Comcast’s Fancast property has recently expanded from solely streaming (Hulu) web video, to offering Internet video downloads. Joining the likes of Amazon Unbox, CinemaNow, and Blockbuster the Fancast Media Manager allows you to rent or purchase television and movie content for Windows PC viewing. Though playback is limited to Windows, the Fancast Store (Beta) supports web purchases from other operating systems, such as Mac OS X. Combined with a variety of similar language, technology, and licensing (up to three PCs), I suspect Amazon is the silent partner powering Fancast. In fact, Amazon alluded to similar technology partnerships back in July:

The video store will [also] be accessible through the Sony Bravia Internet Video link, a $300 tower-shaped device that funnels Web video directly to Sony’s high-definition televisions. Mr. Carr said Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices. “We can support both streaming and downloading,” he said.

At the end of the day, most folks prefer to watch long form content on a television. So, paying for computer-based video will remain a niche market. The only question I have is, do the ~2.5GB SD movie downloads count against my upcoming Comcast bandwidth cap?

TiVo and DirecTV have not only extended their recicrpocal do-not-sue clause, they’re getting back into bed for some new hardware. The original HD DirecTiVo supports only MPEG-2 and has been out of production for a few years, while DTV screwed around with NDS. Although they’ll likely continue marketing NDS DVRs, offering TiVo as an upsell with less subsidized hardware.

The current TiVo HD platform should be sufficient for decoding DirecTV’s MPEG-4 HD content once they integrate satellite tuners - which supports their aggressive goal of rolling this out next year. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Dish…

DIRECTV, Inc. (Nasdaq: DTV), the nation’s leading satellite television service provider, and TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVR), announced today that they have extended their current agreement, which includes the development, marketing and distribution of a new HD DIRECTV DVR featuring the TiVo(R) service, as well as the extension of mutual intellectual property arrangements.

Under the terms of the non-exclusive arrangement, DIRECTV and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo(R) service for DIRECTV’s broadband-enabled HD DVR platform. The product will support the latest TiVo and DIRECTV features and services, including TiVo’s Universal Swivel Search and TiVo KidZone. TiVo will develop the new HD DVR for an expected launch in the second half of 2009.

UPDATE TiVo has just clarified for me that the service will run on DirecTV hardware, not the TiVo HD hardware as I had assumed.

Anyone who follows tech news has already read that Google’s launching a new web browser today. While it’s way too early to pass judgment on a beta product, other than to say they’ll have an uphill battle in securing marketshare, I’ve gone ahead and tested a few media-rich sites. XM’s online guide and music streaming work fine. As do Flash-based YouTube and Hulu video playback. Though Netflix Watch Instantly throws up an incompatible browser error. Which doesn’t necessarily rule out eventual support for Microsoft DRM… but I wouldn’t bank on it in the near-term. Related, good luck finding a Microsoft Silverlight plugin - no NBCOlympics.com for you. Any other successes or failures we should know about?

Update Google documentation indicates broader plugin support. It’s probable web pages like NBC Olympics are hardcoded for specific user agent strings, thus preventing recognition and playback. Instead of reinventing the wheel, has Google leveraged existing Mozilla/Firefox plugins?

Currently, Google Chrome supports the most popular plug-ins necessary to display the Web correctly, including Flash, Acrobat Reader, Java, Windows Media Player, Real Player, QuickTime, and Silverlight.

Last month I learned that Sling Media founder Blake Krikorian backed video CDN BitGravity. Not only is Sling a customer (presumably in regards to the forthcoming Sling.com), my former leader (and Rock Band compatriot) was a participant in BitGravity’s first round of funding ($2.5 million) and has landed on their board. It’s a good time to get in - the content delivery network space has been heating up as web video takes off. Though we’re seeing a variety of players, including incumbents such as Akamai and newcomers like GridNetworks, battling for the distribution deals. While it’s not unusual to find sitting CEOs on various company boards (see: Steve Jobs), it’s my belief that Blake’s shown his hand… I’ve got no inside info, but I’m willing to bet within 6 months (either after the EchoStar acquisition anniversary or after CES) he leaves Sling for a VC firm.

So I hear Google’s introducing a new beta product today. No, not that Chrome web browser. But rather, a real update (finally!) to Picasa. Assuming all goes according to plan, Picasa 3.0 (beta, Windows) and enhanced Picasa Web Albums will both be unveiled this afternoon. The most significant new feature appears to be face recognition:

The “name tag” feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. “Once you’ve started naming people, we’ll start suggesting names for you based on similarity,” said Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager.

Feasible photo face recognition and search is something Jeremy Toeman and I discussed several years ago… So I’m a bit surprised it’s taken this long to see these features creep into consumer software. Although I can’t say I’m surprised with the challenge in properly identifying a subject:

“Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera,” Horowitz said. “There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows.”

Of the additional new features, video slideshows with YouTube export look most appealing. I’m interested in seeing how they stack up against iPhoto and Animoto (now out of beta).

While Amazon and SonyStyle don’t yet have inventory, the new 80GB Playstation 3 SKU slated for a September release started shipping to various other retail outlets as early as August 20th. In fact, my local GameStop received inventory last week. And today I swapped my (former) Xbox 360 for the new PS3. Sony’s more compact and less noisy design appeals. But Blu-ray winning the HD optical disc war coupled with inclusion of the new DualShock controller are what finally moved me.

Trying something a bit different here..

We often find ourselves commenting on a variety of stories around the blogosphere. Topics that we’d maybe like to cover but just don’t get to, content that is slightly off topic, or news that doesn’t justify an entire post. So the experiment here will be aggregating some of our recent web comments back to ZNF. To get going, the initial batch is mine. But I’d like to also include Dale, Davis, Brent, and Mari if they’ve got the motivation to keep track of their contributions.

Related, I continue to micro-publish on Twitter - tweets can be viewed as a web page, subscribed to via RSS, followed within your own Twitter account, added to FriendFeed, viewed in the ZNF sidebar, etc.

And, now, onto the blog comments:

Netflix: Faulty Hardware Took Us Down
Interesting that they blame one piece of hardware, when it looks like all Netflix’s distribution centers were out of commission for a time. Unless they took the others offline until they identified the problem, or they have multiple instances of that one piece of hardware. Still smells like a software issue…

New Palm Treo Pro to be made by HTC
HTC designed at least one other Treo - I think it was maybe the 750. And of course they’re also supposedly behind the Xperia X1. What I don’t get with the Treo Pro is the meager 2mp camera. Also the timing is a bit weird with the new 800w on Sprint. Who can figure Palm out.

Buffalo LinkStation Mini: small backup drive with big capacity, remote media streaming
I wonder how it really works in a mixed-OS environment? I had an earlier LinkStation that allowed me to store/see files from PC and Mac, but one of them couldn’t see the other’s files on the NAS. It also had a loud fan, though this Mini obviously has no fan. Mirroring option is very attractive… But I’m tired of the clutter and wonder if I should get a Time Capsule to replace my USB Maxtor.

Rekindling Interest in Amazon’s E-Book Reader
I’ve seen three Kindles in the wild. Two in cafes and one on a cruise. The design isn’t as sexy as I’d like given the price point. I’m shallow like that. But the big problem for me is that I don’t read enough books to get a decent return on my hardware investment. Drop the price by 50% and their customer base would increase exponentially. Can’t do that due to costs? Fine, give me a Kindle iPhone App and you’re selling tons of razor blades without needing to mess with razors.

Sneak Peek: The WB Launches Tomorrow
I’ve been looking at the WB beta video site for awhile too - I like the more singular focus on per show pages and large nav elements (compared to Hulu), but agree the interface could use some work. Would like to see them build communities around series and would like to see them offer entire series - these seemed to vary during the beta and I’m not sure what will hit the web tomorrow. Most interesting to me, though probably less relevant to the masses, is their television content offerings which didn’t originally air on the WB. Interesting licensing questions here…

TiVo To Partner With Entertainment Weekly
TiVo’s “partnering” with Entertainment Weekly pretty much sounds like another Guru Guide. These things have pretty limited value in my opinion - both as a customer and in evaluating the cross-marketing potential. If Guru Guides evolve to the point where customers can share recommendations with friends, I’d be more interested…

Do you want your devices pre-loaded with content?
The ZunePass and Rhapsody models can probably be understood by consumers and be economically viable if a major market player like Apple introduced similar. Mark’s proposition is unsustainable if Apple intended to make money on the service.

Pre-loading content may work if you’re talking about dropping a few current artisits or hits that the studios want to push as a way to upsell albums or additional tracks. But, yeah - as far as lots of content and hitting relevant genres, good luck. Maybe it works with the teen crowd, but our adult tastes are eclectic.

I think I remember an old Samsung Yepp MP3 player I had years ago having a bunch of tracks on it. I’m sure it didn’t persuade me to buy the album and it didn’t incentivize me to buy that player over another.

TiVo held their quarterly call yesterday and, while I don’t pretend to be financial analyst, I’ll share my uninformed observations.

As TiVo sometimes does, the Investor Relations group began their earnings day by releasing a bit of fluff news to the press - I don’t know if this is designed to distract the market to soften the blow, juice the stock price, or what. Regardless, I didn’t bite.

The quarterly results seem generally positive… TiVo was guided to just their third profitable quarter (!), though this is largely due to a continued reduction in marketing expenditures - perhaps accounting for the net loss in subscribers. While the majority of these folks retired from the obsolete DirecTiVo platform, stand-alone TiVo unit subscriptions were also in decline. (Fully amortized Lifetimed units also push the subscriber number down, but they didn’t volunteer exactly how many that is.) However, TiVo has no debt, plenty of cash on hand, and I get the sense they feel like they’ll be coming into even more related to EchoStar’s patent infringement. Going forward, TiVo expects to pick up additional customers via newer channels consisting of the MSO dealios (Comcast, Cox) and their Australian offering.

Related to the tech itself, I didn’t come across many interesting nuggets. It’s expected that Cox will begin offering their custom TiVo solution this fall in New England. Related, Comcast is expected to increase both their marketing and market presence beyond New England beginning next month. Specific regions weren’t disclosed, but I heard something somewhere a long while ago that Denver was to be one of the initial sites. We shall see.

In regards to a Series4 Tru2way TiVo unit, it doesn’t look we’ll be seeing anything soon. Surely not in 2008. According to CEO Tom Rogers:

The retail Tru2way issue, we have agreed with the cable industry that we would look to provide a OCAP or Tru2way retail device. It is something that we would like to do, meaning something that a consumer could go into any retailer and purchase and plug it into any cable system anywhere in the country and it would just work. There are a number of CEs that are focused on Tru2way devices. Our view is that that whole regime is going to take more time to be clarified and to get the ability for players such as ourselves to build on a national uniform homogeneous basis. We are not alone among the consumer electronics players seeing that that is going to be a slower process than the cable industry may have liked, and certainly issues that we see along the way we bring to CableLabs’ attention, although there isn’t any one at this point that I would necessarily say conflicts with our objectives.

I can’t say I’m surprised with TiVo’s conservative approach given recent industry reports. I’m not even sure this needs to be a priority. However, an interim solution of a TiVo HD with integrated SDV tuning adapter would go a long way towards maximizing TiVo compatibility within the shifting cable landscape. In other cable marketplace news, TiVo doesn’t seem overly concerned with Cablevision’s network DVR. According to Rogers, “a lot of legal issues that still need to be resolved on that front” and there’s an “inadequate capacity at this point for broad scale deployment of a network DVR solution.”

Seeking Alpha TiVo Call Transcript
TiVo Quarterly Earning Release