A raft of goodies has been tacked on to Western Digital's TV Live and TV Live Hub media players including new streams and Vudu movie downloading, but the addition of SlingPlayer might be the most intriguing. Depending on your region, you'll see new channels on the WD set-tops, including The AOL On Network, Red Bull TV, ABC iview (Australia), Acetrax Movies, Maxdome and BILD TV-App. Walmart's Vudu service will also be added, letting domestic and some foreign users buy or rent from a library of 70,000 downloadable films and TV shows. Finally, if you're a frequent traveler, you can pack your WD box and fire up the new SlingPlayer on your hotel TV to watch hometown broadcasts wherever you may be. Provided you've got a Slingbox back home, of course. To find out more and see what's available in your country, check the source or PR below.
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New International and Domestic Entertainment Options Complement WD TV(R) Live[TM] and WD TV(R) Live Hub[TM]'s 'Play Anything' Popularity
IRVINE, Calif., June 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Western Digital(R) (NASDAQ: WDC), the world's leader in external storage solutions and maker of the popular WD TV(R) media player family, today introduced a variety of new entertainment options for the WD TV Live[TM] and WD TV Live Hub[TM] media players. Current and new users can now enjoy Red Bull TV[TM], ABC iview (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Acetrax[TM], Maxdome, the BILD TV-App, and the AOL On Network. They can also watch live and recorded TV with the new SlingPlayer(R) app and save their premium HD movies to the WD TV Live Hub's internal storage with VUDU.
WD's new entertainment choices add to the WD TV media player family's prodigious ability to play personal content such as videos, photos and music by supporting a wide range of media formats. Users can watch content located on any networked PC or Mac(R) computer in the home, from a network drive such as WD's My Book(R) Live[TM] personal cloud storage, and from any directly connected digital camcorder, camera, or USB drive. WD TV Live Hub owners can also save and share pictures and videos from outside the home, using the WD Photos[TM] app for iPhone(R), iPad(R) and Android[TM] mobile devices.
"WD continuously listens to its customers, and adds the content options they want," said Scott Vouri, vice president and general manager, WD connected home solutions. "With today's addition of hot international and domestic channels, live TV through SlingPlayer, and HD movie rentals, purchases and downloads through VUDU, the WD TV media players truly provide the most entertainment."
The WD TV Live Hub is the only media player to offer direct HD movie download service for today's hottest new movie releases purchased from VUDU's large library of movies and TV shows. VUDU is a subscription-free, HD video streaming service, which offers more than 70,000 blockbuster titles including new releases, Hollywood classics, independent films, and TV shows. Because it has an integrated 1TB hard drive, the WD TV Live Hub can save and play back purchased digital content from VUDU, including the high-quality HDX[TM] video format that features 1080p Full HD and rich Dolby Digital Plus[TM] 7.1 audio. "By centralizing their entertainment on the WD TV Live Hub, our customers get high-performance full-HD movie playback without overloading their home network or cluttering up the hard drives of other PCs in the house," added Vouri. From "Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol" to "The Muppets" WD brings today's top movies to the WD TV Live Hub for a cinema-like experience at home through the available VUDU service.
New Services[1] Now Available:
SlingPlayer (worldwide) - With a Slingbox(R) connected in your home, the SlingPlayer app brings your living room TV experience to your connected device in any room - around the home or around the world. The AOL On Network (US) - The AOL HD app, part of The AOL On Network, features high-definition technology, lifestyle, celebrity and entertainment content updated daily from The AOL On Network, which features video from brands like Engadget, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and Moviefone. Red Bull TV (worldwide) - A unique online portal offering exclusive high quality programs from the World of Red Bull in HD. Available to nearly all devices - Red Bull TV offers worldwide live webcasts and a thematic catalogue of VODs complementing exclusive shows of the multimedia content of redbull.com. ABC iview (Australia) - ABC iview is Australia's most popular catch-up TV service and is run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It features 14-day catch-up from channels ABC1, ABC2, ABC3, ABC4Kids and ABC News 24. Acetrax movies (UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria) - Available on the WD TV Live only, this service offers blockbuster new release and library movies from the major Hollywood studios. maxdome (Germany) - Available on the WD TV Live only, the most popular German video-on-demand service maxdome delivers over 45,000 major film and TV titles. BILD TV-App (Germany) - With the BILD TV-App users navigate easily and comfortably with the remote control through Germany's largest news and entertainment portal. The application offers the latest news and videos from politics, lifestyle, entertainment and sports, as well as the pictures of the day.
Availability
The WD TV Live and WD TV Live Hub can be purchased at select retailers and online at wdstore.com.
About WD
WD, a storage industry pioneer and long-time leader, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company designs and produces reliable, high-performance hard drives and solid state drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. Its storage technologies serve a wide range of host applications including client and enterprise computing, embedded systems and consumer electronics, as well as its own storage systems. Its home entertainment products enable rich engagement with stored digital content.
WD was founded in 1970. The company's products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital(R), WD(R) and HGST[TM] brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.
Western Digital, WD, the WD logo, WD TV, and My Book are registered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries; WD TV Live and My Book Live are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Not all products may be available in all regions of the world. All product and packaging specifications subject to change without notice. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.
Paul Berry, the former CTO of the Huffington Post, is pulling back the covers today on his stealth social publishing start-up RebelMouse, allowing users to get a look at the service and sign-up on the waiting list. The service is a publishing tool that lets people pull in and present their Twitter and Facebook content and mix it with stuff from the web, creating a very personal and dynamic page that represents who they are.
It’s like a flexible version of a Tumblr or WordPress site that is easy to configure, allowing users to create a very robust page out of existing and new content. It can serve as a more personal representation of a user, more than a Facebook, Pinterest or About.me page. RebelMouse users who sign-up for the waiting list today will soon be allowed to view the work of some early private beta testers. The site will open to the public in the next two to six weeks.
Berry told me the idea behind the site came from people constantly asking him for advice on how to create their own site. He said that can be too much of a struggle for people, something he set about trying to solve after leaving HuffPo in February.
“Right now, most of the world is on Facebook or Twitter, usually both. You’re spending way too much time and struggle and getting way too unsatisfactory results on your own website,” said Berry. “You need something to bring it together, to show who you are and that’s true of individuals and companies.”
Berry said the goal is to create something that’s fresh and social. So users can pick and choose what content they’ve shared through Facebook and Twitter and turn it into a post on a larger page. Or they can create an original post with their own media. There’s a bookmarklet for pulling in images from other sites, similar to Pinterest. And there’s analytics for each post so you can see how many people are reading it.
What’s cool about RebelMouse is you can easily arrange the different posts and freeze specific posts to a location, while the rest of the content is updated around it. That allows users to get out of the reverse chronological order that is common on most blogging platforms.
“Reverse chronological is very stone age,” Berry said. “It doesn’t represent how you’re thinking. There should be an element of recency but you should be able to highlight stuff you care about most.”
RebelMouse founder Paul Berry
RebelMouse, the second start-up out of Berry’s SoHo Tech Labs incubator, will be working through the feedback of its private beta testers and adding new features before it opens up. The site will soon have more discovery features to allow people to easily browse what other people are doing. And there will be more sources of content including Instagram, Tumblr, RSS and others. Berry said RebelMouse is also adding a commerce function so people can sell things directly on their RebelMouse pages. And they’re also working on finding a way to connect creators with brands, who might be interested in sponsoring posts.
RebelMouse will be free to people who have their page hosted on the site. It will charge individuals $3 a month to power a domain. Bigger blogs and corporate pages will be charged $3 a week.
For the notoriously impatient Berry, who hates creating anything in stealth mode, it’s a big milestone to finally start lifting the covers on RebelMouse. The goal now is to quickly set the service loose and see how viral and sticky it can get.
Most of you likely visit the Huffington Post on a regular basis – and you aren’t the only one. The self-proclaimed “internet newspaper” boasts 28M monthly unique, influential viewers and is continually growing. What’s perhaps most interesting to us over here at Curata, is the recent buzz suggesting the news outlet is joining the content marketing club.
According to articles in AdAge, Business Insider and Marketing Pilgrim, the HuffPo is kicking off a new service that will help brands and agencies build branded websites and assist in the creation, curation and distribution of content to brands’ key consumers. Already, HuffPo is in talks with a major consumer-goods advertiser to create its first such website. According to sources, the publisher will work with a team of social marketers from the ad company to generate new lifestyle-oriented content for the branded site and to curate existing material from The Huffington Post.
What spurred the new offering? Execs at AOL Advertising (HuffPo is a subsidiary) say the news site wanted to keep up with the evolving marketplace where brands are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of producing and sharing strong content.
It’s probably only a matter of time before more publishers begin to incorporate content creation and curation as a revenue stream- just look at the results of our latest Content Curation Adoption Survey which cites how 95 percent of marketers are curating. With a figure like that, content curation must be doing something right. Still, it’s awesome to see yet another major name get involved in the growing cause and work with others to both give and receive all of the benefits this type of marketing has to offer.
Have you heard of any companies jumping on the content curation bandwagon? We’d love to hear what you think. Oh and we’re psyched that this is our first Bostinno channel post – we’re looking forward to “dropping knowledge”!
At this point, most people (in the tech world, at least) are quite familiar with Gaikai's cloud gaming platform, which lets users have a not-quite-console quality gaming experience on any device. The technology has found its way onto Facebook and in LG TVs, and now Gaikai's bringing gaming to Samsung TVs, too. Called Samsung Cloud Gaming (SCG), it'll be available via the Smart Hub on Samsung 7000 series and up Smart TVs in the US this summer. The technology powering SCG is the same as what's behind LG's service, but Sammy's customized the UI to suit its sensibilities. We got a chance to speak with Gaikai CEO David Perry about his company's latest partnership, so join us after the break for more.
A few years back, when I was unwell, I took a vow that I would try and reach out to one person from my past and talk to them on the phone every day. I have done that for nearly four years, though given the size of my rolodex, I am yet to go through the list twice. These don’t include people I currently work or socialize with, or have established relationships in past 12 months. The experience that follows this one-on-one connection is quite rewarding — people are surprised that you remember or that you care to get in touch.
So, yesterday when I came across Pipe, I knew I had to share it with you guys. (Don’t confuse it with the file-sharing app that launched a few weeks ago. My colleague David Meyer wrote about them for GigaOM Europe.) The idea behind the app is basic and simple — it sifts through your social graph and encourages you to get in touch with one person on your list.
The app finds a person, shows some of their basic details, including their social networking identities and offers a plain and simple box to write and send them messages. You can email them, or send them messages via Twitter or LinkedIn. If you don’t want to connect with them today, you can tell the service to remind you later. Or you can simply ignore someone forever and the system will banish them to social networking hell. Pipe is working on Facebook integration, so for now you need a LinkedIn account to use it.
I sadly don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore, so I haven’t used the app. However, when they add Facebook support, I will use the app on a more regular basis. The Pipe app comes at an opportune time. As more and more networks proliferate, we are getting bogged down in frivolous updates but not really connecting with one another.
I must warn you, the app is very raw and the company is tiny and has few resources. At best it is in alpha-stage and currently works on both mobile and regular web browers. If you do end up trying, leave a comment or suggestion here. Also, please don’t judge them for what they don’t have, instead, think about it as a tool to make social networks what they are really meant for — for us being more social.
TwitchTV announced Monday the first game with built-in livestreaming, circumventing the difficult systems players would normally have to use to broadcast their games live.
TwitchTV will integrate streaming into The Showdown Effect, a PC game published by Paradox Interactive. A simple button on the game’s dashboard will allow players to begin streaming their gameplay to TwitchTV viewers.
The partnership represents lowering the barrier of entry to live streaming, according to Matthew DiPietro, Vice President of Marketing for Twitch TV. “We realize it’s not easy for all gamers to share their games, but we’re working on changing that,” DiPietro said, confirming that TwitchTV is working on additional integration partnerships to be announced at a later date.
The Showdown Effect is a shooter that attempts to simulate the over-the-top nature of action movies. According to the Paradox website, gamers will be able to use an arsenal of ridiculous weapons, including grenades, lightsabers and frying pans. Lead producer Shams Jorjani said elements like this will result in a satisfying game to watch and play.
“The game is made to be fun to play but also fun to watch — the two core components that make a game streamworthy. The game has a fair amount of depth, meaning that players will be able to string together outrageous moves and combos — prompting viewers to wonder, ‘how did you do that?!,’” Jorjani said. “Game rounds are short and sweet and the rich customization options give players the ability to craft a visual feast for viewers.”
Jorjani said the partnership with TwitchTV was a natural fit after learning how both Paradox and TwitchTV had similar ideas for fan engagement, and this new development would only increase engagement.
The Showdown Effect will be released later this year.
Are you excited about advancements in technology that make game streaming easier? Let us know in the comments.
Basketball, and soccer, and hockey — oh my! The social TV waves dribbled, dropkicked and fouled along with a handful of sports programming this past week. The NBA conference finals are in a dead-heat; each of the four remaining teams has won two games out of five, so we’ve entered a sudden death situation (Thunder vs. Spurs, Celtics vs. Heat). The former game airs Monday night at 9 p.m. ET.
In entertainment news, the MTV Movie Awards aired Sunday night. Host Russell Brand welcomed viewers, proclaiming the two major film franchies of the night: Hunger Games and Twilight, the latter of which won Best Movie of the Year for Breaking Dawn. In particular, Twitter lit up when Johnny Dep… Continue reading...
When Terence Kawaja started working on a map of the digital advertising universe in 2009, it was never meant to see the light of day.
At the time, he worked at investment bank GCA Savvian and wanted a way to wrap his head around the mushrooming digital-media industry. As he updated and augmented the chart, he said, his colleagues would just roll their eyes.
“Especially when I said this is going to be really, really important for us. They didn’t agree with that,” said Kawaja, who now advises digital media executives and brokers deals through his own company Luma Partners (when he isn’t lampooning the industry with funny videos and commentary at conferences). “I was like the crazy guy with the slide.”
Three years later, he’s still the guy with the slide. But it would be hard to argue that his pursuit was a crazy one. In fact, just this week he introduced a similar slide on the exploding gaming industry.
Since unveiling his chart of the online advertising landscape at a conference in 2010, it has flown around the Web, ending up in powerpoint presentations, business school case studies, and cubicles industrywide. And Kawaja, himself, has brokered some of the biggest deals in the digital ad business in the past couple of years, including Yahoo’s purchase of InterClick and Google’s Admeld acquisition.
To date, versions of his slide have received more than 350,000 views online, from people in 116 countries. Sure, compared to YouTube videos of cute babies and cats that rack up millions of views in a matter of days, 350,000 is quite small. But given the obscure nature of the material (a chart full of ad tech acronyms “SSPs,” “DSPs” and “DMPs”) it’s a fairly impressive number.
The slides have also prompted “hundreds, if not thousands” of requests from marketing and PR departments that their companies be included in the slide or given a different location on the slide, he said. Fitting an industry of more than 400 companies on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper means that by default it’s wrong, he said, acknowledging that there are differences among companies in any given category, just as there are companies that operate across several categories. “[They] are merely snapshots of some version of the present,” Kawaja said. “Simply a conversation starter.”
When companies complain about their placement or absence on the slide, he tends not to adapt it (he just advises them to download it and annotate it for their own marketing materials). But he has tweaked the slide for another reason: copycats.
Kawaja went to logomaker.com to create a logo for the fake company Ad Pro (“with a swish and everything,” he said) and added it to his slide. Then he sat back and waited to see who would take the bait. Sure enough, within a matter of months, at least three firms had attached their names to charts that included the non-existent company, he said.
When Luma Partners updated the online display slide in June 2011 — and added five more slides to the series for categories like social, search and mobile — Kawaja decided to solve the ownership issue for once and for all by calling the media landscapes “Lumascapes.”
The branding seems to have worked. The blatant copying has ceased and, as Ad Age has noted, the Lumascapes are recognized industrywide as Luma Partners’ “calling card.”
So when did Kawaja know that he might be onto something with the slide? When he saw how the investment bankers around him were reacting. “I’m of the view that, as you go through life, think about what an investment banker would do and do the opposite,” he said.
Buddy Media is not a brand most consumers would recognize, but in the halls of social media and marketing, it’s a king. It connects major brands with their customers throughout all the major social media networks. Now, thanks to a $689 million acquisition, it’s set to become part of cloud computing and CRM giant Salesforce.com (the deal should close later this summer). Still, it’s this incredible video that could make Buddy Media and its cofounder and CEO Michael Lazerow a household name.
As Lazerow explains in the text accompanying the YouTube video, the clip is raw and emotional. However, throughout it, Lazerow doesn’t speak a single word. Instead, he tells his own remarkable story and a bit about the acquisition, via a keynote slideshow on his iPad. Lazerow, who has had a life-long heart condition is smiling during most of it, but he’s also clearly wiping away a tear or two as he reacts to some of what he’s sharing.
His main message, though, is not so much about the acquisition or his heart, but about fear and whether it’s holding you back. It’s clearly not hindering Lazerow.
What do you think of the Buddy Media CEO’s sentiment? Is now the right time to share something so deeply personal or was this the perfect way to celebrate the deal and make his point? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Is is possible that Twitter’s users, rather than Twitter itself, are to blame for the micro-blogging platform’s relatively useless search engine? Perhaps. According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. So while the world bemoans Twitter search as useless, maybe we’re doing so through last generation’s Google-colored glasses that don’t let us see Twitter for what it is and the challenges it faces.
In a Twitter Engineering blog post explaining its findings, analytics research scientist Jimmy Lin explains the problem of ranking tweets by relevance as partly being a problem of time. In the case of breaking news, the system is simply overwhelmed by tweets and queries on that topic, which means Twitter’s relevancy models can’t always keep up to determine which ones you probably want to see. While it’s relatively easy to build a simple search algorithm utilizing the concept of “term frequency-inverse document frequency weight” when the overall corpus of documents is fairly static, it’s a lot harder when terms suddenly surge in popularity and a system has to constantly re-process the dataset in real time.
These numbers from Twitter’s research help explain the problem:
Examining all search queries from October 2011, we see that, on average, about 17% of the top 1000 query terms from one hour are no longer in the top 1000 during the next hour. In other words, 17% of the top 1000 query terms “churn over” on an hourly basis.
Repeating this at a granularity of days instead of hours, we still find that about 13% of the top 1000 query terms from one day are no longer in the top 1000 during the next day.
During major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically. For example, on October 5, immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query “steve jobs” spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15% of the query stream — almost one in six of all queries issued! Check it out: the query volume is literally off the charts! Notice that related queries such as “apple” and “stay foolish” spiked as well.
Of course, this particular phenomenon doesn’t explain why Twitter’s search doesn’t go back further in time, or why its algorithms for ranking tweets based on source or the number of time they’ve been retweeted don’t appear too accurate. Even if relevancy improves, there’s still a lot to be desired in terms of getting Twitter to return the types of results users have come to expect.
Lin’s post also highlights another piece of research from Twitter that’s less noteworthy to individual users but probably more telling about the world as a whole. A visualization of Twitter usage patterns in New York City, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Istanbul creates a picture of cultural and seasonal differences at play.
Twitter users in Tokyo, we see, tweet a lot less during the work day and also go to bed and wake up at about the same times throughout the year. Elsewhere, users show pretty distinct differences in activity as the seasons change. Lin also points out the afternoon lull in Sao Paulo. It’s difficult to discern the exact reason from looking at this chart, but the lull does coincide with Sao Paulo’s winter season and a generally later beginning to the tweeting day.
I’d love to see these results analyzed against other cultural datasets, or even just against a knowledge base of local customs and behaviors, to see how Twitter — and web use, generally — use comports or doesn’t comport with a region’s typical norms.