televisions

The Slingbox is known best for its ability to let consumers watch their home TV channels remotely using a laptop or smart phone. But a local San Francisco news station has found a way to utilize the trapezoid-shaped set-top box to cheaply and easily deliver live news, traffic and weather updates wirelessly back to its studio.

The news operations director at CBS 5, Don Sharp, devised a way to replace more than 20 of its cameras affixed to the tops of local bridges, freeways and buildings that use microwave technology to relay video back to the station with smaller cameras … Read more

HBO has requested that YouTube pull down footage of Saturday night's championship boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya, according to a Los Angeles Times report on Tuesday (free registration required). A YouTube user had uploaded the broadcast from Las Vegas, originally shown live on HBO's pay-per-view channel, in a relatively high-quality format later that weekend. That was understandably problematic for HBO, which plans to show a rebroadcast of the match this coming Saturday.

The video was removed from the legally embattled YouTube around 4 p.m. PDT on Monday, replaced with a notice … Read more

On paper, CableCard sounded pretty great. Instead of a cable box, your local provider would give you a small smartcard--the exact same design as a PCMCIA card--that would fit into the back of your TV (or DVR). In theory, you were getting the benefit of "the good old days" of analog cable with a digital makeover--just plug the wire into the back of the TV, and you'd get access to all of your digital and HD channels. In reality, CableCard has been plagued with problems. The existing technology is one-way, so you don't have access to … Read more

Change can be a scary thing. Crave still remembers its first day at gadget school. It was scary and we missed our mum. Changing televisions is just as daunting: your trusty old screen discarded like yesterday's paper and a new upstart put in its place. The good news is Toshiba doesn't want to scare you, it wants to help--and that's what the Regza 37X3030 is all about.

Toshiba's X-series televisions are 1080p ready, which is great, especially if you have the equipment needed to make the most of it. The 37X3030 is, as you may have … Read more

Most of the major TV makers seem determined to create flat screens of Godzillan proportions, but Evesham has apparently decided to zig where others zag with its latest offering. The U.K. company's TV-930 doesn't have the smallest LCD--9.2 inches--but it weighs less than 1kg (around 2 pounds). It also manages to integrate speakers into its modest frame, which Pocket-lint says can be connected to a DVD player, camera or game console.

The lightweight portability could make some sense if one needed to move the TV around the house regularly. If not, we can't understand why … Read more

What could possibly make both beer and the Nintendo Wii even better? That's right, it's chrome. This week Ariel and I talk about the biggest, brightest, and shiniest gadgets that we found this week on Crave:

Download the Crave vodcast RSS feed, … Read more

How quickly things change. Just a couple of months ago, the likes of Sharp and LG were vying for bragging rights over the largest TVs at the CES show in Las Vegas, with sets around 108 and 102 inches. Now, Italy's Tecnovision has dwarfed those models with what it's understandably billing as "the world's largest television" on display at CeBIT in Germany, a 205-inch HDTV--practically big enough, Tech Digest says, to fill an entire wall. There's no information on specs or pricing, but we suspect that its name alone, "Luxio," is … Read more

Time Trumpet was the winner for film and TV in this year's South By Southwest Interactive Web Awards this past Sunday (see our coverage here). The site contains a number of faux-futurecentric video clips with historical satire about politics, current events, and celebrities. What's neat is the somewhat experimental interface that blends various media in partial 3D, similar to Universe which we took a look at yesterday. You can sort through it all by episode or subject, and each clip will organize itself into a neat, swirling vortex. It's total eye candy.

Most of the clips about … Read more

YouTube is now featuring content from the BBC in the form of two new branded channels, one for BBC local programming, and another for popular television programs on their BBC Worldwide network. A channel with daily clips from BBC News is soon to follow. The BBC won't be offering its programming in its entirety, just promotional clips like extra scenes, previews, recaps, and production diaries.

In light of this, I'd like to see the BBC move to something similar to what American networks have been doing, offering full versions of their content on their Web sites with supplemental … Read more