Apple TV, Apple keeps saying, is just a hobby. Google TV, to date, is a disappointment. But for tiny Roku, Internet TV is a success story. The company has moved more than 2.5 million of its little streaming boxes since 2008, founder/CEO Anthony Wood tells me, and sales were up by 300% in 2011. It now offers more than 400 channels, including biggies such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO GO, as well as many more offbeat options.

And now Roku is getting ready to release a version of its service that doesn’t require a box. If you think that means it’ll be built right into TVs–well, you’re on the right track, but that’s not quite it.

Building Internet services into a TV, Wood says, has some issues. For one thing, most TV makers don’t have as many major content deals as Roku does, and their user interfaces aren’t as simple. And even if they did have great content and great software, streaming technology is moving a lot more quickly than TV technology in general is: Unless you plan to upgrade your TV every couple of years, any embedded Internet technology it sports will start looking long in the tooth long long before the rest of the set feels obsolete.

So Wood’s company is creating a Roku that’s almost built into TVs. It’s a thumb-drive sized gizmo called the Roku Streaming Stick, and it incorporates the Roku software, service, and Wi-Fi connectivity, just like the boxes do.

The stick also has a connector that uses a new standard called Mobile High-Definition Link. MHL connectors, which are compatible with standard HDMI ones, are mostly meant to let you hook up a smart phone to a TV and watch video. But Roku is using the standard to put its streaming channels onto MHL-equipped TVs. (MHL provides power to the stick, so there’s no need to plug a brick into the wall.)

Roku wants to work with TV makers to offer the Streaming Stick as their Internet TV solution–either included with sets in the first place, as a “soft bundle” available at retail, or as an option. It’s signed up one big partner already: Best Buy, which will offer the Streaming Stick for its house-brand Insignia TVs. These sets will come with remotes that can control Roku as well as the TVs’ other functions.

Once you’ve popped the stick into a slot on the back of a TV, Wood told me, it’ll offer all the advantages of embedded Internet capability. But because it’s actually a self-contained add-on, you can replace it with improved models as they become available. (Over time, Roku plans to offer several versions, at prices from $50 to $100.)

The Streaming Stick won’t go on sale until the second half of 2012; Roku hopes to have other hardware partnerships lined up by then, and will also offer it in standalone form for use with any MHL-capable TV. It sounds like a clever way to bring the best single way to watch Internet TV on a TV to even more people.

A year go, Laura Locke wrote about Tango, a video-calling app for iOS or Android that had signed up a million users in just a few weeks. That was impressive–but now it has more than 23 million members. Starting today, it’s giving them and new recruits a Windows version of the app.

Continue reading this story…

Just about all the discussion I’ve seen of Google’s decision to dump Chrome’s native support for video in the H.264 format has been negative–and Google didn’t help things by announcing the move in a terse, bland blog post. Now the company has taken a second pass at explaining its rationale. I don’t think it’ll leave most of the unhappy campers any more gruntled, but it’s good to see Google delve into the topic at greater length.

Google’s response does underline that the browser business has a basic problem: Everyone agrees that browsers should have the built-in ability to play video, but there’s no agreement whatsoever on the standards to permit this. (Internet Explorer and Safari use H.264; Firefox, Opera, and now Chrome use Google’s WebM and the older Ogg Theora.) Most normal human beings couldn’t care less about this and simply want video to play on all the devices they use, ideally with high-quality results and without killing their battery. As far as I can tell, the industry is making no progress whatsoever towards unification, and Google’s move–whatever the reason–simply confuses matters even more.

A recently released version of the DivX player comes with DivX HIQ, a plug-in that works with any browser. It’s a replacement for the Flash player that’s used to play videos on YouTube and at other sites–and boy, does it boost performance.

You’ll see the DivX HIQ option right below YouTube’s Start and pause button.

Among other things, DivX HIQ:

• Reduces dropouts indicated by that rotating circle you often see when Flash is downloading the streaming video. The stream is definitely smoother.

• Reduces CPU use, making it ideal for notebook and netbook users, because you’ll save battery life.

• Has a better looking maximized viewing window, plus a nifty, smaller pop-out window you can move to anywhere on your screen.

• Optionally saves YouTube videos automatically to your hard drive.

One thing not to try is DivX’s offer to permanently substitute itself for YouTube’s default player — at least until DivX HiQ is out of beta. For now, I’ve noticed that YouTube’s player sometimes starts first and runs for a few seconds before DivX HiQ kicks in.

Click on DivX HIQ for a smoother ride.

Watch the DivX HiQ product manager take you through an introduction and demo some features. [Thanks, Roger.]

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A day after the New York Times wrote about the lasting appeal of cable TV, Hollywood Reporter notes that paid television subscriptions fell for the first time in at least two decades.

Cable, satellite and telco providers lost 216,000 subscribers last quarter, research firm SNL Kagan claims, the worst performance for these industries since the 1980s, when SNL Kagan began tracking this data. The firm expects web TV options such as Hulu to become the primary way of watching television for 3 million U.S. homes this year, out of 115 million TV households in the United States.

Continue reading this story…

Am I the only one who finds the current public squabble between YouTube and Viacom a tad unseemly? The opening briefs in Viacom’s copyright suit against YouTube were made public yesterday, and YouTube used the occasion as reason to post an item by its chief counsel accusing Viacom of secretly uploading its stuff “for years,” going out of its way to make it look pirated. Viacom has responded with a brief statement saying that YouTube’s founders thought their site needed to “steal” content to prosper; it doesn’t deny YouTube’s charges, but says they’re a red herring.

I’m not a judge, a lawyer, or an intellectual-property expert; neither are most of the folks who the YouTube and Viacom items are aimed at. That said, Mike Masnick of Techdirt has a good pro-YouTube analysis. And he links to the Hollwood Reporter’s coverage, which sides with Viacom.

Continue reading this story…

Last June, I wrote about RealPlayer SP, a cool new version of the venerable, not-universally-beloved media player that shifted its emphasis. Instead of primarily being about playback, it served as a hub for easy conversion of Web video for playback on a bevy of devices–MP3 players like the iPod, smartphones, gaming consoles, and more. At the time, RealPlayer SP was a Windows-only product, but Real said it would bring it to Mac users by the end of 2009.

It took a little longer than the company thought, but a beta version of RealPlayer SP for OS X is available for download now–Real gave me a sneak peek last week–and is largely similar to the Windows version. A utility runs in the background and watches as you view videos at YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and others that offer DRM-free content. As in RealPlayer 11, SP’s predecessor, you can download video files to your Mac for later playback in Real itself. But now you can also transfer them to forty-plus gadgets with a couple of clicks. RealPlayer chooses a format and settings, does the conversion, and even places the resulting video in the proper location for syncing when possible. For instance, it dumps video destined for an iPod or iPhone into iTunes, so it’s transferred the next time you sync.

Continue reading this story…

Way back in June of 2008, Sling Media began showing off a version of its SlingPlayer software–which works with the company’s SlingBox gadget to route TV across the Internet–for the iPhone. It took another eleven months until the app went on sale. And when it did, it turned out that AT&T had prohibited Sling from letting it work over the 3G network. You could watch your TV from your iPhone, but only over Wi-Fi. At the time, I wrote:

Maybe I’m a wild-eyed optimist, but I’m hoping that Sling will eventually be permitted to add 3G support, and that those of us who have paid thirty bucks for this first version will get free upgrades.

Then I sort of forgot about the whole thing, since I rarely used the Wi-Fi version of the app. (In fact I stopped using my SlingBox much, period–I still can’t figure out why the iPhone version was verboten but the Windows Mobile one was OK..) But I hadn’t hoped in vain. Today, AT&T and Sling issued a joint press release saying that the 3G version of the app now passes muster. It’ll be available (and a free upgrade to existing customers) once Apple approves it.

“Just as we’ve worked with Sling Media in this instance, we look forward to collaborating with other developers so that mobile customers can access a wider, more bandwidth-sensitive, and powerful range of applications in the future,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “Collaboration with developers like Sling Media ensures that all apps are optimized for our 3G network to conserve wireless spectrum and reduce the risk that an app will cause such extreme levels of congestion that they disrupt the experience of other wireless customers. Our focus continues to be on delivering the nation’s most advanced mobile broadband experience and giving our customers the widest possible array of mobile applications.”

Good news, even if the process moved at a glacial pace. Presumably there are some interesting possibilities for video applications that developers didn’t even bother to consider after Sling was forced to hobble the original version of SlingPlayer. Now writing them won’t seem like a pointless exercise.

Did irritation with Adobe Flash reach some sort of tipping point over the past few days? Probably not. But the heated debate about the near-pervasive plug-in for video, animation, and interactivity has made for fascinating reading.

When Steve Jobs sat on stage using an iPad that clearly didn’t support Flash, the discussion of Flash and iPhone OS instantly shifted from “Will Apple ever allow Flash on iPhone OS?” to “What does it mean for Flash that Apple will never allow it on iPhone OS?” to, in some cases, “What does it mean for the Web that Flash is on its way out?“

Over the weekend, dogpile on the rabbit syndrome set in. Adobe employees blogged in defense of Flash, but if the software got a stirring defense from anyone else, I didn’t come across it. Even the thoughts from Flash supporters tended to be bleak.

Continue reading this story…

Over the past few months, Internet movie company Vudu has been in the process of morphing from a company that makes a box into a company that (also) licenses its platform to much larger consumer-electronics companies for incorporation into other devices. Yesterday, owners of LG’s BD390 Blu-Ray players got a software update that put the ability to rent and buy movies from Vudu capability on their players. To celebrate, Vudu held a press event at a screening room at Dolby Labs in San Francisco, where it streamed video in its HDX extra-high-quality HD onto a theater screen. It played without hiccups, held up well, and generally helped confirm that Vudu is a neat option for folks who want movies delivered via the Internet without any compromise in visuals or sound.

Also on display at the Dolby event was Mitsubishi’s 52-inch LT-52249 LCD TV with built-in Vudu–a drool-worthy $3099 1080p display that showed off Vudu’s razor-sharp video to impressive advantage. (The Bolt trailer has never looked so good.)

Vudu’s biggest limitation is that unlike humongous archrival iTunes, it’s only available in the living room–not on computers and portable devices. A Vudu representative at the event said that the company said that figuring out how to bring Vudu to more devices is on its to-do list.

The company also announced that Vudu has now integrated Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews into its service’s slick user interface, providing access to a much richer database of critiques as you browse for stuff to watch.

Livestreaming service Qik finally has an app available on the iPhone App Store. (A version for jailbroken iPhones already existed.) It’s good news, but not without a major gotcha: The App Store version of Qik doesn’t permit you to stream live video from your phone to Qik’s site. It does, however, allow you to record video with an iPhone 3GS which is  then instantly and automatically uploaded to Qik (along with your GPS location), as well as share it via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Which is useful in and of itself, and similar to the tactic taken by competitor Ustream to get into the App Store.

The biggest limitation of this Apple-approved version of Qik is that you can only upload via Wi-Fi, not 3G. Qik says it’s submitted a 3G0-enabled version of the app to Apple, though. That one should be a decent stopgap until the day comes–I’m an optimist and assume it will-that Apple lets developers write apps that stream video on the fly over 3G.

Rumor has it that Netflix may be bringing its Watch Instantly video-on-demand service to the iPhone. Unless there are insurmountable issues with content licensing, actually, it would be startling if it Netflix didn’t want to be on the iPhone. (In some respects, the iPhone land grab reminds me of the mad rush to release Windows versions of existing applications in the early 1990s.)

The big honkin’ question with a Netflix application for iPhone is the same as with any other app that involves video on the iPhone: Would it permit streaming over AT&T’s 3G network, or only over Wi-Fi? So far, there’s no discernible consistency to what’s happened with other such applications. TV.com does 3G but Joost doesn’t; SlingPlayer’s 3G version was apparently rejected on the grounds that it violated AT&T’s terms of service; Major League Baseball’s At Bat app not only streams games over 3G but takes advantage of new features in iPhone OS 3.0 designed to make that possible.

A 3G-enabled Netflix could be terrific; a Wi-Fi-only one would be a letdown. Here’s hoping.

I guess there is one other significant question about Netflix on the iPhone: Is there any chance that Apple would keep it off the iPhone altogether by using the “this duplicates features built into the phone” rationale it’s used to remove some apps, such as third-party Google Voice clients? iPhone owners who have access to movies and TV shows from another major provider such as Netflix, after all, are less likely to buy content from Apple’s iTunes Store.

So far, Apple has permitted other video merchants onto the iPhone, but neither TV.com nor Joost provides really compelling competition to iTunes. Netflix would be a bigger deal, as would the rumored iPhone edition of Hulu. But the really big question is whether there’s any chance in heck that iPhone users will ever get access to Amazon’s Video on Demand, the most direct competitor that the iTunes Store’s movie offerings have.

I’d love to think that the fact that the FCC is now nosing around into Apple’s app-approval process will lead to a chastened, paranoid Apple erring on the side of approving competitive apps–whether or not the feds eventually force it to do so. A really good iPhone Netflix client would be an encouraging sign; one that felt crippled would not be.

At this point, it’s just a rumor that’s giving Netflix’s stock a nice goose: Speculation has it that Amazon.com might move to buy Netflix, a merger that makes immense sense to me. Between its Amazon MP3 service and Video on Demand and the Kindle and Audible, Amazon.com is working overtime to reinvent itself for the era–coming sooner than we think–that virtually all content is digital. Netflix, meanwhile, has an enjoyable and well-done Watch Instantly service, but its selection is sparse and less-than-current; if Watch Instantly is as good as it’s going to get, it’s hard to imagine Netflix stating Netflix once it no longer makes sense to mail shiny discs.

An Amazon that owned Netflix would get the opportunity to market digital downloads to all those happy Netflix customers; a Netflix that was part of Amazon would have access to Amazon’s ambitious video-on-demand platform and content deals. It would probably leave both companies and their customers better off—and hey, it give Apple an iTunes Store competitor that was that much larger and stronger.

I’m just a customer of Amazon and Netflix, not a shareholder. But if mergers were voted on by shoppers, I’d give this one my stamp of approval. Even if it’s not really under discussion at the moment, it feels sort of inevitable…

Those that believe what happens in Washington and government in general is more important that the funeral of a major celebrity can take heart today as the much ballyhooed memorial service for Michael Jackson didn’t break the streaming records set by Barack Obama’s inauguration as our 44^th president.

While the numbers were big, Jackson’s 2.185 million streams served over Akamai fell well short of the 7 million delivered when President Obama was sworn in to office, says MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. CNN claims it served 781,000 concurrent streams for Jackson, which lags behind the 1.3 million served on January 20. Ustream did have its biggest day ever, serving 4.6 million streams through its partnership with CBS.

That’s not to say the King of Pop’s service didn’t flood the Interwebs. Akamai said it surpassed 2 terabits per second during the memorial service, according to GigaOM. Also, there were over 3.9 million visitors per second at the height of the service at 1pm EST, second to the 4.24 million/second visitors that hit news sites on June 25, the day Jackson’s death shocked the world.

Overall, the Internet seems to have held up better to the memorial than it did to news of Jackson’s death. Anecdotally, there didn’t seem to be many complaints on network slowness or sites going down on Twitter and other sources during the service, unlike when Jackson died. Obviously with that much traffic, there were some slow downs though. Gomez said its Internet “availability index” fell to 98.2 percent at one point yesterday, down from the usual level of 99.65 percent. It also said Twitter suffered from a heavy traffic load, though I didn’t notice any odd issues with the service during the funeral broadcast yesterday.

While Obama’s numbers were bigger, Michael Jackson’s memorial is still a major milestone for the Web and its ability to stream live events efficiently to a global audience.

But now, we can get back to more important things, as President Obama himself predicted: “Michael Jackson, like Elvis, like Sinatra, when somebody whose captivated the imagination of the country for that long passes away, people pay attention. And I assume at some point people will start focusing again on things like nuclear weapons.”

Some observant folks noticed last month that YouTube was dabbling with letting users download videos from the site to their hard drives. The YouTube blog just made it official: The company is permitting content providers to allow their videos to be downloaded, either for a fee (via Google Checkout) or for free.

It still sounds fairly experimental: YouTube is only working with a few content sources, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Khan Academy, HouseholdHacker, and PogoBat. And even with them, the download option isn’t universally available–actually, I’m not seeing it on any of the first half-dozen videos I’ve checked.

This isn’t earthshaking news–for one thing, tools like KeepVid have allowed YouTube fans to snag videos and save them for a long time. The YouTube videos are in unprotected MPEG4 format: I assume this means that YouTube isn’t going to enable downloading on the massive amount of stuff it offers that consists of short, unauthorized clips of copyrighted material. And while YouTube is also experimenting with streaming official versions of Hollywood content, it seems unlikely that the entertainment industry is ready to allow DRM-free downloads of current shows. At least right now.