Ed Oswald

RealNetworks' movie site Film.com is set to become a streaming media destination as well. The company said Friday at the Sundance Film Festival that it will begin streaming full-length versions of independent movies from the site.

Called "Movie of the Week," the films will initially be provided by GreenCine, which carries a catalog of over 10,000 movies and documentaries available for download. Each film will be featured for one week, and the feature is expected to run throughout the year.

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TiVo has long been the target of much speculation surrounding its future as an independent company. Now a prominent analyst firm says its likely the company will not exist much longer as it will struggle to remain relevant in the market.

The end of TiVo will be the result of the dissolution of the standalone DVR product category as a whole by 2010. Instead, says Yankee Group, the technology would be integrated into other services, negating the need for standalone offering.

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XM Satellite Radio suffered a setback in the copyright infringement case brought against it by the major labels, as a U.S. District judge denied the satellite radio provider's motion to have the case dismissed. At issue are the recording capabilities of some of the company's radios. The record labels say this violates the agreements struck between the two groups, as it only covered live broadcasts and not the right to record programming from it.

However, XM says the effort is without merit, and is confident that it would eventually prevail in court. However, New York District Judge Deborah Batts feels that there is enough merit in the recording industry's claims to allow it to proceed to trial. Recording industry representatives had no immediate comment.

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There is increasing evidence worldwide that sales of the PlayStation 3 are beginning to slow significantly. A firm says sales of the console in Japan this past week were the worst since launch.

Japanese research firm Media Create said the console sold 25,531 units overall for the week ending January 14. This was far behind the Wii, which sold about 93,708 consoles for the week. Still, that number was low too, and the second worst week since launch.

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Microsoft elaborated on its purchase options for the release of Windows Vista, to be released publicly in less than two weeks. Among the options are online upgrades to higher tiers, a family discount, or online purchase and direct download via Windows Marketplace.

"With the consumer launch of Windows Vista so close, we're excited to announce three new ways to make the purchase and upgrade experience easier than ever," said Brad Brooks, general manager of Windows Client Marketing at Microsoft.

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Not even one day after it was revealed that MySpace was tackling the problem of predators on its site head on, two Texas-based law firms said Thursday that they had filed suit against the site and parent company News Corp. over that exact issue.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four families in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina whose daughters were assaulted by adult MySpace users. The suit alleges negligence, recklessness, fraud, and negligent representation.

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According to a preliminary teardown analysis by research firm iSuppli, Apple stands to make as much as a 50 percent profit on each phone sold.

The figure is of course preliminary, as no actual production models have been made available to the public. However, such high profit margins are nothing new for Apple. The company regularly has a margin of 45 percent or more across many of its Mac and iPod products.

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Apple shocked Wall Street after the closing bell on Wednesday, reporting both record revenue and profits that broke the $1 billion barrier. On top of these impressive results, the company shipped more than 21 million iPods and 1.6 million Macs, a record number for the former.

The numbers were well above estimates. An average of analysts surveyed by Reuters showed the Street was looking for profit of 77 cents per share on revenue of $6.43 billion. Instead, Revenue rose to $7.12 billion, on profits of $1 billion, or $1.14 per share.

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MySpace is continuing to be the focus of criticism for not protecting its younger users sufficiently. Thus the site is developing “Zephyr,” a system that allows parents to control their children’s access to the social networking site.

Existence of the tracking software was first confirmed by the Wall Street Journal in an article Wednesday. A release date has not yet been announced.

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It now appears as if security companies and Microsoft have settled their differences and will work together on the consumer launch of Windows Vista. Several leading manufacturers have committed to launch Vista-compatible versions of their software by January 30.

At least two of the companies who had earlier chastised Microsoft over Vista security, McAfee and Symantec, were among those listed as committing to Vista compatibility. Others included CA, Kaspersky, Panda Software, and Trend Micro, among others.

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Digital music sales worldwide are still on the increase, but it's still not enough to offset the declining sales of CDs. Nevertheless, the category is expected to make up a quarter of sales by 2010.

Revenues from digital music in 2006 reached $2 billion, which accounted for 10 percent of all sales. Overall, music sales fell about three percent. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) had said that it hoped the medium would make up for lost sales.

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A California phisher faces up to 101 years in prison after being convicted in U.S. District Court of tricking AOL members into disclosing their personal information, including credit cards. The information was then used to make purchases, say prosecutors.

Federal authorities arrested Jeffrey Goodin, 45, in January 2006. He had been using hacked EarthLink accounts to send e-mails to AOL members. The messages were fashioned to look as if the user would lose service if they failed to respond.

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Dell has been slapped by a class action suit in Canada over its issues with Sony laptop batteries last year. An Ontario resident alleges the company continued to sell certain models even after it knew they were susceptible to overheating.

In August 2006, Dell recalled 4.1 million batteries over the issue, and the fallout damaged both the company's stock value and overall image. The company has attempted to make up for the issue, and there were rumors that the company and others would go after Sony for compensation.

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Customers of the DVR service TiVo began reporting over the weekend that the fast forward ads which appear during commercial breaks have reappeared. The ads appeared last in March 2005, when the company was testing new ways to generate money from the service.

However, TiVo has made changes in response to the initial customer backlash. The ads only appear when a user fast-forwards through a commercial that matches the pop-up ad's content. Additionally, when the commercial is played at regular speed, a flashing green "thumbs up" key is placed on the screen.

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Subscribers of the movie service Netfilx will gain the capability to stream movies to their PCs. About 1,000 films and television shows would be made available through the service, which will be rolled out to current customers over the next six months.

Netflix is facing an ever more competitive Blockbuster, which recently added new rental options to lure customers away from its bigger rival. The streaming feature will be provided at no additional cost above the standard monthly charge.

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