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The computer has become increasingly more important to entertainment in the home then it ever has before. So much, that it’s sparked the coming Internet TV revolution. Consumers want to be able to do everything they love to do on their computers straight from their TV. Imation’s Link can act as a bridge to carry us into the highly anticipated Internet TV era. It could provide us with the entrainment flexibility we’ve been aching for.Next Page »

According to some news, Best Buy has started selling the new Sony Internet TV as of the 17th of October! You can jump over to Gizmodo and take a quick look, as they have a great deal of pictures to take a look at.

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Earlier this morning rumor had it that Best Buy was getting—and selling—the new Sony Internet TVs as early as today. An anonymous tipster sent us some pics confirming that this could indeed be the case.

Stop by over at Gizmodo and check this puppy out :-)

Ever wondered the history of the television? Today, there are high-resolution, large-height, large-width, low-depth, and relatively low-power compared to what it would be if you were to proportionally increase the size of the first televisions. Heck, CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions can still be purchased, but they're not as common as they once were. Looking back to September 1928, it's truly amazing how much the technology of the television has advanced since its initial debut. (Note: This article is a shortened version of the one by Gawker, which is comprised of summaries and links to Popular Science articles from the magazine's archives.)


January 1929 - Your First Television Set
There's a reason they called it a "set" - it's far more difficult than a "kit" could ever dream of being...

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Back in the Great Depression, and before we had third world nations to do all our icky manual labor, you had to work if you wanted to watch television. Not that there was much on (and you thought winter Saturday figure skating was bad?), but if you wanted a glimpse of the future, it required sweat, a high quality radio and some neon tubes. Also, holding your thumb against a disk to keep the picture straight, and the ability to adjust motor rheostats, whatever that means.

April 1934 - Myriads Dots of Light Give New Television
When it came out, CRT was the thing to have! It may seem hard to believe, but back then, CRT was the latest and greatest invention to hit the world, or at least the geeks thought so.


December 1942 - Television Program Gives Housewives Hints from PSM

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Before there were soap operas and Ellen Degeneres to keep the little lady occupied while she kept house, there was a gigantic, horribly sexist robot that coldly reminded women how to properly toil in domestic servitude.

August 1944 - Post-War Television
Predictions of television someday being able to provide live coverage of a sporting event, on a screen as big as 24 inches started to arise; fortunately, their estimates were not limitations, but rather a landmark in the history of television.

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"Entertainment has remained the most important function of the mass communication services. It is important to instruct people, but in a nervous and complex civilization like ours it is even more important to amuse and thrill them." Suck it Tom Brokaw, even the Greatest Generation needed their Jersey Shore fix. Or something like that.

February 1962 - Is Color TV Worth It?
Can you imagine only being able to watch all of your favorite online videos in shades of gray, but no R, G, or B? I couldn't, either.

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What is that, you say? The proposition of color television? Ha! A mere passing trend, flashing opiates for the masses! Hardly a reason to replace the old, trusty tube and cabinet, what with its distinguished gray tones that produce classic, distinguished programming.

September 1991 - Little Dish TV

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So here came small dish satellite TV, bringing the base entertainment of regional superstations into the homes of even the boldest frontiersmen. While big satellites littered crazy people's homes since the 70s in America, the smaller dishes, new wavelengths and compression technology (boring!) was new to our shut ins and shut outs. With seven regional superstations and audio channels and access to Pay-Per-View movies, a $300 fee to buy a dish (or an installation and monthly rental fee) and a $35 monthly subscription was totally a great deal!

Wait, you mean people that didn't work for NASA used to have big satellite dishes?


That's all for here; Gawker has the full version of the article.

The USA has finally switched to DTV and of course the FCC has mandated technologies that are patented by companies and those patents aren't released to the public. It is said that each DTV tuner costs $40 to the patent holders (strangely, the coupons are $40 for those converters... hmm?).

This sort of government forcing people to use non-free technology is terrible and those patents should become public domain. Oh, most people that have received over the air analog TV will probably notice many stations that they now won't receive. DTV doesn't die gracefully as analog TV did.

We need to stop how companies force these technologies on the market through the government. The FCC is horrible corrupt and needs to be disbanded.

If you still get over the air analog TV, that's it. Time to get a digital tuner.

Sadly, they decided for it to be their best one.

Said By THR Television

Thirteen has proven not-so-lucky for Fox's veteran animated comedy "King of the Hill."

After several previous brushes with cancellation, the network has opted not to renew the series beyond its current 13th season.

In April, Fox picked up 13 more episodes from the 20th Century Fox TV-produced show, which are wrapping production.

A lot has changed since "King of the Hill" premiered in 1997. Its creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge have moved on to other projects -- Daniels developed and is running NBC's "The Office," and Judge has a new animated series, "The Goode Family," launching on ABC in midseason.

Judge had continued to voice the central character on the toon comedy, alongside voiceover cast members Kathy Najimy, Pamela Adlon, Brittany Murphy, Tom Petty, Johnny Hardwick and Stephen Root.

"Hill" has been exec produced by Judge, Daniels, John Altschuler, Dave Krinsky, Michael Rotenberg, Howard Klein, Jim Dauterive and Garland Testa.

Fox is introducing two new animated series in midseason, Mitch Hurwitz's "Sit Down, Shut Up" and the "Family Guy" spinoff "The Cleveland Show."

Linky.

So, there is officially no justice. Not only is the last well written show on that programming block going away and the awful-from-the-start American Dad is staying onboard (as well as the increasingly awful Family Guy), but they will be supplanted by what will no doubt be another terrible 23 minutes of poorly written pop-culture references passed off as jokes. I'm guessing it is just cheaper to have television shows on air when they don't require actual writers.

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I'm sure the CableCard standard will be a failure since you still need something from the cable companies to use their service on each TV. This leads to per device charging as opposed to per household. I hate the cable companies.

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The other major issue is that the current version of CableCard technology does not allow for two-way communication between the device and the cable network. This means that interactive services like video-on-demand and pay-per-view can't be enabled through a CableCard slot on a TV or a set-top box bought at a retail store. This is a major issue for companies like Digeo that want to sell their devices to high-end cable subscribers. Video-on-demand is one of the fastest-growing services that cable operators offer. At the end of the first quarter of 2007, roughly 30 million homes used video-on-demand, according to market research firm SNL Kagan. Operator Comcast said that roughly 75 percent of subscribers that could get VOD used the service. "Without two-way functionality that works, it negates some of the advancements that new set-top box makers can offer consumers," said Ian Olgeirson, senior analyst at SNL Kagan. "They could deliver over-the-top content via the Internet, but I think that market is still a long way off."

There are manufacturers that are producing LCD TVs that are using a high refresh rate. Your eyes will thank you.

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A new technology refreshes TV images at 120 to 100 hertz, or 120 to 100 times a second, versus the 60 hertz rate of typical LCDs (liquid crystal displays). This effectively doubles the number of images per second, which leads to a smoother visual presentation to human eyes. Known as motion-compensated frame interpolation, or MCFI, the technology is just starting to appear in high-end TVs. The additional images, moreover, aren't static repeats of the image that came before them. Instead, the new images are composites of two successive images. The TV's internal microprocessors try to compensate for what the additional frame might have looked like had it been inserted into the film.

This large LCD TV supports 4096 x 2160 resolution. That is four times the resolution of a normal 1080p TV. What will people use it for? Porn.

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Sharp has produced a 64-inch LCD monitor that provides screen resolution four times that of normal high-definition screens. Normal HD screens have 2 million pixel points. The new Sharp monitor, which is being shown off by the company at the Ceatec consumer technology trade show in Japan this week, sports a 4096 x 2160 pixel-line resolution--double the number of vertical and horizontal pixel lines offered by a normal HD screen. This comes to almost nine million pixel points. Small details, like plumes of smoke over an aerial shot of a rural village, can be picked out. The monitor can be divided into quarters and display four high-definition videos at once.

It seems that the Japanese companies don't know how to market products or are too stupid to realize that consumers don't need these new hidef disks. The player/recorder models of set top boxes will not be sold in the US. Japanese companies are stupid.

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The high prices for these devices also militate against a worldwide launch in the near future. Panasonic's BW 200 and BW 100 Blu-ray recorders sell for 300,000 and 240,000 yen, respectively. That's about $2,500 and $2,200. Sony's player sells in the same price range. Toshiba's player sells for 398,000 yen, although HD players use less-expensive components. Ohmori, however, said that's because Toshiba puts 1 terabyte of hard-drive storage in its player/recorder. The drive on the most expensive Panasonic unit is half the size at 500GB. High-definition video gobbles up a lot of hard-drive space. A dual-layer Blu-ray disk with 50GB on it can hold six hours of HD video, a Panansonic representative said.

Everytime I read an article about the FCC, I am reminded on why it sucks. The latest reminder... the Cable Card. Yeah, what about that piece of technology that should be for all cable companies? I can get a HDTV with a built-in tuner and still require a tuner from the cable company.

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In 1998, the FCC directed the cable industry to develop a physical device--now called a CableCard--containing the security functions that could be inserted into the equipment of independent manufacturers. That made sure their boxes could be used with cable systems around the country. The FCC thought this separate security device would allow multichannel video program distributors to retain control over the security function while enabling independent entities separately to market navigation devices. The cable industry has so far supplied about 200,000 CableCards for use in more than 140 models of digital cable-ready devices. But the vast majority of cable subscribers continue to use equipment leased from their cable companies.

For a scant $800, you could own a new HD PVR. It contains a 250GB drive that will only hold 32 hours of HD programming.

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The long-awaited product will be $800 and available in mid-September, the company said. Subscription fees for the TiVo service are separate. The TiVo Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder has a 250-gigabyte hard drive - enough to store about 32 hours of high-definition programming or up to 300 hours of standard programming. It also sports two tuners, which will allow subscribers to record two different shows in HD at the same time while watching a third pre-recorded show.