Samsung brings some of the glitz and glitter of the Cannes Film Festival to your home with three newly announced plasma screen televisions named after the prestigious French movie party.

The company says that its new PDP image quality delivers brighter screens, richer colors and clearer images using new technological features incorporated into the Cannes line. For example, the Ultra DayLight component delivers a contrast ratio of 1000:1 in brightly lit rooms and 15000:1 in dimmed environments. The reproduction of natural colors is improved with Natural True Color Technology which processes reds, blues and greens with faster 18 bit speed processing. Finally, the Real Motion Studio technology sharpens the image on-screen, making letters and hard outlines less blurry.

That sounds all well and good but the bottom line is how much will it cost? Samsung is going to launch three sizes …

TiVo and Amazon.com have announced a new service that will allow TiVo Subscribers to watch Movies and TV Shows downloaded from Amazon Unbox on Their TVs.

With “Amazon Unbox on TiVo”, subscribers will have the ability to rent and purchase movies and television shows. Television shows will cost $1.99 per episode and most movies will range between $9.99 and $14.99 for purchase with movie rentals starting at $1.99. The current list of supported major studios includes CBS, Fox Entertainment Group, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Bros.

Once live, subscribers will be able to activate the service on Amazon.com to establish a link between their TiVo Series2 or Series3 box. Once the service has been activated, eligible movies and television shows can be downloaded directly to the TiVo box. Downloaded content will automatically appear in the “Now Playing” list …

LG has some new HDTV’s coming your way with a nice built in feature. The new XCanvas high def televisions almost negate the need for a DVR by housing a built in hard drive.

We’ve seen LCD and plasma televisions with built in DVD players, but we seem to like this even better. Using an internal 160GB hard drive, high definition television and movies can be recorded and played back at a later date, even in a dual picture mode similar to having two tuners.

Your might soon start to wonder just how much high def TV the 160 HDD can hold, but have no fear. The new LG XCanvas televisions come with a USB port to transfer the media in or out, although we’re not sure of the format at this point.

These new hard drive toting TV’s also come with the …

Just can’t bear to miss your favorite television show? Have some time to kill at work? Have to go to junior’s game but you don’t want to miss the big game on TV? The Slingbox Pro from Slingbox Media may be your answer. Slingbox is a media device which connects to up 3 standard definition devices and 1 high-def device to your internet connection and thus to the world. You can control your home theater from anywhere that has an internet connection. You can watch regular cable, pre-recorded shows, on-demand movies, basically anything you can watch in your living room, you can watch on the road.

This has to be one of the greatest advances of the new millennium. I can watch TV from anywhere. It was only a matter of time …

It’s a well known secret; I guess then that it’s not really a secret, that you can get HDTV broadcasts over the airwaves. That’s right; if you have an HDTV tuner you can pick up many of the local stations that broadcast in High-Def. If you’re a mobile type and travel a lot and you want to watch HDTV broadcasts anywhere with an HDTV signal, you are in luck. AutumnWave’s OnAir HDTV-GT lets you connect an HDTV tuner to your laptop or PC with a USB connection.

The HDTV-GT features a remote control and DVR features so you can record and watch your High-Def shows any time you want. A rather surprising feature is that the HDTV-GT allows you to receive QAM signals, the unencrypted cable signals that cable companies sometimes use to broadcast local stations. …

Sony had some prototype super-skinny OLED TV’s display on CES this week. Consumers can’t get them yet, but they are certainly going to want to.

The new wafer-thin televisions come in sizes as large as 40″, and put out a full high-definition picture. The photo and video courtesy of T3 really says it all, showing the televisions on display with bright, high quality video that are still viewable from quite an angle. This will be a product that we will definitely be watching for from Sony this year as this promises to be the future of home entertainment.

Check out the video of these thin TV’s on display at CES 2007:

Today at MacWorld in San Francisco Steve Jobs unveiled the highly anticipated Apple TV, dubbing it the iTV multiple times during his keynote speech. The Apple TV was overshadowed and did not come with as many surprises as the Apple iPhone, but nonetheless has many impressive features.

The Apple TV connects directly to a television to allow viewing streamed iTunes content such as movies, photos, TV shows, and music directly on the TV, from up to 5 different PC or Mac computers at a time. There is also a feature to auto-sync the content of the hard drive to one computer which would allow your content to be easily updated.

Apple TV contains a 40GB hard drive to store movies and other media content as rumored, and plays the video at 720p high-definition. The box is of …

From the CES, Verizon in planning to launch a service that allows mobile phones to receive live Television broadcasts. The service, called V Cast Mobile TV, is expected to launch sometime in the first quarter of 2007.

The service will allow subscribers to get live content from NBC, ABC, Fox, MTV and others. Pre-recorded shows will also be available for viewing.

Two phones, a model from Samsung and the LG VX9400 will be available with more expected by year end.

Verizon will be using a network built by Qualcomm. The technology known as MediaFLO allows content to be broadcast to phones rather than requested by each individual phone. To think of it as having a TV antenna on your phone and you can watch what is on right now, instead of requesting specific content.

The MediaFLO technology …

Today Sony unveiled its new 70-inch flat panel LCD HDTV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Sony stated that the Bravia KDL-70XBR3 HDTV is the world’s largest television compliant with x.v.Color.

The 70-inch Bravia features a 10-bit panel, which gives a finer gradient than most LCD’s with an 8-bit panel. Along with that, Sony incorporated a Motionflow technology at 120Hz. This doubles the number of frames per second that are displayed to practically eliminate blurring with fast motion scenes. The LCD panel also has a 178 degree viewing angle, so viewers can still see the picture at almost a perpendicular angle. The 70-inch Bravia from Sony also sports three HDMI inputs and a PC input to use this screen as a computer monitor, and has a shiny piano black finish distinctive of this model.

“The BRAVIA KDL-70XBR3 is the result …

Announcing their first offering of LCD HDTV televisions to the market Microtek recently added two new 42″ LCD HDTV’s to their list of plasma television offerings.

Both the L42CX2A and the CL42HA models boast the full-HD 1080p with native 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution in wide-screen 16:9 format. The CL42HA model will be part of the Cineon line of televisions created more for the high-end custom installation market, while the L42CX2A is designed for video enthusiasts, according to Microtek.

“We are proud to offer these new LCD HDTV’s in addition to our plasma HDTVs,” said Parker Plaisted, product brand manager at Microtek. “LCD and plasma have emerged as the top choices for consumers for high-definition televisions because they offer outstanding picture quality with the flat-panel convenience and affordable prices. Some people prefer plasma technology and others LCD technology. By offering both to our customers …

The fan favorite Battlestar Galactica is moving to Sunday nights in January. This move led many fans to wonder about the prospects of a fourth season of the show. Now Sci-Fi news site syfyportal.com is reporting that the fourth season may be green lighted even before the second half of season 3 begins.

Galactica has been widely acclaimed outside the Sci-Fi community. TV Guide named Galactica one of the 10 best shows of 2006. Entertainment Weekly said Battlestar Galactica was the third best show of 2006. The American Film Institute put Galactica on its Programs on the Year list.

If there is a fourth season for Galactica then it will not probably air until the Fall of 2007.

Battlestar Galactica airs at 10pm ET/PT on the SciFi channel.

This innovative mobile phone device called Modeo is designed around the high performance DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld) standard, the Microsoft® Windows Mobile® 5.0 platform and along with Microsoft Windows Media platform to give users with a feature-rich mobile multimedia and productivity solution. The new Modeo phone has a pretty good multimedia experience which is impressive when viewing shows on the mobile device.

Manufactured by HTC, the Modeo mobile phone views broadcasted television entertainment to the palm of your hand. You can watch live digital TV and music services, access home or office emails through Outlook, along with calendar and contact information.

Based on the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform, the Modeo is built to receive and playback specifically Modeo’s DVB-H mobile broadcasts delivered using Windows Media technologies. The Modeo handset also uses Windows Media Player 10 Mobile to playback video and music stored in many formats, …

OK, anytime I hear anything about laser beams anymore I can’t help but think of evil geniuses.

Mitsubishi has manufactured a prototype of a television based on the technology of two other companies that uses a type of laser beam projection instead of plasma or liquid crystal displays (LCD). This is still in development but they think something might be ready for production towards the end of 2007.

The Laser TV is intended to be a replacement, or at the least direct competition to the reigning plasma televisions for brightness and picture clarity. Makers boast that the new laser projection television will have a better quality with more detail, consume less power and cost significantly less than plasma or LCD TV’s.

If the new laser TV’s do all that then I guess you really can’t go wrong with that. Is it really to much to ask to …

Are you looking for a way to play that extensive media collection laying dormant on your PC? The iZak may just be the device you have been looking for.

The iZak is a simple to operate portable multimedia player for music, pictures, and video. The device will connect to any PC or Mac via USB-2 allowing you to copy your favorite music, movies, pictures, or data files. Once your data has been transferred to iZak, you can connect it to any TV to watch movies, view photos, or listen to your digital music.

The iZak supports any standard display device with an external input. This includes TVs, Video Monitors, Plasmas, video Projectors, and GA monitors. You can watch your favorite films in HDTV quality Video and Dolby Digital or DTS quality Audio.

The iZak is a creation of Unibrain, a global leader in the development of FireWire …

The Archos 604 is a portable multimedia player for all standard video formats in a full DVD resolution, including MPEG-4 ASP, WMV (and protected WMV) as well as MPEG-2 and VOB with a software plug in.

The Archos 604 has a 30G hard drive to store up to 130 hours of encoded video. The screen is a 4.3″ wide screen, which gives quite a bit more view that most portable video players out there. You can view them right on the screen, or output them to a full size television and still view them in DVD quality. Once uploaded you can use features to play the video, video editing and video bookmarking right on the player.

There is an optional DVR station for the Archos 604 that seems to almost be must to get all the benefits from this super thin player. You …