airline's in-flight video-on-demand system -- which provided access to 18 movies, 16 TV shows and short features, 50 music CDs and games -- went kablooie. 

Continental just last month completed rolling out the audio/video on-demand system, supplied by Panasonic, on all 39 of its 757-200 planes, according to a Dec. 5 press release from the air...Read More

January 6, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Worshippers in the Cult of the iPhone soon will have another toy to play with -- a TV-mobility experience from EchoStar's Sling Media that no cable or telco TV provider matches today.

Sling this week will demo a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone at Macworld (an event the Mac faithful's high priest, the ailing Steve Jobs, is sitting out).

Like Sling's mobile player for other smart...Read More