Wondering if Verizon’s FiOS is available in your area? Look no further than the FiOS wiki. If you click on the states listed you’ll see a detailed accounting of counties or townships where the Verizon service is available. Of course, I live in Upper Merion Pennsylvania and FiOS isn’t actually in my neighborhood, but it is around the corner. Any day now?

(Thanks to Jim and Beth for the photo)

A number of companies racked up fines today for violating FCC rules tied to the digital TV transition. According to Jeff Baumgartner, the FCC put out $6 million in fines targeted mainly at retailers who did not correctly label TVs with analog-only tuners. A couple of companies got hit on interstate shipping rules and a couple were fined for violating V-Chip rules.

So is this how the government plans to answer the next funding request from the National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA) to continue implementing the DTV coupon program? The fines are a hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the $450 million the NTIA plans to ask Congress for. But then again, $6 million is nothing to sneeze at.

While most of the industry is focused on the wireless world at the moment, Broadband Reports has the news that Verizon has apparently launched HD VOD in some areas. It’s a good application for the telco’s fiber network. Lots of bandwidth drain.

Any ZNF readers enjoying VZ HD VOD yet?

There’s good news out today if you’re an Xbox owner and into the console’s content downloading features. Microsoft has done a deal with producer and agent Peter Safran to create short, scripted shows for the Xbox. Yes scripted, not reality TV. Saffran says he’ll focus first on horror and comedic fare, appealing to the male, 14-34 demographic. No word yet on the advertising model (Pre-rolls? Interstitial commercials? Product placement?), but new shows should be available to the Xbox Live audience by this fall.

I’m still skeptical of the Xbox-as-Trojan-horse theory, mainly because I don’t know any who own an Xbox except for Dave. I know a few folks with PlayStations (there’s a PS2 in our house), and increasingly I hear friends say they’ve picked up the Wii to play with the kids. But certainly Microsoft is doing a good job of continuing to expand the range of entertainment available on Xbox Live. Are there enough people like Dave around to watch it?

This little beauty - the SurroundXi - looks best with an iPod Nano, but plays well with other music toys. I’ve been tinkering with these speakers for a couple of weeks now, and they’re fun, highly portable and easy to use. The sound isn’t Bose quality, but with my iPod Shuffle and my iPod Mini, it’s not bad at all. Here are the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Plug and play
• Very portable (runs on wire and on batteries)
• Works with multiple audio players and flash drives
• Auto-play from flash drive is seamless
• Comes in many colors
• Cheap! $40 at Target, but word on the Web says you can get the speakers for much less

Cons:

• Music played from a flash drive worked very well the first time around, but now is accompanied by a very loud windy sound out of one speaker. Faulty unit? iPod Shuffle still plays well.
• I plugged the SurroundXi into my Squeezebox a while back, and initially it worked reasonably well, but now the speakers make an annoying buzzing sound.

Bottom Line: The SurroundXi speakers are fun and cheap, but probably won’t hold up to years (months?) of use. Buy’em with that in mind, and you’ll be happy. (more…)

Two calls from beyond the grave came recently from companies defunct… or very nearly so.

First, Worldgate turned the Ojo video phone service back on. I haven’t set mine up again yet and can’t say for sure it works, but since the problem was not a technical one, I assume I’ll be back up and running with my Ojo shortly.

Second, a company you’ve likely never heard of, Mirror Worlds, has risen again to pursue a lawsuit. Against Apple. I worked with Mirror Worlds once upon a time, and the Scopeware Vision product was impressive in concept. It was Desktop Search before Google had Desktop Search. The “Cover Flow” view before Apple had Cover Flow. Or at least that’s what the lawyers are claiming. I’ll be curious to see if David Gelernter talks publicly about the lawsuit, as he was the co-creator of the technology owned by Mirror Worlds and is most decidedly not shy about his opinions.

All TV (except sports) is moving to on-demand, right? You can’t successfully have hundreds of thousands of people accessing the same online video at the same time, right? You can’t hold an interactive video event online that’s open to the public, right?

Oprah says otherwise. That’s right, Oprah.

Very quietly Oprah’s been hosting an online, interactive class called A New Earth on Oprah.com for the last three weeks. What makes the initiative remarkable is that she’s using Skype video to do it. Not only can online visitors watch Oprah talk with guest/co-host Eckhart Tolle every Monday at 9:00 ET, they can also ask questions in a video split screen. (see above) Limelight is the content delivery network (CDN) partner for the series and Move Networks is handling the video player and encoding. The scale of the experiment is unprecedented.

Here are a few stats, including some otherwise-unpublished figures (that’s right, exclusive from ZNF…):

• More than 180k viewers have tuned in for the full 90 minutes of the Oprah series for three weeks running
• 500k people logged in the first week… and the system crashed. But this was a coding error only, remedied since, not a bandwidth or infrastructure problem. The 500k number breaks the previous Live Earth record of roughly 240k simultaneous streams.
• The Oprah folks are aiming for a million simultaneous streams. Just wait till they really turn on the Oprah marketing machine.