A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our other blogs:

Details on On Demand Online, aka TV Everywhere
Comcast and Time Warner held a joint press conference to announce details around the On Demand Online initiative. Specifically, Comcast will begin a trial next month to test out its authentication system and gather feedback on the new web video service.

How Your Set-Top Gets Updated
If you’ve always wondered how your set-top accesses firmware updates, or if you’re a cable operator looking for a more efficient way to do code downloads, this is the post for you.

MovieWall – A Beautiful Movie Interface for SageTV
Sage MovieWall has been in development for several months and is still in beta, but in my opinion has made some significant strides and looks absolutely fantastic. The result is an beautiful, free add-on User Interface for your movie collection.

How to Get U.S.-only iPhone Apps with Hotspot Shield
With a few easy steps that take only minutes to complete using the HotSpot Shield VPN service, iPhone users the world round can get access to some (but not all) of the iPhone Apps that are only supposedly only available in the U.S.

How Much Did RIM Pay For Dash Navigation?
By buying Dash for $8.3 million, who raised $71 million in three rounds of financings, RIM will get a $26 million haircut on their taxes. While I can understand why Dash and RIM wouldn’t necessarily celebrate this transaction, lets hope that they are being honest with us about implementing Dash’s technology into their products.

Comcast Launches WiMAX Service, Takes Cable Wireless
The long-fabled quad play may have finally arrived and it doesn’t look anything like originally envisioned. Comcast launched wireless broadband service in Portland Oregon combining the Sprint 3G network and the Clearwire 4G network.

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”.

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?

Last night, Ben Drawbaugh (EngadgetHD) and I discussed Boxee’s recent news with Randall Bennett of TechVi. MLB’s endorsement of Boxee’s platform goes a long way towards validating their model – premium content providers can get paid using alternative distribution methods, happily coexisting with Internet-exclusive video produced outside of big media channels (like a TechVi or Revision3). Something Hulu’s currently unwilling to embrace beyond of their explicit control. We also touch on the new Boxee Windows client and where Boxee could go next.

It’s been quite some time since the Squeezebox Duet and Squeezebox Boom Internet audio streamers hit the shelves in 2008. And word on the street indicates Logitech will be refreshing their lineup in short order. Pictured to the left is the forthcoming “Squeezebox Touch”, and we also hear Boombox and Duet updates are on the docket. Unfortunately, I’ve got no official timing or (US) pricing info for you.

Somewhat related, competing product Sonos has a new controller in the FCC pipeline. Although I’m still holding out for their boom box-esque solution. To use with an iPhone.

(Thanks for the tip, Bob!)

In pre-announcing the iPhone 3.0 OS and providing preview software builds, Apple intended to give developers a leg up in producing/updating apps. Fortunately, it also gave the unsanctioned “iPhone Dev Team” enough time to get some of their jailbreak and unlocking apps ready fairly close to the official launch. And early this past weekend, we saw the release of PwnageTool and redsn0w.

I went with redsn0w Saturday to jailbreak and unlock my first gen iPhone. There were early reports of issues with Cydia, the defacto illicit app “store”, but it may have been due to server load rather than the jailbreak process. I also had a scare that involved losing all cellular connectivity, which was due to bad bootloaders. Rerunning redsn0w with the proper files took care of it.

The process is fairly simple, assuming you’re OK with the the risk of an inoperable phone and voiding your warranty:

• Download and run redsn0w
• Point it to your ipsw
• Download the 3.9 and 4.6 bootloaders, point to them in redsn0w (for unlocking first gen iPhones)
• Reboot iPhone as prompted
• Celebrate freedom from the walled garden

Why jailbreak? If you enjoy tinkering, want to shoot (crappy) video without an iPhone 3G[S], prefer organizing your apps in folders, enjoy streaming a Slingbox over a 3G connection, prefer customizing your phones appearance, etc you’re a perfect candidate. And, of course, you still receive all the features of the polished 3.0 OS update and official App Store. The benefits of unlocking should be obvious – as you can see in the pic above, my iPhone now operates on any GSM network. Which will work out well should I defect from AT&T. But we’ll save my current phone lineup and future handset machinations for another post.

Click to enlarge:

Less than a year on the market, the SlingCatcher’s entrance fee has dropped more than 50% from retail launch pricing of $300 down to a rock bottom $130. I can only assume sales are horrible. Which pains me on personal level. The digital media Swiss Army knife vision of the SlingCatcher was a factor in my joining Sling Media way back when. And the execution of that vision was also a factor in my decision to leave. (”losing my religion“) However, despite it’s imperfections and unfulfilled promise, $130 to merely stream from a Slingbox to another television in the home or abroad is a great value – neverminding those hobbled extender and DMA capabilities. (Performance/functionality firmware updates have been trickling out.) Here’s hoping this “sale” also foreshadows a new SlingCathcer in the pipeline with the sort of chipset the upcoming Popcorn Hour C-200 utilizes. But with Sling’s corporate ownership and industry-wide weakened retail sales, I wouldn’t count on it.