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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AOL co-founder Steve Case launched Revolution Health on Monday, a site that aims to combine social networking with health care information. The site would include about 125 free tools, as well as over-the-phone support, health insurance assistance, doctor appointment scheduling, and other advanced services to those who pay for premium memberships.

Those premium services would cost about $100 per year, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, a free trial option that includes both telephone support and digital record service would be offered to those who subscribe within the first 90 days. Case is serious about the new venture: he told the WSJ that he has invested $100 million of his personal fortune.

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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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In a response dated December 21, 2006, to two incoming congressional committee chairpersons, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd stated the sale of 100,000 stock options on August 25, just days prior to the public revelation of possible improprieties on the part of HP directors in investigating an information leak from its boardroom, was a well-planned trade that took place during a regularly scheduled "trading window."

Last December 12, incoming House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D - Michigan) and incoming House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Bart Stupak (D - Michigan), sent Hurd a letter inquiring as to the curious timing of the stock sale. "A key issue in the Subcommittee's investigation," the letter read, "is how much Hewlett-Packard Co. management knew about the board-leak investigation, when they knew it, and what actions they took in response."

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In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, James McQuivey, professor of mass communication at Boston University and a former Forrester Research vice president, expressed skepticism that premium branding such as the Prada brand being attached to LG's top-of-the-line wireless phone, can be used as a profit driver for the company in the long term.

Earlier in the day, Prof. McQuivey released a statement to reporters admitting that fashion-conscious consumers will be interested in investing in Prada and similar brands this year, perhaps because the phone will be cheaper than some of the handbags they'll end up being carried in. But as he later warned, "CE makers want it because it's the last good way for manufacturers to charge consumers a premium."

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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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In a response to our story on Intel's antitrust battle heating up in Europe, AMD spokesperson Michael Silverman offered BetaNews his company's opinion on whether the hopes for its judicial case in the US against Intel were dashed with District Judge Joseph Farnan's partial dismissal decision last September.

Specifically, Silverman took issue with our having stated that Judge Farnan threw out much of AMD's case. "I've got to take issue with that one," Silverman began.

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AT&T is attempting to curb the churn of wireline customers to its competitors by offering a service that would allow the customer to place unlimited calls from their wireless phone to their home AT&T landline. Called AT&T Unity, the service would be available to those who have the $50 unlimited local and long distance plan at home, and a $59.99 or higher wireless calling plan.

AT&T officials expect the plan to help decrease churn. It owns 68 million landlines across 22 states, and plans to advertise the perk in stores that fall within its calling area. About half of Cingular's current customers are also subscribers to its wireline services. However, some analysts are skeptical -- they say the offering would likely have a limited appeal, mostly to those in family plans that call home frequently.

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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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In an extremely revealing interview published this morning by The Hollywood Reporter, Google's vice president for content partnerships, David Eun, conceded to reporter Andrew Wallenstein that his company is just as mystified as the rest of the world with regard to the evolution of online media.

Despite his company having agreed to spend over one and three quarter billion dollars to acquire YouTube, Eun notes that analysts have not been able to come to a consensus over the size and breadth of the online video marketplace.

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In a clever exercise of timely re-branding, LG unveiled a new front-end for its touch-screen KE850 handset, which already won a design award in December. Now, a special edition of the device that will bear the "Prada" brand solo is being touted as LG's "answer" to the Apple iPhone, even though the LG phone may actually have been among a few to force Apple's hand.

Though there may be a price to pay for being characterized as the first "me-too" device in its class, the Prada Phone makes over the steel-blue "desktop" background originally planned for the KE850, according to pictures, with a charcoal grey screen whose buttons are touch-sensitive.

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With members of the European Commission asking EU Commissioner for Competitiveness Neelie Kroes to begin formal antitrust charges against Intel, the company finds itself preparing to cooperate on the investigative front while, at the same time, maintaining a hard line on the judicial front.

The judicial case brought against Intel last year by AMD now centers on whether Intel, by allegedly making exclusivity deals with German resellers, drove down demand for AMD processors so much that the Texas-based CPU company was forced to cancel plans to build fabrication facilities in the US that could serve both US and European customers. Much of AMD's case was thrown out, but a federal district court judge is now interested in hearing AMD at least attempt to substantiate the remainder of its case.

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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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