streaming

Microsoft has struck a deal to bring Netflix's streaming movie service to Windows Media Center, the companies said Tuesday.

Netflix's more than 12,000 "Watch it now" movies and TV episodes are only available to users of Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate. XP users won't be able to access the service.

Owners of Windows Media Center will also be able to search the entire Netflix library, manage their DVD queues, and "filter searches by titles that are available to watch instantly," Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft continues to try to boost … Read more

Radioshift is an application for listening to and recording Internet radio, providing a Radio Guide with listings for more than 50,000 stations and programs. The Radio Guide and a slick scheduling interface are the main advantages that Radioshift offers over lower-priced apps with slimmer feature sets. Radioshift makes it very easy to schedule the shows you want to record (whether on a one-time basis or with recurring subscriptions), so you can time-shift your shows to listen whenever you want and fast-forward through commercials.

The Radio Guide also makes it easy--and even entertaining--to explore and find new shows and stations … Read more

IBM launched this week System S, a software platform built following five years of research into the real-time analysis of large amounts of unstructured business or scientific data.

IBM calls the resulting technology "stream computing," because the software deals with streams of data.

Also this week, IBM opened the IBM European Stream Computing Center, headquartered in Dublin. The center will serve as a hub of research, customer support, and advanced testing for stream-computing applications.

System S is IBM's answer to the growing problem of data overload, the company said. In particular, it is a response to the … Read more

With many versions of Windows, Microsoft chops features as it gets closer to release.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has actually added a few features as it has gotten closer to launch. One of the most intriguing is a feature that debuted with the most recent release candidate (download) allows a user to stream media from one PC to another over the Internet, a la the Slingbox.

There are some noteworthy limitations. The streaming feature works with unprotected video and music files, so one can't watch video from iTunes or other copy-protected content.

Also the remote media streaming, as the … Read more

The music discovery Web site imeem.com officially launched its very own iPhone app on Thursday, May 14. Imeem's app is free and bears a resemblance to similar offerings from Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, offering the ability to stream, search, and purchase music over Wi-Fi or cellular connections.

But before you write off the Imeem app (download) as some late-arriving Last.fm wannabe, there's one killer feature to be aware of: cloud storage. Apps like Last.fm will go so far as to create personalized radio stations based on a random selection of songs from your collection, but the Imeem app allows you to call up any song or album in your collection and play it without the restrictions associated with most services (i.e. limited skips, and the inability to play songs from the same artist back-to-back).

In order to stream music from your personal collection, you first need to upload your music to imeem.com from your desktop using its free Mac/PC-compatible client. Now before you go thinking that you can upload that 300GB iTunes library to Imeem and stream it anywhere in the world, there's a catch. Imeem won't charge you for the first 100 songs you upload to the site, but anything more than that will require a VIP service ($29.99 per year for up to 1,000 songs, or $99.99 per year for up to 20,000).

Beyond the appeal of streaming your music collection form the cloud, the rest of the Imeem application falls somewhere between the simplicity of the Pandora app, and the more personalized, social approach of Last.fm. The main menu screen offers… Read more

The long-delayed SlingPlayer for iPhone will be hitting the iTunes App Store in the next 24 hours--but the software will only stream video over Wi-Fi, not AT&T's 3G data network. The restriction is a big blow to the usability of the software, which allows owners of Slingbox set-top boxes to stream their home TV in real-time to anywhere in the world.

The SlingPlayer app will cost $29.99--expensive for iPhone apps, but the exact same price as previous iterations of the SlingPlayer Mobile apps available for Windows Mobile, Palm OS, BlackBerry, and Symbian handhelds. SlingPlayer Mobile should … Read more

As part of the Streaming Media East conference in New York, Adobe has unveiled "Strobe," the "open framework" for its Flash video player that the company first announced last month. It's expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.

Since you were probably wondering: No, Adobe is not tweaking the pronunciation of "Strobe" so that it rhymes. Thank goodness.

But here's what it is: Strobe is a product and architecture for accompanying plug-ins based on Adobe's Flash technology that lets a company build a custom video player more … Read more

Need a "30 Rock" fix? How about some "Friday Night Lights?" Forget paying Apple two bucks for every iTunes download: Just stream the shows to your iPhone or iPod Touch instead.

No, the rumored Hulu app hasn't arrived yet. But if you point your mobile browser to m.nbc.com, you'll find you can watch full episodes of more than a dozen NBC shows. Free!

(Interestingly, the mobile CBS site (iphone.cbs.com) can stream video in the iPhone-friendly QuickTime format as well, but for the moment, you'll find only clips and recaps, … Read more

Well, this is helpful. On Friday evening I noticed that my Facebook home page was displaying a "Show (number) new posts" alert after I left the site open for a while and some of my friends have posted new status messages, links, or what-have-you. This is something that had been notably missing when Facebook debuted its redesigned, "stream"-focused home page this spring.

It looks like this went live earlier this week, per Facebook's official blog, but it doesn't appear to have rolled out on everyone's accounts immediately (I tend to leave a … Read more