Now that Netflix has revealed exactly how many subscribers it has lost over the last few months, we’re wondering what’s next for the video service and its competitors like Amazon. In other pay-TV news, we have an upgraded UI on the way from DirecTV and new social media hooks from AT&T that could signal a change in the way we watch TV. Before closing things out with our picks of what to watch this week, we even had some time for new ultra HDTV standards, mobile app consolidation for FiOS and Sony’s PlayStation 3D Display.

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Hosts: Ben Drawbaugh (@bjdraw), Richard Lawler (@rjcc)

Producer: Trent Wolbe

16:18 – Netflix US subscriber count drops by 800k in Q3, 21.45 million still streaming
18:24 – Netflix to expand to UK, Ireland in ‘early 2012,’ looks to challenge Lovefilm
24:19 – Amazon Prime Instant Video expands its library with even more video from PBS
27:23 – BBC’s global iPlayer app adds AirPlay streaming, should just be on Apple TV
30:00 – DirecTV shows off its new HD UI with a website and trailer, still no release date
33:55 – U-verse TV gets social with help from Miso, TV Foundry, Wayvin and BuddyTV Guide
40:00 – Verizon’s My FiOS app puts your entire living room under one Android roof
42:39 – Playstation 3D Display hits shelves November 13, Sony answers your burning questions
44:50 – Ultra HDTV technical standards agreed on, more pixels is a good thing
52:30 – Must See HDTV (October 24th – 30th)

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Engadget HD Podcast 271 – 10.25.2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Typically, road rage responses range from a flip of the bird to some gentle highway drag racing. For an enterprising hacker by the name of Gagandeep Singh, however, those on-road hijinks have given way to a more eloquent, albeit LED-lit resolution. Conceived as means of informing errant drivers of their transportation follies, Singh rigged up a 40 x 16 LED matrix display and affixed it to his car’s rear window. Using an AT89C51 micro-controller, hard-coded messages and animations are then fed to the 2cm x 2cm grid, much to the chagrin of reprimanded drivers following close behind. Eventually, this helpful hack’ll hookup with a mobile phone over Bluetooth, delivering real-time updates (and insults?) to the display. Until then, you’ll just have to make due with Singh’s step-by-step DIY at the source. Jump past the break for a scrolling view of this corrective driving tech.

Continue reading Rear window LED hack minds bad drivers’ manners, has nothing to do with Hitchcock (video)

Rear window LED hack minds bad drivers’ manners, has nothing to do with Hitchcock (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are you in DevCon withdrawal? Need a little BBX preview to ferry you safely into the weekend’s arms? Well, you’re in luck, as German site Macberry.de took the time to film a walkthrough of the recently released BlackBerry Playbook 2.0 developer beta. The homescreen of this new build now offers users folder options similar to that on iOS, neatly collecting your gaggles of data into appropriate bundles — like documents and games. But you probably care less about that, and more about seeing BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps in action. We’re happy to report those Google-specific applications are shown here running quite smoothly, filling the 7-inch tab’s screen without any hint of lag. You can download the dev build now for your own first-hand account, or simply click on past the break to gawk at the silent tour.

Continue reading BlackBerry Playbook 2.0 developer beta previewed, Android apps look right at home (video)

BlackBerry Playbook 2.0 developer beta previewed, Android apps look right at home (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PBS has been down with Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service since it launched, and now it’s providing even more all-you-can-eat video for streaming under an expanded agreement. Naturally that means lots of episodes of NOVA and Antiques Roadshow, and “for the first time on digital video”, 200 episodes of The French Chef with Julia Child. According to Amazon, that puts its total number of selections over 12,000, more than double the amount of content it launched with. It still has a ways to go to match Netflix, but with a lower yearly price, sweet shipping deal and now the ability to teach you how to make an omelet, Amazon has developed a very compelling alternative.

Continue reading Amazon Prime Instant Video expands its library with even more video from PBS

Amazon Prime Instant Video expands its library with even more video from PBS originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA’s historically outspoken CEO, Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang, just took the stage here at AsiaD, and among other things, he confirmed to Walt that the Tegra roadmap is well established, and in fact, the entire next-gen range is being produced (internally, of course) right now. That’s Kal-El, Wayne, Logan and Stark, all codenamed after superheros — Superman, Batman, Wolverine and Ironman, in order of mention. In response to a question of if ASUS’ Transformer Prime would be “the first Tegra 3-based product,” Huang simply answered “probably.”

He continued by explaining that it generally takes around three years to build a new generation of Tegra: “We’d like to have a processor every year, and so we’re building three in a row.” Tegra 3 will end up being the world’s first quad-core ARM processor (much like the Tegra 2 was the first dual-core), and he confirmed that NVIDIA has invested some $2 billion in Tegra alone. Finally, he confirmed that the inner workings we’ve heard about in Project Denver will first be present in the Tegra line with the introduction of Stark — a long ways out, but at least you’ve got something (else) to look forward to.

NVIDIA CEO confirms Tegra roadmap, building all now: Kal-El, Wayne, Logan, Stark originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to best view the Google Books collections? Why, a digital bookcase, of course. But this isn’t just any bookcase, it’s a giant spinning 3D helix of a bookcase, collecting more than 10,000 titles in 28 subjects. Users can navigate the WebGL Bookcase by spinning it around or swiping it up and down. Sure, it’s not the quickest way to locate a title amongst tens of thousands of books, but perhaps it’ll offer up some small consolation for those who miss browsing real-life bookstores. You can check out the experiment in the source link below — be forewarned, however, that it’s a bit of a resource hog.

Continue reading Google thinks your digital books belong on a digital bookcase, digitally (video)

Google thinks your digital books belong on a digital bookcase, digitally (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Research in Motion announced the developer beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 today at its annual DevCon event. The new beta will be released today, and has a few goodies that we’ve been waiting a long time for: namely, BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and the BlackBerry Plug-In for Android Development Tools, which will give developers the opportunity to bring their Android apps to the PlayBook. Also coming along for the ride is support for Adobe AIR 3, Flash Player 11 and WebGL, a new tech that enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to show in the browser without needing additional software. Needless to say, this changes the ballgame a bit for Waterloo. Sounds great, but is it enough to keep the company’s head above water? Remains to be seen, but check out the press release after the break to get the full scoop, and head over to the Runtime site to get started.

Continue reading RIM announces PlayBook 2.0 Developer Beta and Runtime, marries Android to BlackBerry

RIM announces PlayBook 2.0 Developer Beta and Runtime, marries Android to BlackBerry originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung and Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich event is tomorrow — get your liveblog here! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading RIM offers free apps to make up for that whole BlackBerry outage thing

RIM offers free apps to make up for that whole BlackBerry outage thing originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s iPhone 4 may not have the fancy dual core CPU of its successor, but thanks to the efforts of developer Steven Troughton-Smith and the folks at 9to5 Mac, it may soon have Siri. The port of the sultry voice assistant was accomplished by using the 4S Siri and Springboard files, and some serious elbow grease, no doubt. As you can see in the video below, it’s far from perfect, but it can recognize spoken commands without issue. Currently, the hack is missing an iPhone 4 GPU driver that keeps things running buttery smooth on the elder phone, and Cupertino won’t authenticate Siri’s commands coming from it either. So, it isn’t quite ready for primetime, but it should only be a matter of time before all you iPhone 4 owners can tell Siri what to do, too.

Continue reading Siri ported to an iPhone 4, old phone learns a new trick

Siri ported to an iPhone 4, old phone learns a new trick originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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