NBC and Fox announced that they will work with a number of major websites including Yahoo!, MySpace and MSN to distribute legally free TV shows and movies.  This appears to be a direct response to Google/Youtube where a lot of illegitimate copies of the shows are available.

And we are talking about hits like ‘24′, ‘House’, Heroes’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’.  Being FREE to users.

The model is to join hands and start a new video site that will run content from the two organizers and be supported by advertising. They’ll also supply content and a video player to their partner sites.  So it’s like back to the ‘old’ days where internet services and content will be free to the users but supported by advertisers.

I will be very keen to see how successful it will be.  I think initially the potential lost in sales of DVDs may not be compensated by the ad dollars.  Yet with P2P sharing DVD sales may be hurting anyway so this is quite a bold move by the media companies to try out this new ad-supported model.  I think it makes sense to go to this direction as advertisers will see that more people will start watching video on their computers (or TV via their computers, think Apple TV).  Hence it also makes sense for advertisers to follow their audience and advertise on this new channel.

While it may take some time to see if the media companies will benefit, looks like the clear winners will be users who can enjoy free quality content and those companies who provide the streaming and ad insertion technologies.

Quite a new and different concept with the sports stars trying to communicate a message thru art. Check it out:

golf shot

this is quite amazing. Not sure how many shots he took. Wonder if Tiger can also do the same?

I’ve been trying pageflakes recently and find it very convenient to use.  Essentially it is similar to MyYahoo! where you can pull in different content and also your email.  However, Pageflakes main advantage is that they can aggregate not only content or mail from Yahoo!, but from most of the leading websites.

I’ve got my Gmail linked up and you can see your most recent mail on that page.  What’s more, you can even read the details (not just title and sender) and even reply on the homepage of Pageflakes.

Thanks to RSS fees, there are a lot of content available and most impressive is that you can even have youtube feed sent over to your pageflakes page.  My favorite Flickr photo can also be fed to the page.

Creating your own pages only takes a few minutes.  You could get content from Reuters, Businessweek, CNN, ESPN.  You can also add PIM applications like calander, to-do-list, clock.  Leading social networking sites such as youtube, MySpace and Flickr also being available.  I don’t see any ads on the page so not sure what is their business model.

this is so cool.  it can geotagged the photos (acutally the text tags) of flickr photos and put them on a map.  so it’s like you can visit all these places without leaving your computer. I am trying to paste the codes here but somehow it does not work properly. Interested parties can visit here

Just like Napster which turns into a legit music download service, BT announced that they will also start offer movie rental and TV downloads for a fee.  Movie can be viewed within a 24-hour period while TV programs can be purchased and owned.

There are more than 5,000 titles including movies, TV shows, music and games content from partners like MGM, 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group.

This is definitely good news for 24 fans like me.  No longer do I need to wait for local TV station to carry the series or wait till DVD becomes available.  I could actually pay for the latest episodes once they become available in the US.

However, when I go check out the site, the service is only available in the US.  Just like iTunes, those executives in the entertainment industry still has a very traditional mindset depsite they start to make use of the internet to sell their content.  Why don’t they open up the market and make the content available to the worldwide audience?  Afterall, the advantage of the internet is its boarderless characteristics.  They could reach out to a massive number of customers in a very cost effective way.  Payment can be easily made by credit card or Paypal so why do they have to limit the service to the US?

Of course one of the considerations is to protect the local TV station as they have paid large sums to get the rights to broadcast the programs.  But with the internet, the studios or labels could reach the end customers directly.

The site claims that they have 135 million users and believe that may be one third of them will pay for the downloads or rental.  But by blocking international users to pay for the service, they just give them an excuse to continue the practice of illegal downloads.