Sundance - one of the prestigious and largest independent cinema film festival is going on right now in Utah. There is a video blog of the film festival on YouTube - link to Sundance Channel.
There are also plenty of video clips of indie films at the festival on their own website - Sundance.org
*Referenced from Frank Barnako's post on his Media Blog.
Today Hillary Clinton announced her much anticipated bid to become the first woman president of USA. The video announcement was posted on her official website and is succinctly titled "I'M IN". - Video Link here
Alan Gore may have "invented" the internet, but the 2008 presidential hopefuls seem to have truly embraced it, especially to deliver their video campaigns.
In keeping with the times, Barack Obama recently announced his decision to form a Presidential exploratory committee in a video on his website. John Edwards on his website outlines the agenda of his campaign in the video titled "Tommorrow Begins Today" and Tom Vilsack presents his opinion in a series of videos on his vlog hosted on blip.tv.
Well the inevitable is here - Starting this week, Netflix will have an option to show movies and TV episodes over the internet. This will be called the "Watch Now" feature and will be available to subscribers at no extra charge.
Read the rest of the details here - Netflix Press Release
Vongo and Movielink are the other two services that offer online movie delivery.
If you are a casual wine drinker like me, then very likely you buy the same Merlot or Chardonnay everytime, because it works for you. However if once in a while you would like to try something different but not sure what to look for or where, then Wineass would be a good place to start.
This tongue-in-cheek website offers video podcast reviews of inexpensive wine. The reviews are funny but relevant (for eg. the wines are rated for their "Body", "Grip", "Wank" and "Snoot").
If your interest in the world of wines run deeper and you aspire to become a sommelier but have not yet mastered the art of opening a bubbly, then Wineloverspage has the video clip to show you how. It also has other wine related information like cooking and painting with wine.
Continuing on the topic of watching online videos on TV - yesterday Sony announced at CES in Las Vegas, the first of its kind TV feature called "BRAVIA Internet Video Link".
This feature is expected to debut in most its new television sets and will allow access to internet video content (including HD content), from various providers such as AOL, Yahoo, Grouper as well as Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG music.
Sony's new internet video-ready tv will have the ability to receive streaming broadband video via a small optional module that can be easily attached to the back of the tv set. This module links the TV directly to the user's broadband internet service provider via an ethernet connection. The user can navigate through the video content using Sony's Xross Media Bar user interface.
Slingcatcher (see two posts down) and Sony BRAVIA will not be the only two hardware options in the future; Netgear too announced a WiFi set-top box called Digital Entertainer HD, which will direct Streaming videos from the web to the TV. For more details click here.
LX.TV defines itself as Broadband Television website for Luxury Lifestyle and Cultural programming. True to its claim, LX.TV features professionally produced short videos that cover the whole gamut of activities like Shopping, Style, workout, Nightlife, dining, arts and much more.
These videos offer an insight and information on the luxury lifestyle that can be had in the cities of Los Angeles New York, Las Vegas. Also coming soon, the cities of Miami and San Francisco will also be included.
Tastetv (which I had covered in one of my earlier post) is a similar website with videos about cuisine and lifestyle, albeit the theme of these videos is not confined any particular strata of the society.
Yesterday's post was about a web application which would allow online videos to be viewed on TV. Well coincidentally yesterday GIGAOM reported that Sling Media will debut a hardware option to do the same.
The new product will facilitate watching online videos on TV and apparently will debut at this year's CES which opens tommorrow in Las Vegas. This product called the "Slingcatcher" will be the exact opposite of a Slingbbox (also from the same company) which as you may know allows watching TV live on your Laptop. Further details are available here.
Have you ever wanted to watch online video clips on TV instead of your laptop, especially those that were TV shows to begin with.
Well now you can with a web application aptly named SOFATUBE. This utility was developed by Ottawa, Canada based company called Red Kawa. Presently using this simple application you can browse and watch videos on You Tube and Revver.
Red Kawa also offers a free personal video downloading program - Videora 2.0 . This application uses Bittorrent and RSS feeds to find and download online videos for you. They also provide a freeware to convert video files from popular formats such as .avi, .mpg etc into custom formats that allow it to be viewed on iPod, Tivo, Xbox etc. In addition they also have something called the Red Kawa Marketplace where you can find software to use and play on your video game system.
