Each and every month video provider Netflix issues a report on ISPs and makes no bones about who's good and who isn't. Honestly, the company has no choice -- its business rides on these speeds and it is not shy about reporting them.

September has been released, and there are some surprises and some not shocking disappointments. First, Verizon Fios flew to the top, averaging 3.17 MB per download. Not bad at all for the customers out there.

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The GIF was first introduced to the world by CompuServe in 1987 and despite all of the technological advancements that have occurred since then -- including the creation of the web itself -- the ancient graphics format remains as popular today as ever.

With Project GIFV, Imgur has taken what’s great about animated GIFs, but modernized the format. The platform-wide upgrade will automatically convert uploaded GIF files into MP4 video on-the-fly. The resulting .gifv will offer better quality in a smaller file size and load much faster. But that's not all.

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Retrieving media from a computer or home server and reproducing it in your home theater has become a growing need among people. Plex offers what is, perhaps, the simplest solution for accomplishing this task. It does so by simply working across almost every known platform, including mobile devices and set-top boxes.

One place where the end-user app has been surprisingly missing is Microsoft's gaming consoles. You'd think Plex would have arrived there long ago -- certainly before places like Roku and Fire TV. Well, that problem is now solved, or at least half of it is.

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Roku, the tiny set-top box, has been on a roll with new content lately. This time the company heads north for its latest score of new content, bringing Cineplex to its devices. The service will lend much new content to viewers in Canada.

If you aren't familiar, Cineplex is like many other streaming services. It allows customers to stream movies whenever they wish, much like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

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Twitpic will no longer close on 25 September as the photo sharing service has found a buyer. There's not yet any word on who is behind the acquisition, but the takeaway news is that photos should be safe as Twitpic will live to fight another day.

Just a couple of weeks ago, founder Noah Everett posted the news that Twitpic was to close following something of a legal tussle with Twitter. But things have taken a turn for the better. After users scrabbled to download their images to ensure they were safe, it now transpires that the service is not going anywhere.

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At the end of its iPhone 6/6 Plus/Apple Watch launch last week, the tech giant kindly gave everyone a gift -- a free U2 album. Songs of Innocence is the first album from the Irish band in five years, and Apple made it instantly available to all 500 million plus iTunes registered users. Which was a nice thing to do, after all who doesn’t like a free gift?

It turns out quite a few people were less than pleased to discover U2's new album appearing in their music collections whether they wanted it or not. If you’re one of those people unhappy about the presence of the album, and despite hunting for an easy way of removing it, still haven’t found what you’re looking for, don’t worry -- Apple has released a new tool for the job.

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Streaming media service Netflix is upping its game these days. Despite its woes with broadband providers, and the added expenses these have provided, the company continues to move forward on the innovation front. This time it’s the website getting an update.

The company has announced a new search experience, bringing what it hopes will be faster results and easier access to what you wish to watch.

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One problem with DVRs is storage -- if you save too many programs you'll find things being deleted to make room for new recordings. Most DVRs land in the 500 GB range, but some are now coming with one terabyte. Things are slowly improving, but now they will be taking a quantum leap thanks to TiVo.

How about a 24 terabyte monster for your TV show storage needs? That works out to about 26,000 hours of stored TV shows (that's SD, HD reduces things to a mere 4,000 hours), which should be enough for even the biggest couch potato. It is, not surprisingly, named the TiVo Mega and will be whole-home capable.

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Earlier this year I obtained both a Roku 3 and an Amazon Fire TV. I use both devices and find both work very well for any home theater enthusiast and media geek. But what separates the two products, aside from a name?

With extensive playing around with each product, I've discovered what does it for me. While the Roku 3 remote is simpler, and contains a headphone jack (handy for when family is asleep, and you don't want to disturb anyone) it doesn't really have a killer feature.

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At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll state the obvious. Broadband in the US is broken. In fact, it's a complete mess. Speeds lag behind multiple smaller nations and providers were granted monopolies in many cases, thanks to complaining about the expense of laying the copper. At best, most citizens have access to two carriers -- that's one more than many, including yours truly.

Competition doesn't exist, but the oft-maligned head of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, wishes to change that. While his net neutrality initiative has been met with staunch opposition, this latest move may win him a few fans.

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We seem to have had something of a run on Lumsing products recently, but the focus has been on power -- both in-car and portable. Now it's time for something a little different from the same company: a wireless Bluetooth speaker. It can be used with phones, tablets, laptops and anything else that chucks out a Bluetooth signal; actually, there's a 3.5mm jack, so there is a wired option too. As this is, primarily, a wireless speaker, it should come as no surprise that it features a built in rechargeable battery. Charging comes via a USB port which you can connect to either a computer or a phone charger.

Let's skirt over the fact that the instruction manual provided with the speaker has a spelling mistake ("Propeht" rather than Prophet) and look at what the Prophet has to offer. This is a budget speaker, but its looks don’t give this away. The disc shape hides two speaker cones, surrounded by a silver trim. Smack in the middle of the speaker grill is a play/pause button which allows for music playback control, and also doubles up as a pick up/hang up button for your phone -- as well as play music from your phone, the Prophet can also be used to make (very loud) hands-free phone calls thanks to the built in microphone.

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Continuing its propensity for terminating projects, Google has decided to kill of its Authorship program. The markup was introduced to provide online writers with a way to link their work to their Google+ profile and have their profile picture displayed in search results. But in its three year lifespan, Authorship did not really manage to take off, and Google Webmaster Tools' John Mueller announced that "we've also observed that this information isn't as useful to our users as we'd hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we've made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results".

Head to one of the Google Authorship support pages and you're greeted by the message: "Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search". This is an interesting move, especially considering how keen Google has been to push people into using Google+. Authorship not only enables writers to more visibly stamp their mark online, but also to gain a following. In practice it was found that Authorship did little to help drive traffic and "wasn't always easy to implement".

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While Windows Phone gets a lot of attention for what it doesn't have, the Microsoft mobile platform is slowly making progress. Now it is scoring a major win, and getting on par with rivals, as Spotify announces it will be going free for Windows Phones.

The new update means customers can now listen to their music without ponying up the monthly fee for a Premium account. The new free version is ad-supported, and customers can still choose to pay the monthly fee for Premium, and eliminate those ads -- and also get offline playlists, as well.

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In the new online original content landscape, Amazon is not messing around, having announced several new comedy shows debuting this year. Now the streaming video service arm of the retailer is greenlighting new pilots of kids shows as well, though these aren't the first to hit Prime.

In all, five new pilots were announced, though this means little about which will survive, as Amazon allows the viewers to vote. The winners gain a full season production run. The losers simply go away after one episode.

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In the latest blow for free speech, the government of the southern Indian state of Karnataka has passed legislation that makes it illegal to upload, share, or like content "with a view to hurt religious sentiments knowingly or unknowingly". Let's put aside the odd paradox of being able to have a "view" to do something, but to do it "unknowingly", and look at the history of this. Back in June, Karnataka police warned citizens about the type of things that were covered by the Information Technology Act.

Warning notices appeared in newspapers (of all places):

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