Monday Evening Links

AT&T let the cat out of the bag a little ahead of the CTIA conference, introducing to its upcoming offerings two LG handhelds with slide-out QWERTY keyboards, the LG Xenon and the LG Neon.

Both handsets have touch-screen displays, and yes, both have QWERTY keyboards for easy messaging.

The LG Xenon
Features include an MP3 player, a microSD card slot, a video player, stereo Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera and camcorder, threaded text messaging, instant messaging, mobile e-mail, quad-band GSM, 3G/HSDPA speeds, GPS, and access to AT&T broadband services such as Cellular Video and AT&T Mobile Music. It is set to start selling on April 8 for $99.99.

The LG Neon
The Neon is already available in Canada through Rogers. Features of the Neon include a 2-megapixel camera and camcorder, a microSD card slot, a music player, stereo Bluetooth, and tri-band GSM. The Neon has GPRS and EDGE connectivity but no 3G. No word on the Neon's pricing or availability just yet.

Google-owned YouTube and Walt Disney Co. are close to finalizing a deal to distribute videos from Disney properties on the video-sharing website, The Wall Street Journal online reported on Monday.

The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the matter," said the agreement would involve Disney putting some clips, including sports content from ESPN, on YouTube and sharing advertising revenue.

It said Disney would gain the right to sell advertisements against its content and then share that revenue with YouTube.

The Disney-YouTube agreement, which the newspaper said was "still in flux, is not expected to include full-length episodes of hit television shows, which Disney distributes on ABC.com, the Journal said.

It also said Disney was talking separately to video-sharing site Hulu about putting full episodes of ABC programs on its service. The deal would involve Disney taking up an equity stake in Hulu.

said by ThrowDemsOut:

»tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090330···ledisney
Between YouTube & Hulu, most 1st run primetime TV series should soon be LEGALLY available on the Internet.

said by BF69:

and yet some idiots will still choose to use torrents because they don't with ads even though they are very short.

said by Vchat20:

I don't think it's so much that, but quality and the adeptness of the flash players to use much more cpu than they should need to for most content (especially when you start looking into 720p content on hulu or YT).

Now if some of these people started using some sort of commonly agreed upon player like the Divx web player (ie: Stage6) and use Divx or Xvid with moderate bitrates, I'd be much happier to watch it on their site with ads that last as long as their on-TV counterparts!

But until they can do something a little better, I'm gonna go for torrents which are much easier to use.

said by BF69:

that's bull. I have a 5 year old computer with a P4 3.2 ghz with 1.5 GB of PC3200 ram and an ATI 9550 video card and I can watch full screen 720p just fine. Your typical $400 wal-mart computer has better specs than that machine. So that shoudn't be an issue for the cast majority of people.

said by BF69:

Please most use Adobe flash player. Bitrates are fine. streamrates on most stuff is getting in the 1.2 mbps range or more. southparkstudios.com streams at 1.2 Mbps and it looks great.

said by Noah Vail:

Not so bull.
Any of my systems that uses a variable speed CPU fan, crank up to max RPMs on those flash video sites. These are dual core systems w/ 2-4Gig ram and decent video cards; one is a dual Xeon workstation.

I don't know why flash players are so brutal on CPUs but my experience is the same as Vchat20. I have a friend who assembles web sites, and films his own video to flash. Perhaps he'll know why.

At one time, 'most' folks lived their online lives in walled gardens. If 'most' people were the gold standard for what our techno choices should be, you'd be posting this from CompuServe.

NV

said by ThrowDemsOut:

Between YouTube & Hulu, most 1st run primetime TV series should soon be LEGALLY available on the Internet.

said by KrK:

Yeah, and ironically, right at the time it looks like capping in threatening to make such viewing too costly for many people. (Overage fees)

said by BF69:

Well a 250 GB would allow for about 400 "1 hour" shows in a month assuming they ared streamed at 2 mbps which is very high by today's standards. Most are 1.2 Mbps or less.