Hulu Plus coming to Roku, TiVo
Published 4:38 pm Friday, October 1, 2010
Hulu Plus, the $10-per-month online TV subscription service, will soon be available for users of Roku Inc. set-top boxes and TiVo Inc. subscribers who purchase its newest Premiere digital video recorders.
Hulu Plus, which launched as an invitation-only service in June, lets people watch current and back episodes from more than 45 shows from ABC, NBC and Fox, including “Modern Family,” “Glee,” and “30 Rock.” Hulu Plus episodes, like the more limited selection available from the free Hulu website, are interrupted by short commercials.
The for-pay Hulu service will be available later this fall on all three of Roku’s Internet video players. The devices, which start at $60, connect to a home network using Wi-Fi or an ethernet cable. Roku says it expects to have sold 1 million set-top boxes by the end of the year.
Hulu Plus will also be available to TiVo Premiere DVR subscribers in the coming months. TiVo customers pay an extra $12.95-a-month fee for updated TV listings and services or $399 for a lifetime subscription. Hulu Plus will only be available to buyers of the Premiere DVR for $299 or Premiere XL for $499.
Google fiddling with e-mail
Google Inc. is addressing one of the biggest complaints about its free e-mail service by giving people more control over how their inboxes are organized.
The new option announced Wednesday will allow Gmail users to choose whether they prefer their incoming messages stacked in chronological order, instead of having them threaded together as part of the same electronic conversation.
Gmail has been automatically grouping messages by topic or senders since Google rolled out the service six years ago.
But this so-called “conversation view” confused or frustrated many Gmail users who had grown accustomed to seeing all their newest messages at the top of the inbox followed by the older correspondence.
Movie info website turns 20
IMDb.com, the website you go to in order to find out who acted in what film, no matter how obscure, turns 20 next month. In addition to its extensive and unmatched database, the site was overhauled this week to emphasize video clips and help fans find what they’d like to see next.
The goal of the relaunch is to “help people make viewing decisions” and “emphasize the visual nature of film and TV,” said Col Needham, the site’s 43-year-old British founder and chief executive. Trailers and ticket information are now much more prominent.
The service started out quite differently. On Oct. 17, 1990, the Internet Movie Database was born as Needham posted what was literally a database program that people had to install on their computers. Users could sift through the published credits for all the movies he and a bunch of friends had seen. It was decidedly low-tech, and definitely not commercial.
“We ran as a group of people who just were passionate about film and TV and were sharing that love and knowledge of film and TV with people throughout the world,” he said. “Actually we predate the Web itself.”
Needham sold the site to Amazon.com Inc. in April 1998, right around the time Amazon.com began selling movies.
Microsoft giving up its blog network
Microsoft Corp. is giving up on its own blog network and, in a new partnership, will start sending new Windows Live users to a competing platform instead.
Microsoft said Monday that people who sign up for a Windows Live account necessary to use the free Hotmail e-mail system, the Xbox Live site and other services can get a free blog from WordPress.com.
They’ll no longer be given a “space” on Microsoft’s own blogging system, Windows Live Spaces.
Current Windows Live Spaces bloggers can use the existing system until the end of the year. If they want to update their blog after that, they have until March 2011 to switch to WordPress. They can also download the content from their existing blog to their PCs.
Microsoft said it will make sure existing text, photos, videos, comments and links transfer over to the new blog.
Redmond-based Microsoft added MSN Spaces, later renamed Windows Live Spaces, to its array of free online services in 2004. For several years, the software maker seemed committed to the idea of building its own version of competitors’ products, from online photo management and event invitation to blogging and social-networking software.
The Associated Press
