Blackarrow Consulting

If you want to own Glee episodes at a cut-rate price, better get your Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) downloads fast. The e-tailer is countering Apple’s 99-cent rentals from ABC (NYSE: DIS) and Fox by selling some TV episodes at a loss. Amazon still has to pay the contracted rates for electronic sell-throughs (EST), according to sources familiar with the situation, and the networks still have deals with Amazon, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and other distributors that make a switch to 99-cent EST as the rule highly unlikely anytime soon. One source described the price-slashing as a “big loss” although the actual number depends on how many take advantage—and how long Amazon sticks with the lower rate.

Although it's only just been revealed and won't actually go on sale for four long weeks, Apple's new hockey puck is far from the only media streamer on the market — and with Sony's Netbox and the Boxee Box on the way, the sub-$200 set-top box market is exploding with options.

Good design is simple, reducing complex tasks to straightforward sequences of elegant interactions, making sure that there is no unnecessary step in the way.

During today’s press event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that 450 million TV episodes, along with 11.7 billion songs, 100 million movies and 35 million books, have been downloaded from the iTunes store, making it the number one digital media store in the world. How will its newly announced 99-cent rental program change the marketplace? It depends what’s on offer.

To maximise the impact of social TV, broadcasters need to ensure their programmes start ‘listening’ to the social groups that have been built around their content and the discussions contained within them, rather than simply broadcast shows and leave the discussions to follow their own, independent path. That is the view of Tom McDonnell, Director of Monterosa, a company that specialises in creating multi-screen experiences that enhance traditional TV viewing by adding a live, social, interactive dimension.

Apple, after sales of its first Internet-connected set-top never took off, on Wednesday launched a revamped $99 version of the device geared around streaming rentals, with 99-cent TV shows — available from ABC, ABC Family, Fox, Disney Channel and BBC America — and access to Netflix's streaming-video service.

In a letter to Telenet and Belgacom TV, the three main Flemish broadcasters VMMa, VRT and SBS Belgium told the two main operators PVRs “are destroying” their business model and ask for immediate action.

Steve Jobs just pulled out the world famous "one more thing" for nothing other than… a new Apple TV.

We know, it feels like it was just a few months ago that the new Envy 14 and 17 hit the market, but HP isn't quite finished tinkering with its aluminum laptops.

When Samsung's 7-inch tablet finally sees the states, it might indeed be more than a giant Galaxy S — for one thing, it may have Froyo, but for another, it could have faster, more building-penetrating WiFi than most comparable devices on the market.

Everyone seems to be stepping into the Internet TV market at the moment and Amazon is the latest company linked with a TV and movie streaming service.

Audio and video metering company DK-Technologies has supplied a PT0710M waveform monitor to German company Steiwer TV, which is installing the unit in a new High Definition SNG vehicle.

You may not be familiar with the Internationalen Funkausstellung Berlin — better known as IFA — but it's a positively massive consumer electronics trade show with a European slant, and this year marks its 50th in the game.

Amino Communications, which began life as a developer of pure IPTV devices, is to showcase its new Intel-powered Amino Freedom DVB-T hybrid/OTT media centre.

Broadcasters, platform operators, consumer manufacturers and other parties are showing connected hybrid devices at this year’s IFA in Berlin signaling new roads for television.