Entertainment

Hulu, the TV-network-owned site for watching television programs over the Internet, has announced a new paid subscription service that promises to give users greater freedom to watch their favorite shows online. Hulu introduced the new service, called "Hulu Plus," Tuesday in a blog post authored by ...

The early-entry, established companies continue to wrestle for dominance in the streaming music space. We have Pandora, Jango, Last.fm, and Google Music is yet to come. Now, though, a small newcomer is in the game, and it joins the fray with an angle. mSpot has just finished its private beta period ...

Microsoft has introduced several changes to the design and content of its entertainment results on Bing, including ways to link searches to the content they're looking for more directly. The changes are ultimately intended to make this portion of its search engine far stickier. That, of course, is h...

Walt Disney Co. has quietly developed an application for Facebook that marries e-commerce functionality with social marketing. Disney Tickets Together, which debuted last week, lets people pre-order tickets to the upcoming "Toy Story 3" movie directly from the application. While engaging in the purc...

Google announced this week at its I/O conference that it will launch Google TV in the fall of 2010. In partnership with Sony, Intel and Logitech, the Internet giant will market televisions, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes with an array of software functions designed to let users search for and pla...

More capable, feature-rich smartphones are finding their ways into more consumers' pockets, and for TV broadcasters, this means everyone's carrying a potential television set with them everywhere they go. It's an opportunity many are latching onto -- local broadcasters are working to bring mobile di...

The producers of "The Hurt Locker" have reportedly signed up with the U.S. Copyright Group in order to sue thousands -- perhaps as many as tens of thousands -- of individuals who illegally downloaded copies of the Oscar-winning movie from the Internet. Voltage Pictures reportedly could file its comp...

Is it 2005 or 2010? That's what many music industry observers may be asking themselves after U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood ruled Wednesday that online file-sharing software provider LimeWire has been infringing on the copyrights of creative artists in general, and recording industry companie...

Streaming video provider Hulu may be moving to a subscription model. That's according to a report in the Los Angeles Times and a host of online rumors. The plan, which reportedly would be rolled out at about $10 per month, would cover episodes of television shows older than the last five -- an archi...

In the midst of a dispute with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over control of the airwaves, a group of broadcast companies announced a joint venture to develop a national mobile content service -- that is, "mobile TV." Including television broadcasting heavyweights such as NBC and Fox, ...

Seagate and Paramount Digital Entertainment have launched a limited promotion for a Seagate portable hard drive that has been on the market for about a year-and-a-half -- they are now offering it preloaded with Paramount movies. The 21 movies preloaded on the 500 GB FreeAgent Go can be viewed only a...

The expected spinoff of subscription music service Rhapsody from parent company RealNetworks has arrived, and it could be a good thing for both parent and child. The formal decoupling, announced in February, was completed March 31 but announced in a regulatory filing released on Tuesday. Real, which...

The set-top box is the primary point of entry into the digital home for television services, including cable TV, DTH, and IPTV. This device has evolved beyond its historical role as a simple black box sitting on top of a large TV set into a smaller form-factor device supporting a variety of function...

Cablevision broadcast the first high-def 3-D television program in the U.S. Wednesday night, a hockey game from Madison Square Garden. The broadcast was largely symbolic -- almost no one is watching TV in 3-D in their homes yet as television sets equipped to decode the signals are just beginning to ...

Viacom's billion-dollar copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google's YouTube took a nasty turn Thursday as a series of documents were released to the public. "Fostering and countenancing piracy were central to YouTube's economic business model," Viacom's filings charge. Viacom "overtly and covert...