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Sony announced on Thursday that Amazon Video On Demand, a service that offers immediate access to commercial-free and hi-def content from Dailymotion are now available through the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link. Sony says it will make tens of thousands of premium movies and shows available for you to stream onto your TV screen over the Internet.

Amazon announced Video on Demand in July as a rebranding of its Unbox service.

Amazon users can purchase or rent movies and TV shows through the Bravia Internet Video Link's interface or from Amazon's Web site and begin watching the streaming … Read more

When Comcast announced last week that it was instituting a formal usage cap for residential customers--a total of 250 gigabytes of data transfer (uploading plus downloading), as described here--I didn't think much of it, except to be happy they finally defined a critical element of their service guarantee. The previous level of ambiguity was annoying and arguably unlawful, as I described here last October.

Few Comcast customers will ever consume that much bandwidth, and in fact it's probably several times what Comcast's network can provide to all users anyway. If a large fraction of Comcast's customer base is now encouraged to start sharing its own high-definition home movies on peer-to-peer file-sharing services, network congestion will impose a much lower limit.

But over the weekend I read some of the news coverage and blogger opinions of the cap, and I have to say that some of it is just astonishing. People are making claims and demands that violate the basic rules of mathematics and the laws of physics. It looked like a digital form of mass panic, like the sky was falling.

In this story, the falling acorn was represented by Karl Bode at Dslreports.com, whose article announcing the cap (here) was highly speculative but still reasonable.

Blogger Om Malik volunteered for the role of Chicken Little in calling the cap "the end of the Internet as we know it," assuming other carriers follow Comcast's lead.

But Malik's analysis is preposterous. The video-on-demand services Malik claims Comcast is trying to block… Read more

Just a few weeks after Dish Network announced that it would offer 1080p on-demand movies, it looks like DirecTV is getting ready to match them. According to Scott Greczkowski's blog on Multichannel News, DirecTV is currently running a beta test that allows subscribers to download 1080p on-demand movies as well. Here's the relevant snippet:

I am not sure if the 1080p movie was coming from the satellite or if it was being downloaded over the internet. I do know that when I checked my DVR list the next morning the movie The Bucket List was there waiting for … Read more

One of the biggest beefs with the Internet video-on-demand services offered on the Apple TV, Vudu, TiVo (via Amazon Unbox), and Xbox 360 is that the movies are just too expensive--usually around $4 for new movies, $5 to $6 for HD films, and a bit less for older "catalog" releases.

Watch just five or six movies a month, and you can easily rack up a $30 charge--not very appealing compared with Netflix's all-you-can-eat pricing plans.

But Vudu took a step in the right direction Wednesday with its new "99 for 99 cents" section, which will … Read more

"Welcome to the new AT&T, we're currently out of iPhones, how can I help you?"

That's how two AT&T stores--one in Los Angeles, another in Denver--answered their phones Tuesday. But those stores are hardly alone in their lack of 3G iPhones. A CNET News survey on Tuesday and Wednesday showed that during their first week on sale, Apple's latest iPhones are playing extremely hard to get.

In total, we contacted 50 AT&T stores in 21 cities across 11 states, and not one had any of the three models of … Read more

Despite a hectic past two months fighting off a proxy battle with investor Carl Icahn, Yahoo is rumored to be sending out buyout feelers for social-networks company Demand Media.

Yahoo's Hilary Schneider, who was recently promoted to oversee the company's U.S. go-to market operations, traveled to Demand Media's Santa Monica, Calif., offices a couple weeks ago to gauge Demand's interest in a $1.5 billion to $2 billion buyout, TechCrunch reports, citing unnamed sources.

But Demand Media didn't bite, TechCrunch notes, adding that company founder Richard Rosenblatt is said to be seeking a price … Read more

If you want more proof that software as a service and ad-supported business models are shaking things up, check out Practice Fusion. This week the small company announced the availability of its free, on-demand suite for physician practices.

Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard touts the software suite as Google Apps for physicians. It's a radical departure from the established and costly software packages used by physicians to manage their offices and patients records.

Practice Fusion includes practice management, scheduling, patient management (electronic medical records) and e-mail applications. The Web interface takes advantage of Flex 3, Adobe's rich Internet … Read more

The Roku Netflix Player debuted last week to largely positive accolades. And why not? The $100 Netflix box delivers on-demand video to your TV for a flat monthly fee that's as low as $9 a month--the same price that would rent you just two to three movies on Apple TV or Vudu. But if the Roku box (and subsequent Netflix-compatible players) has an Achilles heel, it's the dearth of content: only about 10 percent of Netflix's 100,000-plus DVD library is available for streaming, thanks to Hollywood's byzantine licensing systems. The Roku box could stand to have another content source--and I think Hulu would be a perfect candidate. … Read more

If the industry press is to be believed, Tuesday's announcement that Sony would be producing TVs with Tru2way compatibility was a watershed event--the electronics world equivalent of the Magna Carta or the Treaty of Versailles. But let's step back a bit and examine what this really means.

Tru2way is a digital cable technology developed by CableLabs that's designed to be built directly into TVs, eliminating the need for an outboard set-top box. In theory, you'd be able to buy a Tru2way-compatible TV, bring it home, connect it to your coaxial cable, and instantly be able to … Read more