televisions

If you love Christmas lights and don't see why they should be restricted to just one time of the year, the Philips Aurea II is the TV for you. It boasts enough colored illumination to put Oxford Street to shame. The only disappointment: it costs more than a 50-inch Pioneer Kuro.

Yes, that's right, the 42PFL9903D has a list price of ?2,500, or $4,300. So, as you can imagine, this is going to need to be one awe-inspiring TV to justify such a hefty price tag. To be fair, we did really like the original Aurea, … Read more

MTV, the channel that brings us great shows like Paris Hilton's My New BFF, MTV Cribs, True Life, and Sex, With Mom and Dad now has a place for all the music videos that made MTV, well, Music Television. The new MTV outlet is called, somewhat redundantly, MTVMusic.com. I remember when MTV played music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; there were "on-air personalities" known as VJs, or video jockeys. Martha Quinn was my favorite.

Dig the White Stripes? MTVM has 36 Jack and Meg videos listed. Bright Eyes "This Is The First Day Of My Life" … Read more

After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.

The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.… Read more

Can't be away from the TV screen for long?

Australia's ILVE has a solution for you: an LCD TV built into a rangehood.

While it's certainly not the most heinous attempt at integrating a home appliance with electronics, I honestly can't think of a worse way to watch TV: standing over a hot stove and craning my neck ceilingward. Ouch.

Designed by Italian Marco Valerio Agretti, the Vela rangehood is stainless steel and glass and does fancy stove-assisting duties like increasing the interior fan's speed as the temperature over the stove rises, filtering out grease, … Read more

If you're itching to hang an LCD or plasma HDTV above your fireplace but unwilling to shell out the cash for a full-motion mount, fear not, Memorex will save you from improper viewing angles. For $350 (or about half the cost of one of the company's 32-inch LCDs), you can put the safety of your 30-inch to 50-inch display in the hands of a company I still associate with cheap audio cassette tapes (though admittedly this is an unfair association against the Imation-owned brand and has nothing to do with the quality of this product).

Not only is … Read more

Google made two announcements Thursday that further advance the company's goal of becoming a power player in television advertising in addition to the Web.

First, the company announced that Harris, which manufactures communications equipment for business and government clients, will be integrating Google's advertising platform into the products it sells to media and communication companies. This means that Harris clients can use Google's service to manage ad inventory, which Mark Piesenan, director of strategic partnerships for Google TV ads, said will "offer media companies the opportunity to leverage (Google's) automated online marketplace, providing a new … Read more

PBS and YouTube are encouraging U.S. voters to take something more than a sense of civic duty with them when they head to the polls on Nov. 4: they want them to take video cameras, too.

The Google-owned video site has partnered with PBS for "Video Your Vote," a project that encourages voters to videotape their polling experience and upload it to the Web. Select videos will be shown on Jim Lehrer's The NewsHour on PBS.

"Voters have documented each step of the 2008 election on YouTube and this phenomenon will culminate on November 4 … Read more

TOKYO--The Ceatec 2008 circus is packing up the tent, but it won't be long until we see many of these same gadgets again. As the Japanese consumer tech showcase winds down, let's take a look at the major themes of this year's show and look forward to what will make it to the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Although the show was a bit smaller this year, it's still the place to see highly imaginative prototypes, as well as get a glimpse of what will actually be on U.S. stores shelves in the coming year.

The most prevalent theme among the electronics giants: thin TVs. Just like at CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin, and CEDIA Expo this year, they're jostling with each other in a race to see who can make the largest screen on the skinniest panel.

Sony continued to push its current 11-inch OLED TV model, the XEL-1, and showed the prototype 27-inch version. But the company also showed an even thinner prototype, whose display is a mere .3 millimeters thin.

But those are small. In larger TVs, Hitachi showed off a 15-millimeter LCD and a 35-millimeter plasma set (see picture), as did Sharp, which announced its new 23-millimeter thin Aquos XS (for "extra slim") model. Toshiba also lined up to show off a concept Regza that looks and leans like an oversize piece of mirrored glass.

Many companies also showed new types of interfaces, such as gesture-based technology. Panasonic showed its connected-home concept, which included an impressive video wall. Users could theoretically call up an exercise program onto the wall, and a video of an instructor would appear and respond to users' movements. Hitachi showed digital signage technology that used human gestures to play games and create interactive advertisements. … Read more

Google has found another partner to use its system for supplying television advertising: Bloomberg TV.

The two companies announced the partnership Thursday, touting the ad success measurement abilities that Google has benefited from with its core search-ad business and is emphasizing as a way to get ahead over other ad mechanisms for TV. "We're pleased to be partnering with Bloomberg Television to continue to make TV advertising more relevant and measurable," said Mike Steib, director of Google TV ads, in a statement.

Google TV ad technology can tell advertisers which ads the audience is watching second by … Read more