Technology, Tv | featured news

With more than one billion unique visitors every month, YouTube asserted last night that the battle between television and the online video giant is over. YouTube claimed victory with six billion views per month. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited Mark Mahaney's estimates, a stock analyst at RBC Capital Markets,  that YouTube generated about $4 billion in revenue in 2012, up from $2.5 billion in 2011.

Amazon is developing a set-top box to stream video over the Internet via its Amazon Prime and Instant Video services, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Amazon is letting viewers help choose its new lineup of TV shows, scuttling a secretive, wasteful process once reserved for Hollywood taste-makers... There used to be just one way for getting shows on TV. Networks would spend tens of millions of dollars ordering scripts and shooting pilots and then show the fruits of their labor to focus groups. A small group of executives would cherry-pick a few promising shows to put on TV, hoping they'd be a hit with bigger audiences. The process was unscientific, expensive, and often didn't work. It's still how most of the industry operates today.

Google Fiber has a lot going for it, both as an ISP and a pay-TV platform. There was was one gaping hole in the service though: no HBO. Lets be honest with ourselves, its the big geeks that are looking to hop on that 1Gbps service first. And what do geeks love almost as much as blazing-fast Google-branded internet? Game of Thrones. Now Kansas City (and soon Austin) based nerds will be able to watch Joffrey become an even bigger monster live, rather than wait for some torrent site to get an illegal copy of it up (or, if they're smart, mooch off of someone's HBO GO account). Alongside HBO, Google Fiber has also added Cinemax: Home Box Office's less cool sibling. The branded families of channels are both available today for $20 a month or $10 a month respectively. Or, if you're a real premium TV fan, you can get both, plus STARZ and Showtime for $40 a month. Hit up the source for a few more details.

A top executive with the owner of the Fox broadcast network on Monday threatened to convert the network to a pay-TV-only channel if Internet startup Aereo Inc. continues to "steal" Fox's over-the-air signal and sell it to consumers without paying for rights.

It's no secret that Apple wants to get into the living room by making its own TV set, and there have been plenty of rumors and reports about how and when it's going to happen. Now, an analyst says he's learned that the set will go on sale late this year, for $1,500 to $2,500.

Nielsen is taking a step towards extending its TV-ratings business to measure online viewing, aiming to gauge how much viewership has drifted away from traditional TV to online outlets.

...Two different firms that study social media sentiment, Taykey and General Sentiment, have issued Oscar predictions based on what people are saying on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. They arrived at totally different conclusions.

New TVs from Samsung will recognize an expanded range of gestures so people can swipe through on-screen menus in a way that revolutionizes the old remote control.

Today at CES, Intel officially announced a new partnership with Comcast that will will enable customers to view live and on-demand television content on Intel-based devices, such as tablets, ultrabooks and PCs. This experience is made possible by the Intel® Puma™ 6MG-based XG5 multi-screen video gateway.