media

Nielsen to track mobile media use

Nielsen, an entity best known for its television ratings system, announced Wednesday that it will begin to track what you do with your cell phone.

In particular, the company will begin measuring how consumers use mobile Internet and mobile video beginning in July.

The service will be called Nielsen Wireless.

Included in the metrics will be comparisons of how subscribers of different wireless carriers watch TV or play video games, compared to the same use on their cell phone.

One tidbit the company has already released is that 55 percent of users of video-enabled mobile phones are from households with … Read more

Justin Timberlake signs YouTube star to new record label

Looks like YouTube is bringing sexy back. Former boy band sensation and current pop star du jour Justin Timberlake has signed Esmee Denters, an 18-year-old Dutch singer who got her start by building up buzz on the ubiquitous video-sharing site, to his new record label.

Timberlake, 26, founded Tennman Records in a joint venture with Interscope Records last month; Denters is the first artist signed.

But despite her karaoke-like start, Denters is no "Numa Numa" kid--she can actually sing. She's been performing in several European countries already after gaining a fan base through videos where she sang … Read more

The camera behind Google's Street View

If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that $25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.

Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.

What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company … Read more

The tech behind Google's Street View

I spent a good part of yesterday tooling around with the new Google Maps Street View feature. It's one of those Web services that just works. Here at CNET, we're also centrally located in one of the few cities (San Francisco) to have nearly all of its main thoroughfares Street View-enabled. The data for four of the five Street View-enabled cities comes from a company called Immersive Media. In addition to these interactive 3D pictures, they use the same technology for videos. Both use an 11-lens camera called Dodeca 2360 that captures an immensely large surface area of … Read more

Photobucket CEO sounds off on Fox acquisition

Earlier today it was made official, after much speculation, that Photobucket had been acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. CNET News.com spoke with Photobucket CEO and co-founder Alex Welch on Wednesday morning to hash out some of the rumors and talk about what's in store for the popular image-sharing site.

According to Welch, the company put itself up for sale in order to accelerate growth beyond its current membership base of approximately 42 million. "When we look at Fox, it was really a natural choice for Photobucket because we really want to grow … Read more

Sling called out by Major League Baseball

Is watching an out-of-market baseball game illegal? Potentially yes, according to Major League Baseball.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. a lawyer for the league's Advanced Media division said Slingbox's capability to placeshift MLB content--that is, allow owners to watch their subscription channels from a remote location--is illegal, and MLB is mulling a lawsuit.

"Of course, what they are doing is not legal," MLB general counsel Michael Mellis told the publication. "We and other leagues have formed a group to study the issue and plan our response. A lot depends on ongoing discussions. … Read more

Fox unit confirms Photobucket, Flektor buys

It's official: MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media has formally announced its agreements to acquire image-sharing site Photobucket and slide show mashup creator Flektor. Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of media giant News Corp.

Both acquisitions had been rumored for some time. The Photobucket deal, originally reported earlier this month, is inarguably the more significant of the two: Photobucket, after all, is the 34th most visited site on the Web, with over 42 million users and 17 million monthly visitors. Its history with Fox Interactive Media hasn'… Read more

Toshiba's latest Gigabeat V series PVP

Toshiba announced that they will be releasing an updated version of the Gigabeat V portable video player on June 1st in Japan. The new Gigabeat V series will be available in 40GB and 80GB capacities priced around $409 and $491 respectively. Beyond increased capacity, the new series improves on the features of last year's Gigabeat V30 by offering a 4-inch, 24-bit color display with a resolution of 480 x 272. Like its brother the Gigabeat S, the V series also uses the Microsoft PMC interface and supports Windows Media DRM 10 and WMA 9 lossless. The new Gigabeat V … Read more

PS3 DVD upscaling: A big improvement

Before yesterday's firmware update, the PlayStation 3 couldn't upscale standard-definition DVDs to high-def resolutions--a once high-end feature that's now built-in to nearly all DVD players with HDMI outputs. But what's the real benefit of upscaling (or upconverting, as it's also known)? Despite some of the marketing hype claiming that upscaling will make your DVDs appear in true high-def quality, the increase in picture quality will never come close to matching that of native HD material (HDTV broadcasts, HD DVD, and Blu-ray). Moreover, the video quality improvement is completely dependent on how good the upscaling and … Read more

PS3 1.80 firmware upgrade adds media streaming, DVD upscaling

Slowly but surely, Sony's beginning to unlock more and more of that multimedia horsepower under the hood of the PlayStation 3. The 1.80 firmware upgrade--available as an automatic download to PS3s everywhere--adds a variety of features to the console, most of which bolster the system's AV prowess. The main upgrades are as follows:

upscaling of games and DVDs: DVD movies, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games can now be upscaled to HD resolutions up to 1080p (games can upscale via component or HDMI, while DVDs are only upconverted via HDMI). streaming of digital media to PS3 via … Read more