“Blu-ray vendors and dealers are starting to realize that for Blu-ray to become the next DVD, they need to lower player prices in order to generate interest and build volumes,” said Steve Wilson, principal analyst at ABI, in a statement this week.

Wilson pointed out that tier-2 players and earlier models six to nine months old are already widely available for below $200, and that Amazon is selling a Samsung Blu-ray drive bundled with four disks in the same price range.
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As previously reported in BetaNews, unit sales for Blu-ray drives look likely to be lower than expected for 2008, too. Kurt Scherf, principal analyst at Parks Associates, told BetaNews in late October that total sales for the year will decline at least 25% from the firm’s original projections to about 2.2 million players in the US and 4.3 million worldwide.

Wilson is referring to an Amazon sale (scheduled to end on Nov. 11) offering $100 off on the purchase of a Blu-ray player and four Warner movies. The Samsung player referred to is likely the well-regarded Samsung BD-P1500 1080p Blu-ray Player which with four selections from the already discounted full list of Warner Blu-ray movies will easily come in under $200.

The finished Video On Demand service is now compatible with a wealth of device types: Windows PC’s, Macs, suitable TiVo models, Windows Media Center extender boxes (like the Xbox 360), the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link TVs used in the beta, and many portable media players. Amazon is offering a vast catalog of 40,000 movies and TV shows. Some are free, but for most of them the prices are:

• Movie rentals: $2.99 to $3.99
• TV rentals: $1.99

All rentals expire 24 hrs after purchase and all offer a 2 minute preview.

If you aren’t interested in rental and streaming, you can still purchase and download movies as before using the Unbox application and they will always be available in your personal video library. Rentals will be there too (at least for 24 hours) in case you get interrupted while watching or want to watch on a different system than where you order.

Initial reviews indicate the Amazon Video on Demand service is quite usable albeit with some video glitches reported, so you might care to try some of the free videos before plunking down some cash. A bigger question if you are a TV fan is whether or not you might prefer the Hulu service which is free, but has commercials. (Hulu does offer some movies as well.)

Finally, my perpetual rant is that Internet video won’t take off until it is dead simple for the average consumer to use and use in the room where they have their TV set. Amazon Video on Demand goes quite a way towards solving the simplicity problem. As for getting that video into the room where the TV resides, Amazon does its best with the available technical options and is way ahead of most alternatives with the enhanced TiVo lashup which now supports streaming rentals.

Hold on a sec - what about NBC which has partnered with Microsoft’s MSN to show the Games online in the USA? Not to worry - the IOC sells exclusive national online rights just like they sell national broadcast rights and YouTube will be geotargeting the Olympics channel so that only Internet users in "77 territories - South Korea, India and Nigeria among them - that aren’t officially covered by Olympic sponsors" can view it.

This likely isn’t a bonanza for YouTube since they will only be allowed to sell ads to Olympic sponsors and and if there was much online video viewing interest in the Olympics in these countries, someone would already have picked up the franchise. While all of this makes sense from a monetary view, doesn’t the national restriction of Internet rights seem a trifle wacky?

The national franchises do get around the language problem and provide enhanced coverage of contests of particular national interest, but I guess the bottom line is that there is no single online site that could (or wants to do) the whole worldwide job. On the other hand, bootleg Olympics videos have already started appearing on regular old garden variety YouTube.

Amazon.com will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.
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The video store will be accessible through the Sony Bravia Internet Video link, a $300 tower-shaped device that funnels Web video directly to Sony’s high-definition televisions. That is an awkward extra expense, for now. But future Bravias are expected to have this capability embedded in the television, making it even easier to gain access to the full catalog of past and present TV shows and movies, over the Internet, using a television remote control.

Mr. Carr said Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices. “We can support both streaming and downloading,” he said. “Our goal is to continue to establish partnerships with all companies who have a connected device.”

Amazon Video on Demand will be accessible to a limited number of invited Amazon.com customers on Thursday before it opens more broadly to other users later this summer.

One interesting touch is that once an item is "purchased" it is stored in "Your Video Library" and can be watched repeatedly, even from different locations and devices.

Frequent readers will know my mantra that Internet video won’t take off until it is dead simple for the average consumer to use. Amazon Video on Demand certainly fits the bill, but the not-unexpected expense of the intermediate box and its relative rarity is certainly going to slow acceptance. Moreover, details on the technical requirements for the customer’s Internet connection have not been revealed. It will be interesting to see how fat a pipe you have to have to your home to play.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

The claim is that they’s also be available in multiple colors and the first one as soon as October. That’s the original Kindle e-book reader in the photo above.

However, there’s a difference between "can" and "will" or "will with no hassle" so Christopher Null at PC World tried to purchase a PC with XP from Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Asus and reports on the very mixed results. Hit the article for the full details on each, but the best bets for an machine with XP preinstalled are:

Consumer PC: Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo

Business PC: HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo

If you are willing to pay extra or install XP from a CD, the choices are even more numerous. Also Asus has its line of Eee ultra low-cost PCs (ULPC) which come with XP under a different exemption in the rules.

Starting early September and rolling through first-quarter 2009, Warner will offer a Blu-ray point-of-sale rebate program with which retailers will essentially be able to order participating catalog titles for around $11.

Even with a retail mark-up on the featured titles—including The Fugitive, Enter the Dragon, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, The Aviator, Road Warrior and Swordfish—the price tag to consumers should be significantly less than the titles’ current average of $20 to $25 retail price at outlets such as Amazon.com and Best Buy.
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Additionally, Warner will offer rebates, although less extensive, for newer Blu-ray releases, including 300, The Departed, I Am Legend, Ocean’s 13 and We Are Marshall. This layer of the Blu-ray program also will run from early September to the first quarter, according to store sources.

The consumer price for these titles is likely to fall somewhere between $17 and $20. That would still represent a deal for shoppers, as titles such as 300 are now falling between $24 and $30 at outlets such as Amazon and Best Buy.

After Blu-ray won the high def DVD war, it has been plagued by the perception that both the players and the titles are priced exorbitantly. This ought to help a little although click through to see the complaints from retailers who think it might be a bad idea because "format is becoming devalued too quickly."

According to a source at Amazon, "on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles." Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.

Since we’re dealing with percentages rather than unit sales, it’s impossible to say whether we’re talking about a ton of books, or a modest number. But it’s fairly certain that, given the enormous number of new books that Amazon sells, and the fact that many if not most are also simultaneously released as Kindle e-books, we’re talking about a good sign for Amazon.

Explanations for the upsurge abound, including short supply when the Kindle was first announced and growing familiarity with the unit by consumers.

I guess I will have to give it a look although my initial reservation was that there was not as much of a discount for electronic books as I thought there should be. However, checking the prices of Kindle books, I see that (irrespective of special sales) they are running at about equal to or slightly higher than a new paperback and thereby much lower than hard covers. I still think there is room for improvement, but it’s clearly in the ballpark.

RealNetworks on Sunday announced several improvements to its Rhapsody music service, including a new online music store and integration with Verizon’s V Cast mobile phone music service.

Taking a cue from competitors such as Amazon and Napster, Rhapsody’s new Web-based music store sells a catalog of universally compatible (DRM-free) MP3 files from all four major music labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI), as well as a selection of independents.

The new Rhapsody store represents a departure from the strictly software-based music subscription model on which the company was founded.

Rhapsody’s Web-based MP3 music store offers the majority of its catalog at $.99 cents per song and $9.99 per album. While Rhapsody’s MP3 pricing is competitive with the industry-leading iTunes music store, it’s slightly more expensive than Amazon and considerably more expensive than eMusic.

As a competitive advantage, the new Rhapsody’s store allows users to preview entire songs prior to purchase–a stark contrast to the 30-second song previews shoppers have come to expect.

The more the merrier, I’d say. There’s more by following the link, but also note that there is a kickoff promotion:

Open an account and your first album is on us

Shopping for music online just got easier. The new Rhapsody MP3 Store lets you listen to entire songs before you buy them, provides recommendations, and delivers high-quality MP3s that can be played on your iPod or any other MP3 player.

If you’re one of the first 100,000 to create an account by Independence Day, we’ll automatically apply a $10 credit to your first album purchase. The credit must be used by midnight Pacific time, July 4, 2008 – so sign up and start shopping today. Limit one per household.

In the old days, we used to watch a simple device called a television. Nowadays, all the stuff worth watching and listening to tends to be stored on or accessed through a computer. To help remedy this, we are pleased to release the Google Media Server.

Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses Google Desktop technology such as Desktop gadgets for the administration tool and Google Desktop Search to locate media files. All you need is a PC running Google Desktop and a UPnP-enabled device (e.g. a PlayStation 3).

And then you can play all your PC media files (videos, music, and photos) on your TV as well as the unique features of displaying Picasa Web Albums and playing YouTube videos through your TV.

If you are having a hard time breaking the code, UPnP is the acronym for Universal Plug and Play and Google Media Server running on your PC is technically a UPnP AV MediaServer which can send audio-visual data to "UPnP media render hardware" (the UPnP-enabled device above) which also includes the Xbox 360, HP MediaSmart LCD televisions and various networked media players.

If you have one of the right gadgets you probably already know it, but this all seems rather needlessly complex:

Imagine a world where your computer, cellphone, games console, storage devices, media streamers and other hardware all play nicely together, so that, for example, music, photos and video can reach the television or Hi-Fi no matter where in the home it originates.

That world is one which the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), an industry consortium backed by big name consumer electronics, computer and mobile device manufacturers such as HP, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung, is aiming to create through support for the UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play) AV standard. For end consumers this means that any ‘DLNA certified’ device should, in theory, be able to share or access media on the same home network — a message that DLNA members have largely failed to communicate, which is especially sad considering that many people already own a number of compliant devices …

Someday, I suppose it will all work, but unless you have a Xbox 360 or a PS3 you’ll have to do your homework to get it all working.

A terse note on the Fanfare Web site indicates that the “Fanfare beta has come to a conclusion, and the Fanfare application will be disabled as of 5/15/08.” As for the TakeTV hardware, a representative for SanDisk has confirmed to CNET that the TakeTV is no longer being sold. However, she went on to point out that existing users still will be able to use the product’s drag-and-drop feature for watching a variety of (non-Fanfare) digital videos on their TV. In other words, unlike those stuck with oversized paperweights when the Akimbo and MovieBeam services shut down, the TakeTV, at least, is still a usable product.

The problem was simple - customers were just not buying into the concept and in fact the Fanfare shutdown on May 15th was not noticed until June 6:

… had two things going against it:

1.) It was kludgey. You had to plug a USB device into your PC, download content, then put that USB device into another device that hooked up to your TV. Yeah, that’s easy.

2.) Lack of content. If you want people to buy a device that downloads TV content, you’d better offer lots of TV content. TakeTV’s Fanfare portal had deals with CBS, Jaman, Showtime, the Smithsonian, The Weather Channel and TV Guide Broadband. No ABC, no FOX — not even The CW. TakeTV had announced a deal with NBC, but it looks as though that never got implemented.

Not to mention the fact that SanDisk was facing heavy competition from better-known companies like Apple, TiVo and Xbox — all of which provided more content and an easier solution for downloading shows to your TV.

Sigh - all of the current alternatives for bridging the PC to TV gap are proprietary and/or kludgey and/or have limited content choices. Anyhow, strike Sansa’s TakeTV off the list.

Walmart.com is beta testing a classifieds service, powered by Oodle that allows the site’s shoppers to post free classifieds on all kinds of stuff: cars, RVs, apartments, etc. A spokesperson told Reuters that the idea is to offer its shoppers more items through its website that aren’t available in stores.

Plus displaying walmart.com and other ads, of course. Still, I don’t really mind some competition for Craigslist although I wonder if Oodle is up to dealing with the spammers that Craigslist has been fighting with.

Looking at the specs from when Evoltas were announced in January, one claim is that they store more power than prior batteries which was apparently the point of the robot rope climbing.

The new battery cell has a discharge performance almost 1.3-2 times higher than that of the company’s existing alkaline battery cell. When compared, based on the discharge modes set by JIS and ANSI, it is the longest-lasting AA battery cell in the world, the company said.

In a comparative test conducted by the company using two AA cells, EVOLTA could flash a strobe light 277 times, while the existing alkaline and oxyride battery cells could set off 203 and 255 flashes, respectively.

Oxyride batteries are a variant of alkaline also from Panasonic designed for high-drain digital devices. However, even compared to ordinary alkalines, the numbers are closer to 1.3 than 2 in discharge performance although as always your mileage may vary. As for cost:

There is no manufacturer’s suggested retail price, but the expected market price for both a pack of four AA cells and a pack of four AAA cells will be about ¥590 (US$5.57). A pack of two D cells and a pack of two C cells are expected to be about ¥570 and ¥420, respectively. The prices will be approximately 15% higher compared with the existing alkaline battery cells, the company said.

So nominally you would be getting somewhat more power for your buck from Evoltas. Still, I find that these days a much more economical alternative to alkaline batteries for most of my gadgets is Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargeables. You have to recharge them yourself, of course, and you have to rotate your spares since the shelf life isn’t great (although they are working on that problem), but you more than make up for their initially higher cost with the repeated reuse.

However, the real advantage to Evoltas may well be in shelf life:

The recommended use period for all models of EVOLTA was prolonged from 5 to 10 years because the battery life was extended.

I recently had a number of Ray-O-Vac alkalines that I bought cheaply at a local store start to leak after about 3 years on my shelf. If Evoltas really do last approximately 10 years, then they would be perfect for stashing away for emergencies or whatever, and that sounds like the best argument for paying extra. For frequently replaced batteries, I would still recommend rechargeable NiMH.

Samsung late on Sunday promised what it says is a breakthrough in solid-state drives with the launch of its first 256GB SSD. The drive offers twice the capacity of the Korean firm’s previous 128GB SSD but is also much faster. The 256GB edition reads sequential data at 200MB per second, twice the rate of the original model, while also seeing an even greater increase in write speeds: where the earlier drive writes at 70MB per second, the new SSD writes at 160MB per second.

The big question of course is the cost and while Samsung isn’t quoting prices yet, there is some good news:

Rather than use costly single-level cell (SLC) technology, the company has managed to develop a multi-level cell (MLC) storage drive that transfers as quickly as the best SLC storage while costing much less to produce than past SSDs. Improvements to the storage controller have also extended the longevity to as long as SLC drives, giving the 256GB drive longevity as good or better than some rotating hard disks.

SLC and MLC refer to how much information can be stored in one flash memory cell. A multi-level cell stores more than the single bit in a single-level cell providing a greater areal density and lower cost per bit.

Samsung expects its new drive to be sampling for computer manufacturers by September and shipping to those clients by the end of the year; this applies to both a 2.5-inch drive for more traditional notebooks and a 1.8-inch drive for ultraportables and other much smaller devices.

No customers have been announced, but it will be interesting to see who jumps on board and how inexpensive these beauties really are.