Ready to plug in that tru2way TV set you’ve got sitting in your living room? Yeah, probably not.

Today is the day that many of the large cable operators agreed to be ready to support tru2way-enabled CE devices. In a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed last year with major CE companies, the cablecos agreed to support tru2way so that retail devices could be plugged in to a cable network and receive two-way services – not just downstream video delivery, but also upstream services like VOD. Unfortunately, operators haven’t quite met the deadline. Support is improving, but it’s not nearly at 100%.

The fallout from missing the deadline isn’t as bad as you might expect. The consumer electronics industry grudgingly admits that cable has been making a good-faith effort, and everything I hear suggests that cable companies really are making progress. Further network support is delayed, but only by a matter of months in many cases.

There’s also the little fact that there aren’t many tru2way devices available at retail anyway.  In a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma, the CE industry has waited for network readiness to bring new products to market. Meanwhile with few products out, there was little incentive (before the MOU) to prep cable networks to support them.

In short, today’s deadline – missed or not – isn’t a huge deal. But look for a big retail tru2way push at CES 2010.

One of my favorite Web apps got an upgrade recently, and this morning I had a chance to test it out. Cooliris has added a browser plug-in to replace the default full-screen app launch it’s had to date. I’ve played with Cooliris on and off for the past ten months, and while I love the interface, it rarely occurs to me to launch the application for browsing. That could change now that there’s no separate application to launch, just a Firefox (or IE, or soon-to-be Safari) tab.

ReadWriteWeb covered the update in detail, which includes other features like hyperlinked metadata for Flickr. However, perhaps the one note left out is how this (hopefully) sets up Cooliris for integration with new sites. I am firmly convinced that Cooliris has the interface for online shopping. If the technology was officially integrated with, say, Zappos, where someone could click on the nifty Cooliris button to bring up a 3D wall of shoes, I believe awareness of and demand for the app would skyrocket. Not to mention, it could potentially drive new revenue for online vendors. In an Apple iPhone world, where the importance of user interface has been significantly elevated, Cooliris should be in its glory.

A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our friends at Last100:

Hulu really hates the TV, PlayStation 3 blocked
Following the Boxee fiasco, the PS3 has become the latest means by which to conveniently watch Hulu content on a television has been blocked. Users who try to visit the site via the PS3’s built-in web browser are being greeted with the message: “Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Flash 10 coming to smartphones this October? Apple and RIM still missing in action
It seems that Adobe is well on track to deliver a version of Flash 10 for smartphones. Adobe CEO Shantanu Naraye said as much during the company’s latest earnings call, revealing that “multiple partners have already received early versions of this release…”.

Pirate Bay’s YouTube competitor lives on (The Video Bay)
The project was to build a kind of YouTube-esque video streaming site, but one that operates outside of mainstream copyright law. Now we learn that the project, dubbed “The Video Bay”,  lives on.

Nokia testing “long form” video service
Nokia is particularly interested in “kick-starting” the consumption of long-form content on mobiles by utilizing a podcast style delivery method whereby users subscribe to various video feeds, presumably enabling content to be downloaded to the device “over-the-air” rather than being “side-loaded”.

Just a follow up to my previous post on video on the Android, as has been reported a few places, Qik is now available for the G1. It has a lot of limitations, based on the T-Mobile network and the camera hardware, but it does work, and it opens up some very cool possibilities. The ability to live-stream from such a small device will allow for video coverage of places that previously would have been impractical if not impossible.

I’m really looking forward to doing some field testing with Qik on the G1 at the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, which should be a lot of fun, at least as long as I can keep a 3G connection, and the battery holds out.

Catch more of Bruce’s digital media musings over at Digitalwerks.

It’s been two weeks since the digital television switch was universally flipped in what’s effectively a government spectrum fundraiser.

Immediately after the NTSC plug was pulled, I fired up my only remaining analog television device – an ElGato EyeTV Hyrbid (ATSC + NTSC) USB stick. Leading up to June 12th, many over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts contained crawls alerting folks to he transition. But I was expecting to find some sort of message on those vacated frequencies for a week or so, reinforcing what had happened and what to do next. No dice, all I found was static.

As part of their transition, many broadcasters changed/swapped frequencies. According to reports, this generated the most issues and calls into the FCC DTV hotlines. In fact, I heard from my mom who had lost some channels on her kitchen TV using the converter I got her last year. With low expectations (she’s not really geeky at all), I told her she could try poking around the menu looking for some sort of ‘rescan’ option until I found time to walk her through it. Fortunately, it must have been simple/clear enough as she managed to recover her lost channels – and a few new ones, too.

I received a similar complaint from a work buddy and suggested he rescan. Unfortunately, that didn’t resolve the problem. He’s lost both ABC and CBS in HD here in the DC region. Turns out WJLA (ABC) and WUSA (CBS) migrated from UHF to VHF as part of their transition. And thousands of local folks have lost reception. Last weekend, I confirmed the reception/power issue at a Starbucks near work (Sterling, VA) and home (Rockville, MD) using the aforementioned ElGato tuner. It’s sadly ironic as CBS always had the strongest ATSC signal in the region and was the first to go HD with their nightly news. And now they serve nothing but a blank screen, aka the ‘digital cliff‘ strikes. My DTVPal is able to pull in WUSA – probably a combination of a more powerful/better tuner in a wooden structure versus the USB tuner at a nearby SBUX. (Used the same antenna in all three scenarios.)

Lastly, as Brent and others have noted, many of the HTPC guide providers (i.e. Microsoft) were caught unprepared.

So, how’d your transition go?