I wrote a post last month about the dearth of truly useful guides to the growing mass of video available online. Magnify.net is one of the companies responsible for creating that mass; its platform is home to 37,000 channels of niche online programming, including the Flavor Flav Video Network ("Return of the Romantical") and the Dermatology channel. "Lots of them don't get looked at," co-founder and CEO Steve Rosenbaum said in a recent interview. "Lots of them really do. The one thing I've been struggling with for the last six months, as more and more stuff pours onto the Web, who's going to sort it?"

The answer, Rosenbaum believes, is bloggers. "They help you organize the things you're going to see," he said, adding that if one blogger's recommendations don't pan out, you try another. "They become the micro road map around video content." With that in mind, Magnify decided to create tools to help bloggers find videos online and build posts around them.

Time Warner subsidiary HBO has gotten a fair amount of credit today for persuading Apple to abandon its one-price strategy for TV shows at the iTunes Store. That's an interesting development, and it could open the door for NBC to bring its shows back to the store. But what many of the reports overlooked was how little HBO decided to put onto the virtual iTunes shelves. The network is making available downloadable versions of older shows only, and charging premium prices for many of them to boot. Rather than trying to attract new customers and chase incremental dollars, it seems to be designed to cause the least possible offense to HBO's existing markets.

HBO spokesman Jeff Cusson said the network's full offering on iTunes will roll out over the next couple of months, so it will be more extensive than the current selection -- six shows, most of which are represented by just a portion of their episodes. But no show will be available before the corresponding full-season DVD is released, Cusson said. That's consistent with HBO's digital strategy thus far: no full-length program or episode is available online to non-subscribers until long after its first run. The exception was "In Treatment," which HBO offered briefly in full-length form on YouTube earlier this year in a bid to drum up viewership. Now, though, even that show is available only as clips.

U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper has handed BitTorrent index site TorrentSpy a bill it couldn't possibly pay. Having ruled in favor of the major Hollywood studios' lawsuit in December, Cooper awarded the studios damages of $30,000 per movie allegedly infringed with the assistance of TorrentSpy's site. The total for the 3,699 movies listed in the studios' complaint: $110,970,000. Wow. (You can download a PDF of the ruling here.)

Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation.

But the company's demise wasn't triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so. Instead, StreamCast was felled by one of its own rocks: a lawsuit it filed in January 2006 against file-sharing rival Kazaa and a host of related companies. It proved to be a tactical blunder of the first order. Two of the defendants in that case counter-sued, won and locked StreamCast in a financial death-grip. And here's the delicious irony. StreamCast executives had long grumbled that Kazaa had sabotaged their business just as it was taking off in 2002, enabling Kazaa to dominate the second generation of file-sharing networks (i.e., the one that succeeded the original Napster). That may or may not be true, but there's no doubt that StreamCast's attempt to take revenge against the extended Kazaa family proved its undoing.

Apple closed two gaps today with its announcement about downloadable movies for sale through the iTunes Store. The one it emphasized was the agreement by six major studios to pony up their films the day they were available on DVD. This was a no-brainer for Hollywood. In fact, according to a publicist for Vudu, the studios have long been providing downloads for sale through other online vendors "day and date" with DVD releases. The more interesting element here is that Apple has finally persuaded Hollywood's largest studios to sell movies through iTunes.

StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus file-sharing software, filed for protection Wednesday under Chapter 7 of federal bankruptcy law. Now, perhaps, the when-will-it-ever-end legal battle known as MGM v Grokster will finally come to an end, more than six years after the major record companies and movie studios sought the federal courts' help against StreamCast, Kazaa and Grokster. At the time, those companies were the three heirs apparent to the original Napster. In fact, StreamCast -- backed by Timberline Venture Partners, a venture capital firm tied to legendary VC Tim Draper -- had begun life (under the name MusicCity Networks) piggybacking onto Napster's protocol and client software. It eventually switched to the FastTrack network it shared with Kazaa and Grokster, only to be booted unceremoniously from that network and forced onto Gnutella. Its bankruptcy doesn't come as a shock (except, perhaps, to the employees who were laid off as of April 22), yet it leaves a few intriguing legal questions unanswered.

We know what the second generation of the World Wide Web looks like -- a cornucopia of services and applications, not just text and graphics. But what might the Web 2.0 counterpart be for television? It will be digital, certainly, and offer far more programming from a greater variety of sources. It will make more shows available on demand, to meet the expectations of consumers who've been liberated by TiVo. It will be more interactive, to meet the expectations of advertisers spoiled by the Web. And it will be mobile. After all, every cell phone in the market will soon be able to show video, and TV flows inexorably toward any screen that can display it.

Today, a Silicon Valley start-up called Sezmi (formerly known by the more stealthy and Webster's-friendly moniker Building B) goes public with its version of TV 2.0. It may not succeed -- the landscape is littered with the empty offices of firms that tried and failed to compete with the local cable operators -- but its approach shows what's possible.

The NPD Group released a report today showing that post-holiday sales of Blu-ray didn't exactly skyrocket after Toshiba folded the HD DVD tent in February. After dropping 40 percent from January to February, sales of set-top Blu-ray players (i.e., those not built into a PlayStation 3) crept up 2% in March, NPD said. HD DVD sales, meanwhile, fell off a cliff that month.

This morning, CinemaNow announced a mobile version of its downloadable movie site. Happily, the point isn't to supply movies to your cell phone (not that there's anything wrong with that). Instead, it lets people use their phones to order movies and have them delivered electronically to their PC or a variety of other devices.

If you're like me, a single question bounced between your ears when you read that Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate had decided to start their own premium movie channel, in competition with Showtime, HBO and Starz: "What were they thinking?" In this morning's LA Times, Claudia Eller and Meg James (the Biz section reporters who cover the studios and the networks, respectively) provide some answers. Although the move still smacks of an effort to wrest more dollars from Showtime, the piece helps illuminate some of the logic behind the effort.

This post is meant for readers in the, oh, 17 million or so households that rely on over-the-air signals for their television programming pleasure. As you should know by now, analog TV signals from full-power stations are shutting off next February, when those stations go exclusively with digital TV transmissions. If you're wedded to your analog TV, you'll need a converter box that will cost about $50. The federal government, fearful of couch-potato riots, is offering one to two $40 coupons per household to subsidize those boxes. So far, more than 6 million coupons have been mailed out by the feds, but only about 10% of them have been redeemed. With the analog cut-off not due until February, you might think there's no reason to rush out and get a converter. Well, here's a reason: I got my box a couple of weeks ago, and I've never seen broadcast TV look so good.

Movie critic and blogger Bill Goodykoontz drew my attention today to a new feature on the TVLand website: an impressive collection of movie trailers, sorted by genre and (more interestingly, IMHO) year of release. The site is embellished a bit with a couple of extras, but the main draws are the trailers and the accompanying descriptions from All Movie Guide. The site is built for idle browsing only -- there's no way to search for a specific trailer. (UPDATE -- Oops, you can rummage through the catalog of trailers alphabetically. You just can't find them through the site's search box.) Still, after spending a few minutes flipping through trailers (Note to editors -- just a few, honest!), I had to wonder -- why not provide the movies, too?

Let's see -- The CW network is going to drive up ratings for one of its shows by making it harder to catch? Who's idea was that?

Killing the free episodes online may very well demonstrate that Internet TV cannibalizes over-the-air broadcasts. That would be a safe conclusion if "Gossip Girl" ratings climbed significantly in the next few weeks. I doubt that's going to happen, however. I think the Internet TV audience is separate from the group that turns on the set in the living room at night. It's people who don't have access to a TV when the show they want to watch is on the air, or who want to time-shift programming but don't have a DVR. In fact, there's some evidence that making shows available online boosts the a show's broadcast ratings by giving more people the opportunity to discover it or catch up on episodes they missed.

My guess is that the real problem here is that The CW hasn't figured out how to get the kind of advertising revenue per viewer online that it can on the air. Perhaps The CW's online ad-sales force needs to spend some time with its counterparts at Hulu and CBSSports.com. Downloadable versions of "Gossip Girl" episodes will still be available from Apple's iTunes for those inclined to pay for them, but the strongest demand online seems to be for free, advertiser supported content. And if The CW won't meet that demand, someone else certainly will.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but it was refreshing nevertheless to see Hulu CEO Jason Kilar make the case yesterday at the National Assn. of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas for networks and studios to be more aggressive in making content available online. His admonition: when competing for viewers on the Net, it's better to play offense than defense. According to Kilar, Hulu is collecting more per commercial on its most popular show, "Arrested Development," than prime-time TV shows can charge. The higher CPMs reduce the risk that Hulu could hurt the networks' bottom lines by drawing viewers away from the TV set.

Harry Shearer is a multimedia kind of guy. His talents are on display on film, TV, radio, CDs, the Internet, video games -- you name the medium, he's there. And soon, he'll be working a yet another format: motion capture animation. At the National Assn. of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas today, Shearer gave attendees a sample of the work to come, showing a brief skit that integrated Shearer's voice, expressions and gestures into a pair of computer-generated figures. The official version, due later this year on My Damn Channel, will have Shearer lampooning the presidential candidates, political leaders and media figures who populate the 2008 campaign.

Microsoft has an uphill climb with Silverlight, the browser plug-in technology it's developing to compete with Adobe's ubiquitous Flash technology. To boost its chances, it's taking a distinctly un-Microsoftian tack: it's designing the technology to work on software platforms and devices outside the Windows universe. And in that vein, it's working with Widevine to supply a non-Windows DRM for content delivered via Silverlight.

The Internet certainly beats conventional TV when it comes to the quantity of video offered. Finding something worth watching is another matter. TiVo and Digeo's Moxi set the gold standard for TV program guides; their EPGs make it easy to sift through thousands of hours of programming to find something appealing. I haven't seen anything that's quite so useful for video online, but elements of an online program guide are emerging around the Net. Most take the form of media players with channels of aggregated content combined with the ability to find and retrieve programs, such as VeohTV, Miro and the recently released Adobe Media Player. There also are standalone indexes, such as OVGuide and new entrant Modern Feed.

I have a column running today on latimes.com that explores the emerging differences in strategy between RIAA members and MPAA dues-payers over how to respond to Internet users' demand for large quantities of content on the cheap. I wouldn't argue that the labels and studios are fighting over how to respond. Both of them support the idea of using content-identification technology to ID and block unauthorized transfers of copyrighted works. But label executives are expressing increasing support for all-you-can-download plans, the most extreme of which being the file-sharing-friendly stance taken by Warner Music Group's Jim Griffin.

You could, of course, argue that the labels' comments will amount to little more than lip service until they actually license an all-you-can-download offering such as PlayLouder MSP, a broadband service in the UK that allows subscribers to share music to their hearts' content. But at least they're saying interesting things.

The ink was still drying on Comcast's press release this morning announcing a collaboration with BitTorrent Inc. on the touchy subject of network management when various groups for and against Net neutrality regulations started weighing in. The ones opposed to such rules typically said the collaboration proved government action was unnecessary; the ones who favored them argued that Comcast acted only because the FCC had launched an investigation into the cable company's interference with BitTorrent traffic.

BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin was asked his views on the need for neutrality rules this afternoon, but he refused to take the bait. Speaking at the Technology Policy Summit conference in Hollywood, Navin noted that Comcast wasn't the only ISP using that particular technique to interfere with BitTorrent uploads. "I feel good about our relationship with Comcast," he said. "The FCC has several other ISPs that it needs to be vigilent about.... It would be appropriate, responsible for the FCC to do what it needs to do to make sure the U.S. is a leader in broadband, not only in broadband technology but also broadband regulation."

The folks at DivX and D-Link recently loaned me two pieces of hardware to help bridge the gap between the Internet and my TV set: a DivX Connected box and a pair of powerline adapters to turn my electrical wires into a branch of my home network. All the gear worked well and was surprisingly easy to set up (especially the powerline adapters, which were literally plug-and-play -- a first for any networking gear I've used). Yet as much as I enjoyed using the DivX device, it reminded me that closing the PC-TV gap isn't as simple as hooking up a smart set-top box. It's about finding a way to make computers and websites speak TV.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman doesn't speak for the movie industry, technically. His clients are the MPAA's dues-paying members, the major Hollywood studios. And the interests of those studios -- all owned by giant conglomerates -- don't necessarily align with their smaller brethren, just as the RIAA often parts ways on policy matters with the indie labels. A good illustration of this is a letter to Glickman released today by Jean Prewitt, president of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. She blasted Glickman for coming out against Net neutrality regulations earlier this week in a speech to theater owners. You can download the letter here, or just check out the money line:

The issue is not whether the government should regulate the Internet but whether there will be effective oversight to prevent a handful of corporate giants from imposing their own version of private regulation to the public's detriment.

Not that the indies particularly mind the use of government regulatory power: last year IFTA called on the FCC to require networks to devote at least 25% of their programming lineups to shows from unaffiliated producers (Download here). Nevertheless, independent studios have a clear interest in Net neutrality rules that would prevent larger players from buying preferential treatment for their websites and online services, particularly with the opportunities dimming on cable, satellite and broadcast TV for smaller programmers. As Prewitt put it, "Allowing the Internet to become the exclusive province of a small number of large companies would inevitably harm the future of independent art and commerce."

If Glickman releases a reply, I'll update this post to include it.

Verizon, a leading provider of broadband services in the U.S., is the belle of the blogs today thanks to its work with a p2p trade group on a technology to speed p2p downloads. The technique, developed by researchers from Yale and the University of Washington, enables p2p software and broadband networks to work together to select the most efficient way to deliver a requested file.

For ISPs, this "P4P" approach offers a way to cut the amount of bandwidth hoovered by file-sharing applications -- in particular, the costly bandwidth between the ISP's local network and the rest of the Internet. That's because it would help downloaders obtain as much as possible from the shortest possible electronic paths.

After more than four months in an invitation-only Beta, Hulu opened to the public today with full-length episodes from about 200 current and classic TV shows, as well as a smattering of full-length movies. If you're interested in the Hulu inventory, the site is a nice way to experience it. The programming is all available on demand (albeit after lengthy loading times), the player's controls are great, and the commercial interruptions are less frequent than they are on TV (and in some cases, viewers get to choose between a long pre-roll and shorter interstitials). The video quality is high, even when blown up to full screen. And programs can be linked into playlists, although they don't function particularly well (the waits between clips are unforgivable). Still, Hulu is missing too many pieces to make it a truly compelling entertainment experience, which it will have to be if it wants to make a dent in online piracy.

For the third year in a row, CBS will make its broadcasts of NCAA basketball tournament games available free on the Web. The biggest difference this year, though, is that it will make *all* the tournament games available online (except for one opening-round game on March 18). There will be no local blackouts, and every round will be online, even the finals. The move acknowledges something that seems obvious: the Net doesn't cannibalize the broadcast TV audience. No one who could watch the game on a TV set would choose to watch it on a PC -- there's no interactive feature compelling enough to drive viewers out of the living room (or sports bar). As CBS chief Les Moonves told financial analysts last month, according to Online Media Daily, the "Internet audience is additive to our core audience."

Access Integrated Technologies announced yesterday that four major Hollywood studios (Disney, Fox, Paramount and Universal) had committed to provide digital versions of their films to up to 10,000 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. That's close to a fourth of all the screens in those two countries (about 39,000 here, 2,800 up north) The announcement came on the heels of a trio of releases about deployments by Thomson's Technicolor Digital Systems, which has agreements with four major Hollywood studios (Fox, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.) and DreamWorks SKG to distribute digital movies to up to 5,000 theaters. Meanwhile, Sony announced Monday that it plans to offer a competing digital-cinema package to exhibitors.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman made it official today: Hollywood will fight Net neutrality regulations being considered by Congress and the FCC. Glickman's comments, which were in his annual "state of the industry" speech at ShoWest, weren't exactly surprising, given that the MPAA had urged the FCC last year not to adopt neutrality rules that would hurt anti-piracy efforts. Today, though, the nuance was gone. Said Glickman:

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

Here's a link to my column today about MMCast's intriguing approach to advertiser-supported content on wireless networks. The company, which has offices in Beverly Hills and London, believes its targeted approach to commercials can generate enough revenue to enable content companies to give away music, ringtones, games, and videos. Its secret sauce is technology to cache video ads on handsets, rather than embedding them into the content. Included is one interesting data point about a test that Vodafone did to measure the price elasticity of downloadable games. Not surprisingly, people really, really like free content....

*Updated* Silicon Valley Insider is reporting that quarterlife, the video series that jumped from MySpace to NBC, is heading to cable after one disastrous broadcast. The show's fate is a reminder of how tough it is to take programming from the Web to broadcast TV, and how illusory it is to view the Internet as the TV networks' D-league.

You might say the series creators -- Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team behind "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" -- hit for the cycle (to use a different sports cliche). The project started off with a successful pitch to ABC, which ordered a pilot episode but then declined to pick up the series. Then Zwick and Herskovitz decided to carve up the hour-long episodes into create a new pilot and follow-up episodes, which they posted as 8-minute chunks on MySpace and quarterlife.com, a social network built around the show. (Thanks, Kelly!) Less than a week after the segments began running there, Zwick and Herskovitz struck a deal with NBC to air the program there (back in its original, hour-long format). That brings us to today's development, which, now that I think about it, makes the show's path look more like a sine wave than a trip around a baseball diamond.

HBO's announcement Monday that it was putting full-length episodes of "In Treatment" onto a new YouTube channel made me wonder why there were no ads on the network's YouTube pages. I can see why HBO might not want to throw pre-rolls and interstitials into the videos themselves, given that the programs air on TV without commercials (except those for other HBO programs). But what about all that real estate around the video window?

Intel has been racking up the press clips in recent weeks for new chip designs aimed at cheap laptops and handheld devices (e.g., the Wall Street Journal today, Business Week last week, Engadget last month). The downsized chips promise to bring desktop computing power (albeit from a couple of desktop generations ago) to a new type of mass-market mobile Internet device -- something like an iPhone at half the price or less. This is another sign of the pieces falling into place for ubiquitous connectivity, that is, people being connected to the Net wherever they go. And when that happens, the Internet will probably change everything again.

"Invoking the metaphor is a shield against thinking," William Patry, the chief copyright counsel for Google, wrote on his blog a couple of years ago. The topic was "technical protection measures," but he's argued that bad metaphors are also behind the entertainment industry's rhetoric that unauthorized downloaders are thieves. I give my own take today on the question of whether infringement should be viewed as a form of theft in a latimes.com column, which you can read here. I'm not completely in sync with Patry on this issue, so you should take my views with more than the usual grain of salt.

Nielsen Online offered its first numbers today from VideoCensus, the online counterpart to its famed TV ratings service, and the results buttressed at least one piece of conventional wisdom about streaming video: people might watch a lot of it, but they don't spend much time doing so. The results square with a report today from comScore and Media Contacts, which found that 80 percent of online video watchers in October tuned in an average of less than 3 minutes per day. The stats aren't particularly encouraging for companies hoping to build advertiser-supported video businesses on the Net.

The Times of London had a remarkable story Tuesday about a UK government proposal to require ISPs to monitor their users' downloads and cut off service to those who repeatedly access pirated movies and movies. This is the entertainment industry's Holy Grail, or at least this year's version of it -- a set-it-and-forget-it approach to combating online piracy.

Kudos to Los Angelino Andy Baio for putting together a fabulous review of online movie piracy since 2003. It's mainly raw data today; Baio promised to offer some analysis on his blog, Waxy.org, tomorrow. Focusing on a slice of the film industry -- the titles that earned Academy Award nominations for their producers, actors or crew -- Baio examined how many days elapsed between the movie's release and the availability of various bootlegged versions online. Such movies aren't always in demand online; blockbusters seem to draw more attention from the scene than critical favorites (especially period dramas). So if anything, these titles move online more slowly than the average Hollywood film. Which is not to say that they dawdle en route to the darknet. By Baio's calculation, this year's Oscar nominees were bootlegged online only four days, on average, after they were released to theaters. And DVD-quality bootlegs were available online less a week after the official DVD was released to video stores or mailed to Oscar voters.

I wrote a couple of posts last year about the expanding field of companies offering content-recognition services to user-generated video sites, peer-to-peer networks and other businesses with inventories of uncertain provenance. At the DEMO conference this week, yet another firm joined the fray: Eyealike, a small company from Bellevue, WA, whose strength is in facial recognition technology.

Television networks have garnered a lot of attention in the past year for making their programs available for free online, be it through their own sites (e.g., cbs.com and comedycentral.com), joint efforts (hulu.com) or social networks (MySpaceTV). Many of these efforts rely on Adobe's well-nigh ubiquitous Flash format, which works on Macs as well as PCs. One consequence of using Flash is that the streams aren't encrypted, which means they can be recorded and redistributed. That's not necessarily a bad thing for advertiser-supported programming, but not a good thing if people routinely clip out the commercials before passing the video along. Where there is a vulnerability, there will be tech companies trying to exploit it -- and, inevitably, others trying to fend them off with tighter security.

Reader James Lubin of Los Angeles pointed out something I'd overlooked in my post Tuesday about Apple's new movie rental service. One of the differentiators between Apple and other downloadable movie sites is that rented films can be transferred to pocket-sized portable players in addition to laptops. Previously, that was something only DivX-enabled services such as Film Fresh could do with rentals, and until this month, no major studio had approved the use of DivX's DRM on its movies. But Lubin pointed me to a post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog reporting that movies rented from iTunes can be transferred only the latest iPods, i.e., the Touch, the Classic, the iPhone and the redesigned Nano.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed this morning its long-rumored entry into the online movie rental business, saying it had deals with all the major Hollywood studios to offer downloadable films for $2.99 (older titles in standard definition) to $4.99 (new releases in high definition). The company's approach is plagued by many of the same studio-imposed problems that have burdened pioneering download sites Movielink and CinemaNow, but it also has a couple of advantages unique to Apple.

In the aftermath of last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the trade group mounting that epic gadget-fest has banned a reporter from the Gizmodo website. The reporter -- one Richard Blakeley -- used a gadget modeled after the TV-B-Gone to turn off an assortment of display screens at the show, including ones used during a presentation by Motorola. He recorded the pranks and posted a short video on Gizmodo, with an intro by the site's editor, Brian Lam. ("It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola).")

One of the trends on view at this week's Consumer Electronics Show was slimmer and slimmer flat-panel TVs. Pioneer showed a prototype that was a mere 9 mm (a little more than 1/3") thick, while several other manufacturers offered technology demos and production models in the 1"-2" range. The closer sets get to the wall, though, the more consumers will want to dispense with the tangle of wires typically needed to connect a set to peripheral devices, such as disc players and amplifiers. One approach is to hide those wires behind walls and under floors, but that typically requires a professional installer. Another idea, from Irvine-based OWLink Technology, is to make the wire all but invisible.

The consumer electronics industry may know where it's headed, but it doesn't seem to know how to get there. That was my takeaway from this week's International Consumer Electronics Show, where once again there was more talk than action around the topic of the connected home. Clearly, manufacturers are focused on creating devices that link seamlessly to each other to share audio, video and images. And they had plenty of prototypes and demos showing how two or three items could feed the same screen and respond to the same remote control. But if you were hoping for a standard way to bring together every piece of your personal entertainment gear, from TV and stereo to camcorder and cell phone, regardless of the brand, you were out of luck. It's not for lack of trying. There are several inter-industry groups working on various aspects of the problem. It's just that seemingly every year a new set of pieces get thrown into the puzzle.

Here's an unusual first. Paramount Pictures announced a deal Wednesday to let MusicGiants, an online music store that caters to audiophiles, sell collections of movies loaded onto hard drives. Buyers will be able to transfer the contents of those drives onto personal  computers or, more likely, home media servers. The deal marks the first time Paramount -- and probably any major Hollywood studio -- has let its films be a) delivered on hard drives and b) loaded in bulk onto home servers. MusicGiants will also be able to sell downloadable titles one by one through its new online video store, dubbed VideoGiants, although it doesn't plan to do so until later this year.

Heard this one before? A tech start-up company plans to install movie-rental kiosks in airports, train stations and convenience stores. This go-around, the would-be entertainment retailer is PortoMedia of Galway, Ireland, whose business plan revolves around tiny, souped-up flash drives. The company is backed by IBM, which is supplying the kiosk technology, and claims to be in late-stage talks with the major Hollywood studios. The kiosk idea has been floated (and sunk) many times, most recently as a way to burn DVDs on demand at video stores and other retailers. What makes PortoMedia a bit different -- in a way that bodes well for its business -- is shorter wait times for customers and lower equipment costs.

The problem: a houseful of gadgets and devices that all stake claim to your music, movies, pictures and video, like toddlers who amass toys and don't like to share. OpenPeak thinks it has the answer: a universal remote control on steroids that acts like a Swiss governess that can make all those unruly gadgets behave and play nice.

Not too long ago, the recording industry was pressing file-sharing networks such as Kazaa to use filtering to deter piracy of copyrighted works.

NBC Universal today renewed the call for technological intervention in a forum at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, but with a twist. It's urging service providers, such as AT&T, to filter for copyrighted works as data travels over the network to your computer.

AT&T seems at least willing to consider filtering to curb Internet piracy, noting that Internet service providers recognize that they have moral -- but not necessarily legal -- obligation to deal with theft.

"It is a systemic problem," said James W. Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs. "It is theft. It does burden our network. It creates extra cost to our consumers. It opens them to legal liability in many cases as well. "

The mere idea is bound to trigger consumer backlash, as occurred when Comcast Corp. started throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Other participants in the forum were filtering companies Audible Magic and Vobile Inc., consumer electronics giant Philips and Microsoft Corp.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Gadgets for grownups may be chock-a-block at CES, but the electronics market for the juice box set is expanding fast. Sales of so-called youth electronics grew 22% in 2006, contributing $1 billion of the $22 billion U.S. toy market that year, according to market research firm NPD. Some gizmos, such as the V-Smile Baby Infant Development System, target kids even before they can walk.

Since Junior is unlikely to have a credit card, gadgets makers instead try to appeal to parents by boasting that their products can turn kids into the next Stephen Hawking. Many, according to a report released Tuesday by The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Street Workshop, have no scientific basis for making these claims. Of the 300 video games released in 2007 as "edutainment" titles, only 69 had any educational value and just two were based on any type of curriculum, such as math, science and literacy.

Just when you thought you figured your way out of the Blu-ray and HD DVD maze, another head scratcher pops up, complete with its own alphabet soup of acronyms. This time, it has to do with mobile digital television--the ability to tune in to, say, a live Lakers game from the car, cellphone or laptop. At CES this week, LG showed off a suite of gadgets that can receive digital TV signals, including two mobile phones, a four-inch portable display and a USB dongle that turns a laptop into a digital TV. LG calls these gizmos Mobile Pedestrian Handhelds, or MPHs.

This is interesting because traditional analog TV signals in the U.S. will stop broadcasting in February 2009. At that point, only digital TV signals will be transmitted. And that's when these devices will kick off.

If you think you've seen this show before, you probably have. Samsung Electronics Co. in 2006 announced a similar initiative, called advanced vestigial sideband, or AVSB. MPH is a competing standard. Samsung and LG have both said they are prepared to launch products in 2009. My colleague Jon Healey offers his take on this here.

--Alex Pham

One rumor flitting around the Consumer Electronics Show is that the federal government will push back the Feb. 17, 2009 cut-off date for analog TV signals because the public isn't prepared enough for digital broadcasting. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin tried to broadcast his own message on that issue this morning. During a Q&A session with CEA honcho Gary Shapiro, Martin said, "There’s no question that it’s a hard date. I don’t see that moving at all."

Of course, Martin's vote isn't the only one on the issue. Congress can adjust the date, too. And with only about half of U.S. homes having a digital TV today, combined with a troubling lack of awareness about the impending cut-off, some consumer advocates are warning of a huge public backlash next year if analog broadcasts end. But Martin said having a sure date for the cutoff is critical to the government's efforts to resell a portion of the TV band (the auction is due to start in a few weeks). Knowing the frequencies will be available in a year, Martin said, helps potential bidders plan for the investment. It also helps technology and consumer-electronics manufacturers make plans for taking advantage of the new broadband services that are expected to result from the auction. Nothing would deter companies more from making such plans, Martin said, than moving the cut-off date.

-- Jon Healey

San Diego-based DivX announced this morning that Sony Pictures has agreed to let online video stores and services distribute its movies with DivX's DRM, an alternative to the electronic locks developed by Microsoft, Apple and Intertrust, a company partly owned by (wait for it ... ) Sony.

It's the first major studio landed by DivX, which has been wooing Hollywood for years with little to show for it. But time and recent history may be on DivX's side here. Like the MP3 format for music, which the major record labels shunned for a decade before accepting, DivX's compressed video format has gained wide support among consumer-electronics companies and (ahem) unauthorized sources of movies. The difference -- and this works in Hollywood's favor -- is that DivX's format can be copy-protected with DRM, while MP3 cannot.