Posts Tagged ‘video’

Zune Pass expanding to U.K. and Europe, more nations get movie rentals and purchases

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Microsoft has announced a new expansion for Zune services. The news is a touch bittersweet for me, since it didn’t involve the arrival of Zune Pass in Canada. Maybe next time…

Those of you who live in the U.K., France, Italy, and Spain, however, can now enjoy the Zune Pass music subscription service for £8.99 or 9.99 Euros per month. That’s only a tad pricier than the $14.99 U.S. residents pay for all-you-can-eat music via Zune. The “keep 10 MP3s per month” option remains U.S. only, unfortunately.

Those four countries — along with Germany — can also now buy music via Zune, and movie rentals and purchases have been extended to even more countries. Here’s how the video expansion breaks down:

  • Rentals: U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
  • Purchase: U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand

This is great news for anyone who owns an Xbox 360 or plans on purchasing a Windows Phone 7 device — but it’s also good news for Windows users in general. There’s plenty of good content to be had on Zune, and it never hurts to have one more option for purchasing downloadable music and video content.

Hit up the official Microsoft press release for full details.

Zune Pass expanding to U.K. and Europe, more nations get movie rentals and purchases originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FaceTime: iPhone 4 gets its own video calling app

Monday, June 7th, 2010

When Steve Jobs announced his trademark “one more thing” during his iPhone 4 unveiling at today’s WWDC keynote, it was a real doozy. FaceTime is Apple’s new video calling app, that works from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 with no setup whatsoever. Just when we were getting excited that the iPhone 4’s front camera would let us video call with Skype, Apple delivered something even bigger.

FaceTime is not without its issues, though. First off, it’s going to be WiFi-only for at least the rest of 2010, while mobile carriers get their networks ready to handle it. AT&T, we’re looking at you! Get it together, guys! Also, taking mobile video calls mainstream presents some interesting issues of etiquette and decorum. With Skype, you know you can video call someone because they’re signed in. With FaceTime, you might get an incoming video call when you’re in public, or when you just got out of the shower. Plus, it makes drive-by flashing pretty damn easy … I wouldn’t hurry to answer any FaceTime calls from strangers, that’s for sure.

Despite the issues, though, I think FaceTime just raised the bar for what we expect from our communication devices. Plug-and-play video calling used to be Jetsons-type-future-stuff, and now it’s just the latest thing made mainstream by Apple. Love them or hate them, they’re pushing the envelope again.

For a recap of the keynote, check out the liveblog from our sister site, Engadget and further WWDC 2010 coverage on TUAW.

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Apple posts a new HTML5 demo page — for Safari only

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Whether you’re on Team Apple or Team Adobe in the whole Flash vs. HTML5 brouhaha, you really can’t dispute just how nice some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features are, and while Microsoft was quick to throw a demo page up to tout IE9’s capabilities, Apple for some reason waited until yesterday to post one for Safari.

…And they locked it down with user-agent detection to allow only people using Safari to view the demos. Anybody using something other than Safari to check the page out will be greeted with a box telling them to download Safari the moment they try to view one.

The ironic part is that Apple felt that people using, say, Chrome shouldn’t be able to use any of the demos shown on the new HTML5 and Web Standards demo page, while any HTML5-capable browser can play with the demos on Apple’s Safari Technology Demo, where all the same demos can be found, along with several others. Using both Chrome 5 and 6, I was able to use every demo except Video, VR, and Movie Trailers (which worked but couldn’t load the actual trailer video). All three of those demos needed Safari to load the H.264 successfully.

I’ll be the first to admit that Safari’s been way ahead of the curve HTML5-wise (it’s been able to do just about everything in these demos since last year, including video), but I think it’s a bit on the daft side for their marketing team to block Chrome users from trying the demos on the page that’s labeled HTML5 and Web Standards. A simple disclaimer saying that Safari may do a bit better would have probably sufficed, and now everyone is going to call them out on it — like this.

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