I can’t say my finger’s on the pulse of the trading card beat, but Upper Deck’s upcoming Evolution football cards seem like a neat gimmick.

According to Switched, each “card” measures a half-inch thick, and includes a small LCD screen. A 60-second highlight reel rolls automatically when you open the cardboard flap covering the face of the card.

The Evolution cards arrive on April 12. No idea why Upper Deck is pushing a new kind of football card in the middle of baseball season, but whatever.

It’s funny, because as a childhood baseball card collector, I never associated the decline of trading cards with the rise of personal computers and the Internet. Baseball cards had their own problems, including the strike of 1994 and market oversaturation. I was in early middle school when the market boomed, and I specifically remember being soured by the glut of premium cards, which were expensive for kids my age.

But in hindsight, playing cards are just another example of physical media doomed by digital. The stats on the back of the cards are instantly accessible on a smartphone, as are highlight reels. The very idea of collecting and trading players has been replaced to some extent by fantasy sports. Even if the trading card market hadn’t become oversaturated in the early 1990s, it’d still be in trouble today.

Upper Deck’s new cards won’t change that, of course. They’re just another reminder that no dead-tree media is safe anymore.

The New York Times’ David Pogue bemoans–or at least notices–that the digital world is robbing us of the analog noises that provide the communal soundtrack of our subconsciousnesses. It’ll be sad day when we all stop going “ka-ching!”  (Then again, a little log being sawed is still our shared shorthand for snoring…and when was the last time you sawed a log?)

A rowdy crowd of 650 gathered at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn for Boxee’s highly anticipated unveiling of its set top box tonight.

Boxee creates open source software that brings on-demand content from the Internet and home networks to TVs, and while the software has just reached beta, it is enlisting hardware partners to embed it on their devices. (Until now, it’s been available for OS X, Windows, Linux, and as a hack for Apple TV.)  The $200 Boxee Box is the company’s first branded hardware device, manufactured by D-Link. It will become available in the second quarter of next year.

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Sony is boasting about its downloadable movie and TV show offerings on the Playstation Network, telling Video Business that revenues are up 300 percent from the same time last year.

There also appears to be a new demographic in play. “We’re getting people in the households who hadn’t yet interacted with their [Playstation 3] in the past,” Eric Lampel, the Playstation Network’s director of operations, said. “This is the girlfriend, wife and mother.”

He points to the film Bride Wars as an example, as it became a top-ranked movie download after its April 28 release.

I suspect a hint of marketing in Lampel’s statements. Video Business notes that a hefty amount of PSN’s movie offerings are action and animation flicks — not exactly fare for the missus — and Lampel concedes that the service is “very game heavy.” It is a video game console, after all. There’s probably truth in what he says, but I think the “everyone’s digging it” idea is a deliberate message.

Sony has ambitions to expand the PS3′s role. Lampel said PSN wants to be a major source for original, mainstream (as in, not nerdy anime?) programming. He speaks of broadening the console’s audience “not necessarily around gaming” and mentions HBO’s exclusive content creation as a model worth following. Can you imagine the Playstation 3 churning out edgy dramas and comedies? Perhaps it could happen through cooperation with Sony Pictures.

One thing I’ll add, alluded to Lampel’s quote about wives and girlfriends: If the Playstation 3 (and the Xbox 360, for that matter) are going to gain broad appeal beyond the stereotypical college male gamer demographic, it’ll take those dedicted gamers to reel in the outsiders. That means the original content has to be so good, it’s worth evangelizing. Let’s see what Sony comes up with.

A solution for the digital download squeamish: Go to your local video game store, buy a boxed version of a digital download voucher, go home and use the Internet to install the same product that’s being sold cheaper to those who don’t want to leave the house.

Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera has word from a “reliable” insider — with a proven track record of breaking stories — that this will happen for the upcoming PSP game Patapon 2. Kuchera suggests that Sony is testing this retail download model to gauge whether it will work for other games, maybe even setting the stage for a UMD-less PSP.

Why would Sony hang on to retail at all with this release? Because as much as video game publishers would love to kill the middleman, they need that shelf space. Digital distribution doesn’t share equal footing with hard copy sales. Besides, cutting out Gamestop and other retailers could potentially force them to drop the PSP in retribution. Despite the strained relationship between publisher and retailer, no one wants to rock the boat.

As a result, we might have this bizarre solution in which consumers can pay $20 plus a trip to the store for a $15 game that they can download at home. You pay more for the luxury of an empty box.

Whether the rumor is true or not, I can’t imagine retailers lovingly embracing the idea in the long run because they’d be digging their own graves. Once enough retail shoppers realize they’re getting duped at retail, they’ll abandon the store. GameStop also loves the used game market, and won’t give it up without a fight.

Retail downloads might work in the present simply because of shelf appeal, but Sony and other game publishers can’t have it both ways forever. Eventually, they’ll have to commit to a download-only future — brick-and-mortar be damned, consoles can be distributed other ways — or commit to physical media and all the retail baggage that comes with it.

International financial services company Credit Suisse has burst Google’s bubble: Its analysts report that YouTube could be on track to lose $470 million this year due to outrageously high operating costs and a poor business plan.

Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube has a gross income of $240 million a year, but that its expenses far exceed that, totalling an astonishing $711 million. According to the report, about half of YouTube’s expenses come from meeting bandwidth demand, while the remainder derives from licensing costs, hardware, marketing, and other operational expenses.

The analysts determined YouTube’s bandwidth costs by assuming that 375 million unique visitors would visit the site in 2009, with 20 percent of those users consuming 400 kilobits per second of video at any given time. That works out to 30 million megabits being served up per second. That’s a heck of a lot of bandwidth to devote to videos of sneezing pandas.

However, Credit Suisse’s revenue forecast deviates from other reports. In March, Jefferies Co. said that YouTube would earn $500 million, and Screen Digest predicted $120 million in earnings earlier this week.

The Credit Suisse analysts’ proposed path to profitability is for Google to change YouTube’s business model to place an emphasis on premium content over user-generated content–like Hulu. NewTeeVee, a blog dedicated to online digital media, reported that Google is poised to unveil a site redesign that will do just that.

That would be the end of YouTube as we known it, but we are living in a new economic reality. YouTube built its business without ever having any viable way to become profitable in the short term, and it cannot continue to lose money just because its users are accustomed to receiving free entertainment. That just does not cut it anymore– shareholders won’t tolerate white elephants forever. Even Google shareholders.

As you may know, the HP MediaSmart Server has been the exclusive sponsor of Technologizer’s Digital Media Central section. HP has been presenting “What Are Your 3?,” a feature which lets people upload and embed their favorite photos, videos, and songs, as well as vote on other folks’ media. And to make contributing more tempting, HP decided to give away MediaSmart Servers to participants whose media were top-rated by other visitors.

The contest is over, and I’m happy to announce the winners. Here they are (click on their names to see the stuff they submitted):

Jesse Tobler
Dennis Pasley
Jerad Heffner
Josh Martin

Congratulations to all four–and thanks to everybody who contributed.

Despite a recent organizational shake up, help-wanted ads indicate that Microsoft may be taking its Zune brand into the living room, and expanding into new international markets.

Today, blogger Long Zheng’s watchful eye took notice of a job listing on Microsoft’s Web site seeking a software engineer to help its Zune team, “deliver great digital entertainment features into the living room, including on demand music and video.”

The job requires an engineer with experience developing user interfaces to deliver “rich online media experience delivering music and video from the cloud.”

The listing is dated just days after the company announced that it was restructuring the Zune product group into distinct software and hardware divisions. Microsoft’s goal may be to bring Zune services to third-party devices, CNET reported.

A separate job listing is seeking a database programmer to help Microsoft open Zune stories for other countries or regions.

The company has already made inroads into the living room with its Xbox console. Windows Media Center Edition has failed to make much of an impact. It would make sense for Microsoft to offer a Zune store through a future edition of the Xbox that would serve as a digital media hub. If nothing else, it would help the company compete in the living room with Apple TV, which analysts have projected could sell as many as 6 million units this year.

When it comes to media–digital or otherwise–you’ve got options. Lots and lots of them, from formats that have been around for decades to new services that may or may not amount to much over the long haul. At prices that range from nothing to kinda pricey. It’s an embarrassment of riches, so here’s a quick T-Poll to see how the Technologizer community’s getting entertainment (and news, and information) right now.

I haven’t taken the survey myself yet, but when I do, my answer will be, basically, “all of the above with a few exceptions, such as Blu-Ray, and in several other forms, too…”

(A NOTE FROM HARRY: We’re pleased to continue Digital Media Central‘s guest appearances with one by Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat, a cool blog about design, technology, and sustainability.)

With the cost of memory cards and hard drives falling almost by the day we’re adding storage capacity faster than can we fill our hard drives up with stuff–even if we are creating more photos, MP3s, emails, videos, etc. than ever (think about how you take more pictures with your digital camera now that you have a 1GB card in there than when you were scraping by with just 64MB). Moore’s Law has been great for processors, but the cost of a megabyte of hard drive space has plummeted. In 1986 it cost about $50 to get 1MB of storage; 23 years later just over fifty bucks gets you a 500GB drive–$2.5 million worth of capacity by 1986 standards.

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[NOTE FROM HARRY: Digital Media Central guest posts continue with a contribution from blogging superstar Heather Armstrong, better known as Dooce. This post--republished from Heather's site--shows off a few photos she took on a 2006 trip to Amsterdam.]

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[A note from Harry: Our Digital Media Central guest posts continue with a few thoughts about storaget from Dave Altavilla of PC enthusiast site HotHardware. It's not as simple as it used to be.]

These days, the ever-growing library of files, documents and multimedia content for the average home user, family or small office, is not just bulk media that needs to be backed up.  Beyond ensuring redundancy and resiliency for the data itself, file access, file management and file distribution need to have higher levels of sophistication.  Gone are the days where you just mount a NAS (Network Attached Storage) volume as a mapped drive on your client machines and workstations.  Oh no, dear ol’ Dad needs to play around with pics of the kid’s football team and needs to look at them “Flickr style” or he gets confused.  Little Johnny wants to stream his iTunes up to his bedroom.  And Mom, she just wants that QuickBooks data backed up nightly because if she loses it again, Dad is going to be in the dog house for a very long time.  Finally, and actually of primary importance, all of this precious family data needs to be secured and have varying levels of user access rights.

While there’s much fawning over the Xbox 360′s streaming Netflix service, it appears that Sony is doing quite well distributing movies on its own over the Playstation Network.

The story in Variety notes that Sony has made $180 million on “pieces of digital content” — more than 380 million downloads in all — since the company brought TV and movies the Playstation 3′s online service last summer. Praise for both Microsoft and Sony follows, saying that they “may have achieved something of a breakthrough as studios try to figure out the digital age.”

It seems obvious that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are prime candidates for digital distribution onto televisions. With total worldwide sales easily topping 20 million for both consoles, the install base is already there. Plus, a lot of it is that golden 18-35 demograhic, particularly with the PS3. They’re downloading “The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man” and “The Pineapple Express” in mass quantities, Variety says. Of Sony’s digital offerings, the company says 65 percent are purchased, and the rest are rented.

I never expected video on demand to do as well on consoles as this report suggests. My money was always on free streaming video sites like Hulu to swoop in and offer content gratis. With the exception of YouTube, that hasn’t happened, and Hulu is having it’s own distribution issues right now.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the studios need those other services. If people are willing to pay for on demand video over their consoles, why offer it for free?

I did something this week that I haven’t done in months: I went to a big store full of shiny discs, and bought me some.  Three DVDs and two CDs, to be precise. I used to go on shopping sprees like that a lot more often, but little by little–almost without me noticing it–my collecting of entertainment in physical form has dwindled, and my downloading and streaming from services like iTunes, Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu, and Amazon Video on Demand has has shot up.

Which is not to say that I’m trying to wean myself off good old-fashioned physical media entirely. For one thing, my tastes are exotic enough that much of what I buy still isn’t available in legal form online, as far as I know–such as two of the three DVDs I picked up. (I was also startled to find one of the CDs selling for three bucks less than Apple wanted for it as an iTunes download.)

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Astonishing breakthrough. Household object. Funny anachronism. Such is the journey that nearly every great gadget travels. (Sometimes it takes several generations; sometimes it takes just a few years.) And then it happens all over again with whatever hot new gizmo rendered the old one obsolete.

While rummaging through the endlessly fascinating Google Patents recently, I was moved to compare some significant devices of the past with their modern-day counterparts. In some cases, old and new are connected by seamless evolution (the cell phone, for instance). And in some cases, they’re separated by seismic technological shifts (like the one that replaced silver-halide film with tiny slivers of silicon).

After the jump, a dozen comparisons of past (in the form of patent drawings) and new.

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[An introductory note from Harry: Our visits from guest Digital Media Central bloggers continue. This week we're happy to host David Ponce, owner and managing editor of popular gadget blog OhGizmo. Welcome, David!]

It’s not that I want to sound like I’m repeating things that have been said endlessly over the last decade or so, but sometimes there’s no avoiding it. It’s pretty amazing to me just how radically the production, storage, and sharing of documents has changed since, say, grandma’s time. I mean, really, think about it. My own mom, only one generation back, still has these heavy stacks of cardboard albums with sticky pages, cellulose acetate covers, and fading Polaroids. My dad has trunkloads of Super 8 films in condition I can’t even imagine. I still own a pretty impressive collection of cassette tapes. Yet none of these materials is getting any sort of attention any longer simply because they haven’t crossed the digital divide.

We just live in a completely different world now, with different rules. I think it’s important to learn a new way of storing and protecting the new digital documents. While it might have been perfectly fine for my mom to keep her photo albums on a shelf above her racks of mothballed clothes, that won’t fly these days. It’s no longer necessary for grandma and grandpa to fly over from Miami to watch a grainy video of their grandchild splatter around in a pool. Or watch slides of their children’s Grand Canyon vacation projected on a white wall. They can stay at home and look at everything on their computer, easy as pie.

So, if we’re ditching the cardboard albums and dusty boxes, what are good ways of sharing and (maybe more importantly) protecting all the digital content we produce these days? First thing you need to realize is that hard drives fail. Really, they do. And often. So it’s really not safe for you to keep all your files on your PC drive, and expect them to be around forever. You need to back up. You can do this several ways: get an external hard drive and transfer everything there. Upload pictures to a picture sharing site, like Flickr. Transfer data to an online storage service, like Carbonite. Basically, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

While you’re doing this you’re clearly increasing the safety of your data. But you’re not making it particularly easy to share your files with family and friends. You’re even potentially fragmenting your collection, with files here and there. Another obstacle to sharing is large video files. You can put them on YouTube, but the quality will suffer. Of course there are sites that allow you to send large files, some of which rely on Peer-to-Peer technology (like YouSendIt), and they’re quite effective. But they do have their problems: you have to initiate the transmission, a notification email is sent to your intended recipients and they have to download the files. It works, but it’s not easy to use.

Then you have other more elegant solutions, like home servers and other forms of networked storge. They can become a central hub where all your media is stored, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. There are no limits on the amount you can transfer. They can also back up your files periodically, and since it’s just the one device, you solve the fragmentation issue. But they’re not perfect on they’re own.

If you ask me, I think the best solution is one that tries to get the best of all worlds.

- Use a PC as you normally would, offloading pics and videos and any other documents as usual.

- Use centralized storage to automatically back up your files and make them accessible worldwide.

- Send your files to one trusted offsite storage solution. A home server device is nice, but what happens in a fire?

And that’s it. All your data is redundant and accessible. With a little bit of effort and some discipline, your documents will stand the test of time and look a heck of a lot better than my mom’s 1972 Polaroids.