#newteevee

Everyone assumes Google's acquisition of Motorolla Mobility is about competing with Apple for handset / tablet supremacy. The folks at NewTeeVee are agreeing but point out an even more compelling opportunity to reboot the failed GoogleTV with Motor Mobil's settop box division.

Good to see that my cable company finally increases the bandwidth caps to more appropriate levels. The system also bumps you automatically into the next tier temporarily if you go over the cap of your tier.

'Professional' being the operative word for this premium service, but I can see this service being a big help for companies and content producers with a big web presence looking for a solution that's not quite as enterprise oriented like Ooyala and Brightcove.

Article from NewTeeVee on Pollak's switch to Dynamo. Archived episodes of Kevin Pollak's Chat Show can now be watched through the Dynamo Player. Pollak has interviewed stars such as Jon Hamm, Eddie Izzard, Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, Joel McHale and more interviews stretching to the 2-hour mark!

Sezmi is making its broadband and broadcast set-top setup available in 10 new markets, expanding beyond a limited trial of services in Los Angeles that began earlier this year. But while the company called its LA trial a success, we’re skeptical that consumers will be eager to pay $299 plus an additional $4.99 per month to get live access to content, most of which is readily available through Hulu or can be picked up over the air with a $30 digital antenna. Residents of Boston; Detroit; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; Miami, Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; and San Francisco will now be able to use the Sezmi hardware to get live and on-demand content from broadcasters like ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, as well as broadband Internet video from YouTube and other online video providers. But unlike in LA, the system won’t be sold in Best Buy stores (though it will be on sale through bestbuy.com), and users won’t have access to certain premium cable content.

FFmpeg published release 0.6 of its set of multimedia tools and libraries this week. The release is code-named “Works with HTML5″ since it incorporates support for Google’s WebM open source video codec, as well as improved decoding for H.264 and Ogg Theora. FFmpeg is used by more than a hundred video players, transcoding applications and home theater solutions to support a wide range of video codecs, with VLC, Boxee, MythTV, Handbrake and MPLayer being some of the more popular projects utilizing FFmpeg. WebM was open sourced by Google at its developer conference in May and is based on On2′s VP8 video codec. It is meant to offer an open source alternative to the H.264 video codec, which is controlled by the MPEG LA licensing body — a fact that has stopped the makers of Firefox from supporting H.264 for Flash-free HTML5 video playback. Firefox and Chrome support the playback of Webm video content via preview-releases instead, and Adobe has announced that it will also bake WebM support into Flash.

There’s good news and bad news for Yahoo’s TV Widgets. The good news is that Sony is expanding the number of markets where those widgets are available nearly seven-fold. The bad news is that Yahoo partner Sony is also spearheading the introduction of a competing platform by Google. Yahoo announced today that its TV widgets will soon be available on Sony Bravia LCD TVs in more than 100 countries around the world, a nearly seven-fold increase over the number of markets that they are available in now. With Yahoo TV Widgets on their TVs, customers can get access to thousands of content sources for news, weather, sports and social networking, as well as over-the-top movies, TV shows and other Internet content. The only problem is that Google also wants to make Internet content available through connected TVs and other devices, and plans to do so with the help of Sony. The search giant introduced Google TV at its I/O conference last month, with Sony as its first major CE partner to introduce connected TVs and Blu-ray players that leverage the new TV operating system.

Encoding.com has introduced a new API that will let major customers — like large video publishers and video distribution platforms — offer its cloud encoding services as a white-label solution. And a group of its customers have already signed up for the white-label service, including Cisco Eos, Giant Realm, Kaltura and Vzaar. Encoding.com’s new features allow video management firms to create sub-accounts on the fly, enabling them to sign up their own customers for the cloud-based encoding service. By extending its API, video hosting and distribution companies can integrate the service into their own platforms, therefore making encoding in the cloud a seamless part of the video production workflow. The startup has also made sample scripts available for various programming languages to let its customers get up and running quickly.